Filmmaker Rodney Ascher has achieved something that hasn’t happened since Wes Craven’s A Nightmare On Elm Street back in 1984 – he’s made us all afraid to go to sleep.

Everyone is raving about Ascher’s Room 237 follow up, The Nightmare, with our own Patrick Cooper promising that you’ll never sleep again.

With the film arriving day-and-date on June 5 via Gravitas Ventures, Bloody Disgusting talked exclusively with the filmmaker about the documentary that includes re-enactments from victims of sleep paralysis. What’s scarier than sleep paralysis? Learning that it may be contagious…

Ascher tells us that the idea came to him ever since he experience sleep paralysis himself.

“It’s a subject I’ve been fascinated with since it first happened to me (in the 90s!) When, more recently I discovered the number of people who have been sharing their stories online (many of which made my own pale in comparison), and what their search for answers was like, I became intrigued. When I heard that sleep paralysis might have inspired folklore, superstition, and even horror movies, I was hooked.

“I’m hearing from more people, but our original research had no shortage of the bizarre and terrifying,” Ascher added in regards to people reaching out via reddit. “What I’m hearing a lot now is ‘This happened to me too! I can’t believe you’re making a movie about it – I thought I was the only one.’ ”

Being that Ascher himself experienced sleep paralysis, one would hope this was a cathartic experience. Only, The Nightmare poses more questions than answers.

“The Nightmare is more about questions than answers, and you’re getting at what I see as one of the biggest questions we’re dealing with here,” he explained in regards to if there’s something supernatural behind sleep paralysis, or is it just the way our brains work. “If I was forced to answer, you might get something different depending on the time of day you asked – and either answer will leave you with a loose thread or two.”

The scariest thing viewers will gain from the movie is learning that sleep paralysis could be “passed” on. I asked Ascher if that scared him while making the movie, to which he responded, “A little – what’re you going to do?”

As to what scared him the most during filming: “The first time Stephen, the guy who played the shadowman put on his costume and I found myself face to face with my own personal demon again.”

There is one thing, though, that he wishes he could have included in The Nightmare – the surprising reaction to the film at Sundance.

“It’d be great if the film itself could have somehow ended with the Q&A from its premiere at Sundance,” he explains, “when some 20% of the audience raised their hands to say that they’ve experienced something similar (and one emotionally shaken woman shared her own account with the whole room.)”

Now that The Nightmare has opened pandora’s box, could we see a sequel?

“You never know – let’s see what cans of worms the first one opens…”

And we also wanted to know, would Ascher exit the documentary subgenre and make a narrative feature?

“Anything is possible – and I’m not entirely sure where I’m going from here – but yeah, although I want to do more docs and push this approach even further, my ambition includes mutating the narrative feature genre as well.”

The Nightmare arrives on VOD and in limited theaters June 5 via Gravitas Ventures.

From Rodney Ascher, the director of ‘Room 237’, comes a documentary-horror film exploring the phenomenon of ‘Sleep Paralysis’ through the eyes of eight very different people. These people (and a surprisingly large number of others) often find themselves trapped between the sleeping and waking worlds, totally unable to move but aware of their surroundings while being subject to frequently disturbing sights and sounds. A strange element to these visions is that despite the fact that they know nothing of one another, (and had never heard of sleep paralysis before it happened to them), many see similar ghostly ‘shadow men.’ This is one of many reasons many people insist this is more than just a sleep disorder. ‘The Nightmre’ digs deep into not only the particulars of these eight people’s uncanny experiences (through elaborate, sometimes surreal dramatizations), but it also explores their search to understand what they’ve gone through and how it’s changed their lives.