Donnie Darko and the Horrors of Sleep
October 24, 2023 | Advanced Research Centre, University of Glasgow
To celebrate spooky season, we hosted a double film screening of Simone Smith’s The Möbius Trip (2023) and James Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001) at the Advanced Research Centre, Glasgow. This event was part of CinemARC and the 2023 Festival of Social Science; the screening of Smith’s film was in conjunction with Glasgow Short Film Festival.
Viewing Smith’s short film in conjunction with Kelly’s cult classic, we held a Q&A which discussed the darker side of sleep, cinema’s affordances for showing the distortions of time and memory and how illusions morph into hallucinations.
Visitors could also interact with our recent ‘Design your own sleep demon’ workshop materials and create a Top Trumps style playing card featuring their most prominent nighttime nasty.
PROJECT SOMNOLENCE ----> TANGENT UNIVERSE <---- INSOMNIA
Some questions to consider:
- What is the temporal logic of cinematic narrative, especially the horror genre?
- How do these films variously explore issuesof absence and presence?
- To what extent do these films resist pathologising ‘strange’ or impossible experiences such as hallucination and time travel?
- What apertures or (black) holes do these films create and how do they distort our sense of time and character?
- How is nightmare employed as narrative method?
- What is the relationship between sleep and narrative loops?
Simone Smith on The Möbius Trip
‘When I started to write the script, the pandemic hit and I’d just had a baby. New motherhood and being in that solitary space gave me the freedom to play and imagine. There was this joy and euphoria, yet paradoxically, life felt chaotic and primal. So the ideas flowed from a creative subconscious place. Old memories, darker reflections and observations. Not just in relation to me but around the people closest to me. It was like I was drawing from a place of pain and madness, and the idea of confining that madness inside a vehicle and alongside your own flesh and blood really compelled me. And so, in honouring what inspires me creatively and where I was emotionally, I wanted to express the film, not in a straight-cut linear way, but on a more psychological, experiential level’. (Directors’ Notes)