Dead Awake (2016) 1h 39m

Yes! Back-to-back movies about sleep during my insomnia period!  I feel like Netflix is either pulling one of those "well, have you tried falling asleep" moments or, inversely, is trying to point out all the horrible things that can happen when one sleeps.  Either way, you are not helpful nor are you a doctor Netflix, so get off my sleep dick!

A long time ago I covered a documentary about Old Hag Syndrome/sleep paralysis called The Nightmare.  If you aren't familiar with Old Hag Syndrome it takes its name from an antiquated belief that if you had sleep paralysis then it was an old witch that was sitting on your chest and preventing you from moving.  This is our focus with Dead Awake.  Kate (or Beth, I forget as the same woman plays both of them) wakes up at night with the feeling that something is watching her and keeping her from moving.  After a weird birthday party where a woman literally stops the music to gossip about her husband that is in the room, Kate has a freak out where she shares a bit about her experiences.  Beth kind of believes her and after Kate dies in her sleep Beth begins to have the same experiences.  When Lori Petty is unable to give her answers she seeks out some semi-new age weirdo that claims he can help and tried to help her sister before Take Girl told her to avoid him.

Up front this movie gets very Nightmare on Elm Street, but not so much that it kills it.  What kills it is that Dead Awake is kind of boring.  Don't get me wrong, there are some scenes in this film that did it justice but not enough to create a comfortable set of peaks and valleys.  For example, the creature doing a Ring crawl up the hallway to the bed or the spider falling from the ceiling to land on Kate's open eyeball were each squirm worthy in their own way.  Yet these are two moments in what is endless research and Lori Petty not driving a tank and chugging a beer to fight this thing.  Sorry, but I fucking love Tank Girl.

I give Dead Awake 2 copies of Tank Girl out of 5:

Day 10: The Nightmare (2015) 1h 31m

Full disclosure:  In the course of my adult life I have had three events of sleep paralysis.  All three happened while I lived in the same apartment in Pittsburgh, PA.  Aside from those three, I have never had any other cases of sleep paralysis that I can recall.  Why am I disclosing this?  Because while the title and this poster make you think that The Nightmare could be a horror film (and despite being in the "horror" listing), it's actually a documentary about sleep paralysis and other individuals that have had experiences with it.  The disclosure is so you know that when I comment, I'm not just offhandedly making a comment with no background in the subject matter.

So despite my initial disappointment with this not being a real horror film, The Nightmare let us hear stories from people all over the world in regards to their experiences with sleep paralysis and what they saw, heard, and felt, not only through their own words but also through decent dramatizations.  What was interesting here was that when we're being presented these stories each one seems to build off of the previous in some way.  The only exception to this being that guy that was getting tickled by aliens.  I don't know what the hell was going on with that one.

Looking at this analytically, the commonalities between these create the question: why do these similar scenarios exist?  To talk about my own experience, only once did I ever feel a physical presence.  The other two times where one that I knew something was either there or around but I couldn't feel it, and the second was more along the lines of the symptoms of the "old hag" you read about in association with cases of sleep paralysis.  In this film there's the talk of shadow men, one of which may be wearing a hat, one that might have been an incubus, and the dumb tickle aliens.  Seriously, fuck the tickle alien thing.  Although he did make an awesome Halloween mask based on them.

I can't really give this a review as it's not a horror movie really.  Sure, things that happen in real life that can't be explained easily are scary as hell.  Some people view these experiences as an attempt at demonic possession, or UFO encounters, or just a state of sleep in which you feel you're awake but aren't and thus can't control your body despite your consciousness telling you that you should be able to.  I know this goes in the opposite direction of the rest of this blog, and fucking runs that way, but I'm going to attempt to wrap this up.

Since I'm not rating this film I will say to watch it if you have an interest in the experience of sleep paralysis.  While you do so, take it with a grain of salt.

Fuckin' tickle aliens, man...