I don’t remember standing there.” Continuing to watch, she refers to herself as “I” but talks as if she was another person: “I’m freaking leaving the room. When Micah (Micah Sloat) makes Katie watch the footage of herself in the morning, she’s incredulous. She gets up in the middle of “Night #15,” stands by the bed, and then walks downstairs. But before Katie (Katie Featherstone) is possessed, she sleepwalks. Peli’s Paranormal Activity famously features a woman who becomes possessed by a demon after a string of strange occurrences in her and her boyfriend’s house. You can stream 1984’s Nightmare on Elm Street here: Notice how sleep becomes the dangerous agent in the tagline “Sleep Kills” He tells one of his subjects (who is speaking of the strange deaths of numerous Hmong immigrants in their sleep in the late 1970s and 1980s) that Craven read an article about these strange deaths and that they “helped inspire ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ and Freddy Krueger, which,” he continued, “went on to create a weird feedback loop inspiring other people’s nightmares and sleep paralysis experiences.” Later on, the documentary raises Nightmare on Elm Street again with a rare interjection by the man behind the camera. In Rodney Ascher’s documentary about this disorder, The Nightmare (2015), one of his subjects tells of watching Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street one day and immediately realizing that the film rendered nearly perfectly her experience of sleep paralysis. Wes Craven’s well-known 80s horror film can be read as a literal rendering of the horrors of sleep paralysis. You can stream Don Siegel’s classic 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers here:Ī Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) But Invasion also represented quite dramatically how we become someone (something) other than our conscious self-how we literally become an alien being-when we sleep. As it often is, sleep was a metaphor in this case, alerting Americans to the possibility of being taken over by Communists or by the force of American conformity in the post-war years. Invasion of the Body Snatchers warns that to fall asleep is to risk being taken over by an alien being, robbed of all human emotion and individuality. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956)īecky (Dana Wynter) after she falls asleep and becomes an “inhuman monster”īefore sleep became the subject of professionalized medicine in the US, and before it became such a hot topic of horror in the 21 st century, it nonetheless was dangerous terrain. The body that acts becomes something other than the person it appears to be it generates uncanny doubles and evokes the profoundly uncanny uncertainty as to whether, as philosopher Dylan Trigg puts it, “‘I’ am truly identifiable with my body itself.” Horror films in the twenty-first century in particular have turned to sleep to exploit its inherently uncanny nature and the way it suggests that we are not always in control of who we are and what we do. To walk or talk while sleeping, moreover, is to act in ways divorced from the world of light and reason, to act without volition and the consent of the mind. Indeed, the Western way of sleeping has been described as a “lie down and die” model. This realm is not only profoundly opposed to the contemporary illuminated world, but it has always lain uncomfortably close to death. To sleep is to slip into a realm of darkness, irrationality, and the supernatural. Sleep is becoming one of the crisis points of late modernity, as the steady encroachment of the “24/7” plugged-in world only intensifies sleep’s already uncanny nature.
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