For a movie fan, nothing is juicier than lying in bed at night, afraid to fall asleep because you just watched a movie about people who were afraid to fall asleep. For me, my first encounter with this phenomenon was the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel.<\/p>\n
Appropriately enough, this 1956 classic about alien seedpods replicating human beings in their sleep was almost titled Sleep No More by the studio, since the film\u2019s protagonists, Miles and Becky\u2014played with indelible black-and-white earnestness by Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter\u2014spend much of the film trying to stay awake.<\/p>\n
Spoiler alert\u2014Becky doesn\u2019t make it.<\/p>\n
On the run and terrified, she finally snoozes in Miles\u2019s arms, and is instantly replaced by an alien duplicate. This leads to one of the film\u2019s best bits of narration: \u201cI’ve been afraid a lot of times in my life, but I didn’t know the real meaning of fear until … until I kissed Becky.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fear, as it turns out, is a major theme in the very best sleep-themed movies.<\/p>\n
In Dustin Hoffman\u2019s 1976 thriller Marathon Man\u2014directed with manic intensity by John Schlesinger\u2014a grad student named Babe (Hoffman) gets mixed up in a plot by a sadistic Nazi (Lawrence Olivier), who plans to sell diamonds stolen from the victims of Auschwitz. An avid marathon runner, Babe spends much the film (literally) one step ahead of the bad guys, too afraid to slow down, let alone to stop and sleep. Famously, after filming a scene in which Babe has not slept for three days\u2014made more authentic since the \u201cmethod\u201d championing Hoffman had stayed up all night (partying, according to Hoffman)\u2014Olivier jokingly suggested that he should \u201ctry acting, dear boy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Acting wasn\u2019t the attraction with Wes Craven\u2019s game-changing horror movie A Nightmare on Elm Street. In the classic 1984 B-movie, the spirit of murderous Freddy Krueger starts killing off the teenage kids of the neighborhood lynch mob who once killed him. Since he only exists in nightmares, he has to wait till his victims fall asleep. In one of the film\u2019s most audacious scenes, a young Johnny Depp decides the best way to stay awake is to listen to some tunes on his headphones while lying on his bed.<\/p>\n
Since the stupid kids always get killed in movies like this, you know that poor pre-Pirates Johnny is going to get it\u2014and he does. He finally falls asleep, and before he\u2019s hit his second snore, monstrous hands reach up out of the bed and pull him inside, headphones, stereo and all. Seconds later … well, it\u2019s too grisly to report what happens, but it involves what sounds like an enormous Cuisinart, and that\u2019s the end of Johnny. At least, all in one piece.<\/p>\n
In all of those films, people are trying to stay awake, but in Christopher Nolan\u2019s 2002 suspense film Insomnia, Al Pacino just wants to go to sleep. An L.A. cop hunting a serial killer (Robin Williams) in a northern Alaskan town, Pacino can\u2019t deal with the whole midnight sun thing, and unable to catch any quality shut-eye, his mind starts to play tricks on him. For one thing, he keeps thinking he\u2019s in a movie where Williams is giving a really good performance (which, these days, seems to only happen in our dreams).<\/p>\n
So Pacino basically goes nuts.<\/p>\n
The queen of all sleep-themed movies, of course, is Disney\u2019s Sleeping Beauty. Artfully crafted, the old-fashioned animation is so captivating we never bother to ask the most important question: \u201cHow does Sleeping Beauty go to the bathroom?\u201d
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