William Malone made a horror movie called Parasomnia in 2009 – and there seem to be one or two short films floating around with the same name. Confusingly, each of these projects has a slightly different defininition of parasomnia. In writer-director James Ross II’s take, the condition is a combination of night terrors, possession, Freddykrueger Syndrome and voodoo.
Told in chapters from the viewpoints of a succession of characters, it seems at first to be a straight-up curse story – once every ten years, Riley (Jasmine Mathews) falls into a terrifying sleep on her birthday and a dreamwalking boogeyman called the Seer (Simon Longknight) manifests in reality and compels someone close to Riley to a murder-suicide with a nasty eye-gouging (and eating) frill. Having lost her parents to this when she was five and some friends in a group home when she was fifteen, she has developed coping strategies as she turns 25 … but the Seer manifests as she spends a night in her large, creepy family home (a weird ‘white person’ mannequin on the porch keeps spooking all these African-American characters) with her boyfriend Cameron (RJ Brown) and longtime pal David (Stephen Barrington) and his new-to-this-clique girlfriend (Danny Brown).
Despite all precautions, the horrors come home – though there are also a scattering of clues to do with odd items like eyedrops, a voodoo mask, Cam’s troubled backstory and ambiguous text messages. About the half-way point, we pull back from Riley’s viewpoint and get a different understanding of what’s been going on all along – with a standout turn from Sally Stewart as a voodoo priestess Mama who is playing a long game with a nasty spell – which makes the curse more complicated. Horror films usually make these phenomena random, but Parasomnia is more tightly-plotted – it bothers to think about who would invoke such a curse and to what purpose, even as it adds some human villains to the supernatural mix. The young ensemble cast are all good.
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