Sleeping Beauty Meets Hypnotic Serial Killer: A Love Story for the Deranged
Every so often, a horror film comes along that makes you wonder if the director accidentally fell asleep on a stack of Salvador Dalí paintings and woke up thinking, “Yes, this is cinema.” Parasomnia is that movie.
Written, directed, and self-financed by William Malone (of House on Haunted Hill fame), this 2008 indie gem is a fever dream of gothic romance, psychological horror, and pure B-movie weirdness. It’s beautiful, absurd, and charmingly self-indulgent — like a student film that grew up, developed hypnotic powers, and decided to date a girl who’s perpetually asleep.
And honestly? I loved every bizarre second of it.
The Setup: Boy Meets Girl, Girl’s Asleep, Boy Kidnaps Girl Anyway
Danny Sloan (Dylan Purcell) is a lonely art student who works in a record store — already a red flag for questionable decision-making. While visiting a friend in rehab (because why not start your love story there?), he stumbles into the hospital’s “psycho ward.”
There, he meets two very different patients: Byron Volpe (Patrick Kilpatrick), a hypnotist-turned-serial killer so evil they keep him hooded like a Lovecraftian falcon, and Laura Baxter (Cherilyn Wilson), a gorgeous young woman trapped in a near-permanent sleep due to a rare disorder called parasomnia.
Danny takes one look at Sleeping Beauty and, instead of saying, “Wow, this is deeply concerning,” he thinks, “Soulmate.” So naturally, he decides to kidnap her before some evil scientist can turn her into a lab experiment. Romantic, right?
It’s Beauty and the Beast if the beast were a broke art student and the beauty were in a medically induced coma.
Danny Sloan: Hopeless Romantic or Certified Lunatic?
Let’s not sugarcoat it — Danny’s behavior is wildly illegal. He literally dresses up like a doctor, breaks a woman out of a hospital, and hides her in his apartment like a kidnapped mannequin. But in Malone’s surreal world, this isn’t a crime — it’s true love.
Dylan Purcell plays Danny with the wide-eyed sincerity of a man who’s never had to explain his search history to the FBI. He’s the kind of protagonist who makes you want to shout, “Buddy, therapy exists!” and then quietly cheer him on anyway.
He’s not creepy in a Buffalo Bill way — more like a socially awkward romantic who got stuck in a horror movie instead of an indie coming-of-age flick.
Laura Baxter: The Dream Girl You Can’t Wake Up
Cherilyn Wilson’s Laura is both victim and mystery. She spends most of the movie either sleeping, stabbing people while sleepwalking, or gazing longingly at Danny like she’s trying to remember who he is and why he smells like turpentine and poor decisions.
Laura’s condition, parasomnia, means she’s mostly unconscious, occasionally waking to wreak havoc under someone else’s control — usually Volpe’s. Think of her as a human Ouija board with bangs.
Despite her limited dialogue, Wilson gives the role a haunting fragility. She’s a literal dream girl — beautiful, tragic, and prone to occasional knife attacks. Honestly, who among us isn’t?
Byron Volpe: The Hypnotist From Hell
Every good gothic love story needs a villain, and Patrick Kilpatrick’s Byron Volpe delivers — if Count Dracula and Charles Manson had a baby that grew up to host a TED Talk on the dangers of eye contact.
Volpe is a master hypnotist who once convinced his wife (Sean Young, briefly slumming it between cult classics) to jump to her death — and then decided to spend the rest of his life tormenting anyone with functioning eyeballs.
Kept in a straitjacket and iron mask to prevent him from hypnotizing hospital staff, he’s still somehow managing to control people from inside his padded cell. You know you’re dealing with a top-tier villain when you have to hoodwinkhim with literal hoods.
Kilpatrick chews scenery like he’s being paid in asbestos and eyeliner. He’s magnificent — a walking, talking personification of bad vibes.
Hypnotic Mayhem: The Horror of Looking Too Deeply
Once Danny steals Laura away, things spiral fast. Neighbors die mysteriously. Cops get murdered. Knives fly. People play Russian roulette under hypnosis.
It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not — partly because Malone deliberately blurs the line between dreams and waking life, and partly because the editing feels like it was done by a sleep-deprived raccoon.
But that’s part of the charm. The movie moves like a nightmare — logical one moment, nonsensical the next. You don’t so much follow the story as you sink into it, eyes wide, muttering, “What the hell is happening?”
Jeffrey Combs: The Real MVP
When Jeffrey Combs appears as Detective Garrett, you immediately know things are about to get weird — in the best way.
Combs, beloved for his mad scientist roles in Re-Animator and From Beyond, brings just the right blend of camp and credibility. He’s a noir detective trapped in a surrealist painting, muttering hardboiled one-liners while clearly wondering if the script is hypnotizing him.
His fate — forced to play Russian roulette at the hands of Volpe’s psychic command — is so absurdly intense it borders on performance art. And yet Combs sells it with Shakespearean conviction.
When he survives the gunshot and later returns to shoot Danny in the head (oops), you almost applaud. It’s that level of commitment.
Visuals: The Fever Dream Aesthetic
Let’s talk style — because Parasomnia looks fantastic.
William Malone has always had a gift for visuals, and here he turns low-budget filmmaking into hypnotic art. Every frame oozes color and texture: decaying bookshops, dreamlike corridors, and rooms that look like Tim Burton’s Etsy shop.
The lighting is all deep reds, eerie blues, and greenish shadows that feel more fever than film. It’s lush, tactile, and unabashedly gothic — the kind of movie that makes you want to burn incense and write poetry about eyeballs.
The set pieces — particularly Volpe’s lair and the hospital’s “psycho ward” — look like they were designed by someone who fell asleep watching The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and woke up humming The Phantom of the Opera.
Themes: Love, Madness, and the Beauty of Bad Decisions
At its core, Parasomnia is a story about love — but not the kind you put on Valentine’s cards. It’s about obsession, delusion, and the fine line between caring deeply for someone and needing a restraining order.
Danny’s love for Laura is both pure and unhinged, an act of devotion so intense it becomes monstrous. The film asks, “Can love conquer all?” and immediately answers, “Maybe, but it’ll get a lot of people stabbed first.”
And honestly, that’s refreshing. Horror so often punishes love, but here, it just lets love be the weird, irrational, messy thing it really is — especially when demons and hypnosis are involved.
Final Verdict: Hypnotically Weird and Weirdly Hypnotic
Parasomnia is not for everyone. It’s messy, melodramatic, and occasionally feels like it’s trying to seduce David Lynch through interpretive dance. But it’s also gorgeous, ambitious, and heartfelt in a way most modern horror wouldn’t dare.
It’s a horror-romance that actually romances horror — unafraid to mix beauty with brutality, tenderness with lunacy.
If you like your movies neat, logical, and grounded, this will drive you insane. But if you enjoy surreal fever dreams, doomed love stories, and hypnotists who wear more leather than a biker convention, then Parasomnia is your kind of madness.
4.5 out of 5 stars.
It’s Sleeping Beauty meets Re-Animator with a dash of Goth IKEA. You’ll never look at hypnosis — or hospitals — the same way again.
