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Dead Awake Review

Sleep-paralysis is a terrifying phenomenon; the condition can affect anyone at any point during their life. It is a strange event during which people on the cusp of waking or sleeping find themselves alert, but trapped paralysed in their bodies whilst ‘dreaming’, and was the subject of a fantastic documentary called The Nightmare. The film was showcased at Frightfest in 2015 and was one of the scariest films to screen that year. It featured accounts from real-life sufferers of the disorder as they recounted their experiences, all of which were skin-crawlingly intense. The documentary clearly caught the attention of Hollywood as we’re starting to see the emergence of horror films that attempt to delve into the condition. The first such film is Dead Awake which arrives on DVD on Monday 15th May.

After her twin sister Beth dies in her sleep, Kate (Jocelin Donahue) starts to investigate a string of mysterious deaths, all occurring whilst the victim was sleeping. She soon realises that something is stalking sufferers of sleep-paralysis and it’s out for blood. Can Kate save herself and her friends before it’s too late?

Dead Awake Review

Sleep-paralysis is such an interesting condition, and so ripe for the horror genre, that it’s surprising that it has taken so long for it to get an outing. The dreamworld and horror are of course old friends, dreams being Freddy Krueger’s stomping ground, but sleep-paralysis is uncharted territory. This means that Dead Awake, being one of the first films to tackle it, has a lot to play with. Unfortunately it seems to squander this real-life nightmare favouring the tried and tested scary, evil hag.

Written by Jeffrey Reddick, the man behind Final Destination, the film doesn’t have that same magic. The script is clunky and expositional throughout, and includes all of the cliches for this sort of film. The character of Hassan gets the worst deal on the script, spouting the same lines that we’ve heard a million times from the kooky discharged doctor. It also falls into The Bye Bye Man territory with characters making huge leaps of logic without any information to back it up.

Dead Awake Review

Dead Awake‘s antagonist is ‘the hag’, a supernatural being that stalks the realm between waking and dreaming. Visually she looks like a lot of female entities we’ve seen before – she’s haggered, dressed in torn, dirty rags, and has long dark hair that hides her face. In terms of her scareability, things start out well. The first time we see the ‘hag’ she appears in a creepy manner, slithering her way around the room, but after that, her appearances are just a repetition of this first sighting. What makes a horror film scary is not knowing what is going to happen. It’s that fear of the unknown and that something could happen at any moment that keeps the viewer on the edge of their seat. Dead Awake changes the locations of the attacks, but all the hag does is continue to slowly creep towards her victim. It gets old fast and reduces the scare factor substantially.

Curiously, viewing Dead Awake made my mind think of Wishmaster. It might be that they have similar themes or it might just be that Dead Awake feels like it belongs firmly in the nineties. Maybe it’s the muted colour palette that visually dates the film, or maybe it’s the cliched plot, but something about it makes it come across as dated. Given this is one of the first movies that we can think of that covers sleep-paralysis in such detail, it should be fresh and invigorate the genre, instead it plods along ticking off all the expected, but uninteresting, boxes.

Dead Awake is out now on UK DVD and Digital Download. 

Kat Hughes is a UK born film critic and interviewer who has a passion for horror films. An editor for THN, Kat is also a Rotten Tomatoes Approved Critic. She has bylines with Ghouls Magazine, Arrow Video, Film Stories, Certified Forgotten and FILMHOUNDS and has had essays published in home entertainment releases by Vinegar Syndrome and Second Sight. When not writing about horror, Kat hosts micro podcast Movies with Mummy along with her five-year-old daughter.

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