New Trailer: The Nightmare’s Shadow Men Are Right Behind You

The Nightmare approaches. Rodney Ascher’s must-see horror-doc is out this June 5^th, and a new trailer for the film highlights both its intensely creepy reenactment sequences, as well as one of the strongest and most interesting themes in Ascher’s filmmaking: how we filter our own personal experience through the movies.

Ascher is best known for his kaleidoscopic The Shining doc, Room 237, which saw a panel of viewers lay bare their intricate theories and analyses on what exactly Kubrick was up to in his horror classic. Here, Ascher examines the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, interviewing a key group of sufferers and in turn, dramatizing their experiences. “It’s a kind of horror that’s worse than like in the movies,” says a subject. It’s a common kind of sentence and what that, and the dramatization, does is ultimately help us put on a lens through which to understand their plight; that is, if you don’t experience sleep paralysis yourself, which research seems to indicate many do.

Gravitas releases The Nightmare this June. For more, see Shock’s review here.

The Nightmare: Trailer “Right Behind Me” from Rodney Ascher on Vimeo.