Rob Badger
Connector Contributor

I rarely come across a horror movie that leaves me with sleep deprivation. I often times find myself putting my hands over my eyes or paying attention to my phone in those climactic moments, where the viewer is about to meet the monster, demon or entity.

If the hand and phone do not prevail I tend to shut the TV off or change the channel to a Disney film, something happy and cartoonish. These steps usually work and sleep still comes easy, but with Matthew Arnold’s “Shadow People,” I couldn’t take my eyes away. My phone stayed in my pocket, and my hands never approached the vicinity of my face. It was my inability to turn away that left me laying in bed at night watching the walls for dark figures.

Those dark figures originally surfaced when Ravencroft, a professor at Camden College, conducted a sleep study in the 1970’s linking the thoughts of multiple participants. His objective was for them to focus on opening a door in the room, while they were falling asleep. As the door opened the participants started having seizures, and all of them died as a dark figure came through its threshold. Hundreds of others around the world also died similarly, leaving doctors of the film to name the sickness SUNDS, which stands for “Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome.”

The movie jumps to 2013 where Dallas Roberts plays a radio talk show host, Charlie Crowe, who receives a call from a troubled teenager, claiming that the shadows in his room are watching him. He makes the boy out to be crazy, only to hear news in the next few days that the caller died in his sleep. Crowe begins telling people of the shadow people, and those who listened to him started dying in their sleep. Are these people dying from natural coincidental causes or are evil entities waiting in the darkness?

This 89 minute indie film brings all your nightmares to life. It incorporates legends and ancient beliefs backing them with “facts.” There are “real life” documents and footage, which has everyone thinking that something is watching them as they sleep. This fear is magnified by the imagination, which the film does a great job with activating.

Arnold deliberately moves the scenes slowly, to activate the viewers’ anticipations. Just when you think someone is going to die, he draws out the death surprising you with the actual moment. The darkness blurs the screen slightly and the victim grasps for air, as if something was crushing their chest.

The film brings the shadow people to those who think of them. Crowe says that the thoughts are like invitations, attracting the shadows to their victims. He chooses not to save his radio show—that had been in danger of closing the whole film—so that he could save people.

“Shadow People” is by no means a great movie. It succeeds in that it truly freaks out the viewer. The images were not too much to deal with, but the impression the idea leaves is something that will stick. Next time you wake up in the middle of the night, will you see shadows?