Sleep paralysis has fairly clear connections with religion and culture. My aim was to explore how sleep paralysis has impacted the media. More specifically, I wanted to know what kind of influence it had on horror movies. Different themes and elements can be drawn from all of the different aspects of sleep paralysis and these can be compared with many great pieces of cinema.
The film "Cat's Eye", by Stephen King, follows a cat as it connects three separate stories, stumbling through each of them. In the last story of the movie the little girl is being targeted by a little goblin. The small creature is trying to suck the breath or "life" out of her while she sleeps. this is similar to the stories of cats and goblins sitting on peoples chests and even the Yamachichi can be included as it was a breath stealer as well. Difficulties breathing and shortness of breath is one of the common symptoms of sleep paralysis and it seems this movie has included them within its film, possibly because of the folklore that may have been created because of sleep paralysis.
"A Nightmare on Elm Street" is a very special case since it was actually inspired by an incident where a bunch of young men had died in their sleep for no apparent reason and that was how Wes Craven came up with Freddy Krueger. Freddy embodies a lot of sleep paralysis lore. In some of the first scenes he shows up in, he is a shadow man. One of the most interesting things from this is when pain is attached to sleep paralysis. It does not seem to be incredibly prevalent but it is mentioned in "The Nightmare". One man recollects instances when he started to feel pain during his sleep paralysis episodes. He explained the pain as a claw machine stabbing into his genitals. This claw is a lot like Freddy's glove.
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Though there are more, the last film I will be covering is "Dark Skies" which is about aliens. In the film the aliens often appear as shadow creatures, clearly not human. This is just like the shadow people that is so often reported. Another scene in the movie has the eldest son is in the woods when his body becomes stiff and his eyes roll into the back of his head. The rigidness and inability to move is similar to the paralysis part of this complicated sleeping disorder.