Somnia
After surviving a car crash that kills her secret lover, a guilt ridden woman retreats into isolation, only to find herself hunted through increasingly violent episodes of sleep paralysis by something that may be more than a manifestation of her guilt.
Shot on location at the home of Dan and Tinya Spolizino. We appreciate them both very much for allowing us to use their home, very thankful.
- Starring
- Kasey Karlsen, Cory Smith, Sarah Manuello, Tim Quintero, and a sleep paralysis demon
- Written And Directed By
- Justin Baranello
- Director Of Photography
- Justin Baranello
- Special Effects Makeup
- Sarah Manuello
- Makeup
- Megan Luchesi
- Creature Costume
- Mike Meola, owner of Darkside Haunted House
- Produced By
- HorrorCore Productions
This Is Sleep Paralysis
The Research Behind The FilmYou did not find this page by accident.
Maybe you have seen it too. The black shadow in the corner of the room, the one that does not move until you do. Maybe you have felt the weight on your chest, the pressure behind your eyes, the cold breath of something ancient. You tried to scream and your lips would not part. You prayed and no words came out.
This is sleep paralysis, and it is not just in your head. The body wakes before the brain lets go of it, or the brain surfaces while the body is still held down, and for a few seconds you are entirely awake and entirely unable to move.
What people see in those seconds has a clinical name. Hallucinations on the way up out of sleep are called hypnopompic. The ones on the way down are hypnagogic. For centuries they have been described as demonic, then ghostly, and lately extraterrestrial. The name keeps changing. The description almost never does.
Sleep paralysis itself is common, and a one off episode is harmless. If it happens to you often, or it is wrecking your sleep, it is worth raising with a doctor. What follows is the other side of it, what people called this thing long before anyone called it a sleep disorder.
The Three Forms
How It ArrivesIt takes many shapes, but the accounts fall into three categories.
The Intruder
A dark presence in the room. Sometimes standing in the doorway, sometimes beside the bed. You feel it more than you see it, and it arrives with a dread far out of proportion to anything actually there.
The Chest Pressure
Known in folklore as the Old Hag. An invisible weight settles on the chest and breathing turns into work. Some describe being choked, suffocated, crushed.
The Out-Of-Body
A detachment, as though the mind has come loose from the body. People describe floating, being dragged, or looking down at their own paralysed shape from somewhere near the ceiling.
What Opens The Door
Five Ways InIt does not come out of nowhere. Something has to hold the door open first.
Trauma
Unprocessed trauma breaks up REM sleep, and a broken REM cycle is exactly where paralysis lives.
Guilt
What you refuse to look at in daylight has a habit of standing at the end of the bed at three in the morning. This is the one Somnia is about.
Sleep Deprivation
The most common cause of all. Too little deep sleep leaves the body exposed in the handover between stages.
Broken Schedules
Night shifts, jet lag, a body clock that never settles. Confuse the rhythm and you widen the gap it comes through.
Substances
Stimulants, depressants and some prescription medications disturb REM sleep, and disturbed REM is the doorway.
Known By Many Names
Eight CountriesThe name changes with the border. The feeling never does.
The Old Hag
A grotesque woman who sits on your chest and steals your breath. Victims wake gasping, still pinned under a weight that is not there.
Kanashibari
Bound in metal. A spirit that pins the sleeper where they lie. Some say it is punishment for disrespecting the dead.
Karabasan
A jinn-like creature that presses down on the chest of the sleeping. It is said to be driven off by prayer.
Pisadeira
A long-nailed, red-eyed hag who walks the rooftops at night and drops onto anyone sleeping on a full stomach.
Popobawa
A bat-like demon that arrives through dreams. Reports of it have set off waves of panic through entire villages.
Dab Tsog
Blamed for a wave of deaths among Hmong men in the 1970s and 80s. Victims described the spirit before dying in their sleep. Medicine calls it SUNDS - Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome.
Incubus And Succubus
Demons said to visit sleepers in the night. Most paralysis accounts of the period were laid at their feet.
Amuku
A ghostly figure that takes hold of the sleeping body, locking the limbs and bringing visions of the afterlife.
Somnus
The Demon Of The ThresholdHe does not speak. He does not scream. He simply watches.
Across the accounts we gathered, one figure kept surfacing. A shadow with a gaunt face, elongated limbs and sunken eyes. Different countries, different languages, the same description. We call him Somnus.
Some say he is a construct, the mind assembling a face out of fear and the dark. Others believe he is something older that feeds on guilt and trauma and waits for a night when you are weak enough. Either way, almost every account of him has one detail in common: he appears only during sleep paralysis.
And in some of them, he does not leave.
Somnia is what happens to a woman he decides to stay with.