Sleep is such a vulnerable state, it requires a complete letting go of control. Slipping out of waking consciousness into another world. A world controlled by an unpredictable subconscious that loves to play tricks on you. Watching someone fall asleep is to see them move through different states of being, exposed and unaware.
The state between sleep and waking is a half life. It has a medical name, Hypnagogia or “threshold consciousness” and it’s in this change of state that people often experience unexpected audio and visual hallucinations. An almost consciousness that allows the brain to stumble across reality, dazed and confused. Picking up what it can from the shore to make meaning as it's dragged out to sea. Hard to decipher what’s real and not real, sensation or imagination. This state can be a powerful natural psychedelic and aphrodisiac leaving the waking sleeper disorientated and at the mercy of their body, their instinct.
In almost every ancient culture across the world there is some kind of mythology about a demon-like creature that comes to you in the night as you sleep and sits on your chest, often to seduce you, fuck you and take your life force. Here we probably know it best as the idea of “the succubus”, an supernatural feminine coded entity who comes to men in the night and over powers them, draining them of their semen against their will.
There are parallels across cultures with Qarînah in Arabian mythology - an invisible sleep deity who "sleeps with the person and has relations during sleep as is known by the dreams” Shinto in Japan have Yuki Onna, snow maidens who seduce men, India have the witch-vampire Chedipes who enter a household naked and put everyone into a deep sleep to suck their blood.
These could be theorised to be mythological explanations for the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, where a sleeping person wakes up but remains completely paralysed, unable to move their bodies but staying mentally conscious and aware. There’s often reports of feeling a heavy sensation pressing into the sleeper's chest, like something sitting on them. Reports of seeing shadowy figures in the gloom or crouched over them are pretty commonplace across cultures. The sleeper is powerless to move or react and entirely at the mercy of their imagination.
This helplessness is rich soil for erotic ideations to bloom and the connection between this half state and sexuality runs deep. It’s interesting that the anthropomorphising of these pre-sleep anxieties often centers around feminine archetypes that are culturally subversive, objects of societies anxiety or dysfunction - fallen women, old women, ugly women, beast like women but especially sexually insatiable women. In some accounts the succubi appear to go through metamorphosis, changing form and gender. Wet dreams, the sin of adultery and homosexuality and early ideas about witchcraft probably played into this mythology as culture tried to make sense of the strange phenomenon.
In the West the figure of Lilith is closely associated with the succubus, In Hebrew-language texts, the term lilith or lilit is translated as "night creatures", "night monster", "night hag", or "screech owl” and there’s close associations in Judao - Christianity with eponymous Whore of Babalon. The idea of a malevolent beast like temptress who makes you succumb to her sexuality and her will fascinated the patriarchy, infused by fear of the power of women’s sexuality and how powerless powerful men often felt at the hands of it.
When we shot this we wanted to use a traditional porn POV angle for the first time, having the eyes of the viewer become the eyes of the camera to mimic the sensation of a sleep paralysed state. POV can be so powerfully effecting, as the viewer you can suspend disbelief and feel yourself embodying the scene. The closeness of the camera to the action feels very intimate and intense, you can feel the breath in your ear, evoking the stuckness, the sensation of being trapped in your own head. The intense blurred close up where your eyes can’t quite focus and your vision is being pulled and bodies merge as you’re overpowered. the spy cam view feels as though you're floating outside of yourself and your body watching the scene below as in a dream.
We wanted the delirious unreality to flicker between bodies and realities blurring what is real or unreal. Is there one or two or even more? is your body your own? Is this really happening?
So much of what's erotic is about the unseen, the soon to be seen. Letting your mind fill in the blanks and that's what shooting this in near darkness evokes. A sense that your mind is having to work to fill in the blanks left by vision and understanding. The opposite of instant gratification.
Getting to work with Fae on this was a dream, they embodied the energy so effortlessly and gave us the smiling, malevolent seductive demon of our dreams getting to take advance of our poor, defenceless Mickey Mod, who was surely hating every second and took it like a champ. Getting to meet Fae and reunite with Mickey after a semi shooting hiatus was the perfect antidote. We had such a joyful shoot, I’m going to include some on set stills that Fae took on their camera here:
MUSIC original score bysupplicate REFERENCES Skinamarink (2022), Kyle Edward Ball. The Nightmare (2015), Rodney Ascher. Approaching Babalon - Essays for the Abyss (2020), Georgia Van Raalte. CONTENT NOTES flashing imagery, spit, mild threat
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