Unpleasant Dreams in New Horror Film Parasomnia

When it comes to scaring, Austin filmmaker James Ross II isn’t interested in slashers and gore and the tropes of the genre. Instead what fascinates him are what he called “the things we don’t think of as scary in a horror movie sense.”

Take involuntary responses like blinking, which became the source of terror in his first short, “Don’t Blink.” Now, with his debut feature as writer/director, Parasomnia, he’s turned to another uncontrollable part of our lives to find true terror: sleeping.

In the psycho-supernatural horror, which is streaming on Shudder ahead of a special screening at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar on Sept. 11, Ross looks at the terror of closing your eyes. He explained, “Sleep is a very vulnerable thing. You’re vulnerable to the outside world no matter how safe you make yourself, but you’re also vulnerable to what’s going on inside your subconscious.” Worst of all, it’s unavoidable. “You can stay up for a couple of days, but eventually it’s going to get you.”

Those double threats inspired the story of Riley (Jasmine Mathews, Heathers, The Man from Toronto), a woman who is besieged in the waking world by the horrifying legacy of her family, while her sleep is plagued by dark forces that seem to be intruding into the real world as she slumbers.  

Riley’s terror at the idea of going to sleep isn’t something that Ross himself normally experiences. He said, “I sleep like a baby. I dream a lot, but for the most part I sleep like a rock, man.” However, the demands of film school at Florida State University gave him his own run-ins with deliberate sleep deprivation. “Sometimes we would do overnights and back then I wasn’t smart enough to sleep through the day in order to have enough energy to get through the nights, so I’d rely on Celsius energy drinks and these things called Zipfizz and that had me feeling very delirious at 4 in the morning.”

Ross, who relocated to Austin last year after graduating from FSU, shot Parasomnia in Panama City, Florida. In part, it’s because that’s where his producer and fiancée, Gabrielle Chapman, is from, and in part because it gave him the variety of locations he was looking for. “The film was very much built around the locations we had at our disposal. We had a big old house we could use, another house in the deep backwoods of Florida where God knows what could have attacked us but thank God did not. But the biggest thing, location-wise, was this big, abandoned hotel from the 1930s. We were out scouting and I took one look at the whole thing and went, ‘Imagine being trapped in here and there’s something chasing you. I can’t imagine anything more horrifying.’”

That hotel spawned the idea and the look of the Maze, the supernatural dreamworld in which Riley finds herself. Another major inspiration for the look of the Maze was the horror-survival game, Outlast, “where you’re trapped somewhere and you can’t fight, so you basically just have to run and hide from things. It’s the most stressful thing I’ve ever played in my life, and I was like, ‘I want to be able to bring this feel to Riley’s nightmares.’”

There was also one other very practical reason for picking Panama City. Ross explained, “Florida State has this program for alumni called the Torchlight Program in which, if you shoot a feature in Florida in summer, they will give you a grip and camera package for free. So, we knew that was at our disposal once we graduated and we were like, ‘If we have that, we have to find a way to make this work.’ We moved to her hometown, and were like, ‘We can shoot the film here and use that Torchlight package.’ So that’s when we got it done. May of 2024. Summer in Florida, which you’ve got to love.”

No sequence was tougher to shoot because of the weather than the scenes in the Maze. Ross said, “We all went in this haunted hotel on the sunny-ass day, with minimal AC, and we shot all the Maze sequence stuff in one day. Props to my team, props to my art department, and props to my DP [Christopher Lee Fatt] for strapping a motorcycle helmet with a camera attachment on it and running from this monster chasing him for 12 hours.”

That now means Ross has swapped Florida summers for Austin summers, which he’s already finding a little more convivial. “Come here any time except August, and then that might melt the camera.”

The summer heat aside, Ross is glad to be part of the city’s established and growing film scene. “I love when the industry comes here twice a year for Fantastic Fest and South by, stuff like that. You get a good dose of that, but they come and they go, and you have your space to create.”

James Ross II will present a special Q&A screening of Parasomnia at the Alamo South Lamar, Sept. 11. Parasomnia is screening now on Shudder.