Parasomnia (film)

Parasomnia is an independent horror film directed by William Malone and stars Jeffrey Combs, Timothy Bottoms and Dylan Purcell. The filming was funded by Malone himself, and its release was delayed due to difficulties securing distribution.[1]

Parasomnia
UK DVD cover
Directed byWilliam Malone
Produced byJane Hamilton
Written byWilliam Malone
StarringDylan Purcell
Jeffrey Combs
Timothy Bottoms
Music byNicholas Pike
CinematographyEnzo Giobbe
Christian Sebaldt
Edited byAnthony Adler
Production
company
Luminous Processes
Rising Storm Productions
Distributed byRising Storm Productions
Release date
  • October 17, 2008 (2008-10-17) (Screamfest Film Festival)
Running time
103 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

Plot

Danny Sloan is an art student who works in a record shop. He visits his friend Billy (Dov Tiefenbach), who is in drug rehab in hospital. Billy suggests Danny goes to see the "psycho ward" before he leaves, to see Byron Volpe (Patrick Kilpatrick), a serial killer kept in a padded cell after being convicted of murdering his wife Madeline (Sean Young) by hypnotizing her into jumping from a building. Volpe is explained to have extraordinary powers of hypnotism, and is kept restrained and hooded to stop hospital staff from seeing his eyes. During the visit, Danny sees Laura Baxter (Cherilyn Wilson) sleeping in the room next to Volpe. She suffers from a form of parasomnia in which she sleeps most of the time, and wakes occasionally for short periods of time.

Danny falls in love with Laura, and continues to visit her at the hospital. When he finds out that she is due to move to a clinic run by Dr. Bhyle (Louis Graham) where she will be used for medical experimentation, he resolves to rescue her. Disguised as a doctor from the Bhyle clinic, he kidnaps her and takes her to his apartment. The following morning Danny discovers that a neighbor has been murdered, and Laura attacks him with a knife while seemingly in a trance. When Detective Conroy, investigating the neighbor's death, comes to Danny's apartment, Laura kills him. Danny decides that Volpe must be controlling her, and decides that he must kill Volpe to stop him. He buys a handgun and visits the hospital, but Volpe overpowers him, escapes and takes Laura. Danny visits Volpe's derelict book shop, where Detective Garrett (Jeffrey Combs) finds him. After Volpe speaks to Garrett on the phone, he too falls under Volpe's control and takes Danny to Volpe. Volpe then sets Garrett to repeatedly playing Russian roulette.

Volpe explains to Danny that rather than just kill him, he must make Laura forget about Danny so that she will love only Volpe. Volpe hypnotizes Danny into denouncing his love for Laura, but the sound of a gunshot made by Garrett shooting himself breaks the spell, and Danny and Laura fight and finally defeat Volpe. Garrett, who was only wounded by the gunshot, then shoots Danny in the side of the head, rendering him comatose. The film ends with Danny and Laura being cared for together by Dr. Corso (Timothy Bottoms) back at the hospital.

Cast

Production

Malone wrote the screenplay while he was working on the Masters of Horror episode "Fair-Haired Child". The film was financed by Malone and his friends, and filmed on the same stage on which he directed House on Haunted Hill (1999).[2] The imagery in the film was inspired by surrealist artist Zdzisław Beksiński.[3]

Release

It premiered on October 17, 2008 at Screamfest Film Festival in the United States.[4] E1 Entertainment released the film on DVD and Blu-ray Disc on July 13, 2010.[5]

gollark: If you configured it wrong during setup of whatever this is somehow, then it won't match. PotatOS has the law enforcement access mechanism (PS#7D7499AB) which also currently doubles as "forgot password" handling, but not every OS does that.
gollark: How do you know your password is the right one?
gollark: I should assign unique IDs to the other sandbox escape bugs.
gollark: My "fix" is this:```lua--[["Fix" for bug PS#E9DCC81BSummary: `pcall(getfenv, -1)` seemingly returned the environment outside the sandbox.Based on some testing, this seems like some bizarre optimization-type feature gone wrong.It seems that something is simplifying `pcall(getfenv)` to just directly calling `getfenv` and ignoring the environment... as well as, *somehow*, `function() return getfenv() end` and such.The initial attempt at making this work did `return (fn(...))` instead of `return fn(...)` in an attempt to make it not do this, but of course that somehow broke horribly. I don't know what's going on at this point.This is probably a bit of a performance hit, and more problematically liable to go away if this is actually some bizarre interpreter feature and the fix gets optimized away.Unfortunately I don't have any better ideas. Also, I haven't tried this with xpcall, but it's probably possible, so I'm attempting to fix that too.]]local real_pcall = pcallfunction _G.pcall(fn, ...) return real_pcall(function(...) local ret = {fn(...)} return unpack(ret) end, ...)end local real_xpcall = xpcallfunction _G.xpcall(fn, handler) return real_xpcall(function() local ret = {fn()} return unpack(ret) end, handler)end```which appears to work at least?
gollark: Fixed, but I don't really know how or why.

References
  1. Parasomnia (2008) movie review on BeyondHollywood.com
  2. Lose Sleep Over the Parasomnia DVD Cover Art
  3. Parasomnia preview on Hollywood Gothique.com
  4. Parasomnia Finally Coming Home
  5. Parasomnia DVD / Blu-ray Disc Update]
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