“The Nightmare (2015)’, more of a sorta-spooky daydream really.
Let’s be honest: ‘The Nightmare’, a documentary which looks at night terrors and sleep paralysis, while promising, drops the ball in quite a few ways.
One of these issues is the films’ reliance on some very amateur-looking 3D graphics, despite their obvious low-budget. The producers bit off more than they could chew, and it shows. Another of the more disconcerting flaws is that the re-enactment scenes all appear to share the same lighting scheme (red walls, blue hallway; red walls, blue hallway) and are quite difficult and ultimately boring to try to differentiate from one another.
It’s taxing, and becomes amateur-hour all around.
But the biggest fault, in my opinion, is the obvious lazy fucking film-making going on here. Let’s take one of the documentary’s subjects, Forrest B., for example.
Forrest tells us:
‘I was born and raised in an old farmhouse in rural Vermont, in the middle of the woods. It was very dark.’
Ooh, spooky. Do go on.
’Here I am... I wake up, and I can’t move. Above me are these two... anthropomorphic beings I guess. I was paralyzed. I couldn't move.’
‘They were tall, kind of thin. They had these long limbs and fingers. And they had these very simple faces with these big inky eyes. They were tickling me, and they were kind of laughing about it.’
Okay, time for the reveal. Cue ominous doorway.
Now the filmmakers get to take Forest's drawings, his retellings, and represent them on-screen in, hopefully, a captivating way. This is the money shot. It's a visual medium, after all.
Store bought Halloween costumes? Plastic alien heads?! I’ve seen these pieces of shit a dozen times before, every October! Is this really the best they could come up with?
It completely removes you from the story. It’s... quite comical really.
This is when you apologetically start to remind yourself of their budget. You start making excuses for them:
‘Hey, at least they rotoscoped TV static onto their skin, yeah? They're trying.’
Okay, so they dropped the ball. Maybe the art department wasn't the most creative. Maybe they were up against a tight deadline. It's tough to design a monster.
But wait! Forest has something to tell us:
Forest already DID THE WORK FOR THEM!
Forest had already sculpted a mask of his tormentors, and it’s leagues above their on-screen solution. He’d already brought it into the physical realm. The art department is running to Party City with the company Visa, leaving Forest to doodle third-grade-level drawings of greys for the camera.
Your subject ALREADY DID your work, guys.
Yeah Forest, it’s scary.
Why the filmmakers didn’t design something based off of Forest’s mask is truly mind-boggling. Or perhaps attempt to make a mold of the mask? Or at least put that existing mask on an actor?
These aren’t budget constraints. This is just lazy filmmaking.
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