#horrors

"It. Nightmare" (2026, USA)

Ghosts are born from our consciousness, but that doesn't make them any less real

I don't know why the sad news of Hayden Panettiere's death hit me so hard, but I can't stop thinking about it for days. For me, she is primarily the series "Nashville", which I loved at the time. In a way, it started my long-standing love for country music.
Then Hayden for me is "Scream". And I haven't watched "Heroes" yet.

Against the backdrop of sad news and thoughts about how young she was and how much life had battered her [to put it mildly], I decided to watch something with her that I hadn't seen. And I found her last film, which even came out in our theaters — "It. Nightmare".

While watching, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was watching another part of "Insidious", only with Hayden Panettiere.
So many ideas are taken from the franchise launched by James Wan. Sometimes even phrases like "Ghosts attach not to houses, but to people". And the very scene of summoning a female exorcist-medium resembles "Insidious" in atmosphere, rather than "The Conjuring", for example. Although I still hoped that Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga would burst into the frame.

But as happens with almost all films about the supernatural, these are stories about dramas in real life. Although here the supernatural was needed to draw attention not only to drama, but also to the mysteries of our brain, albeit very conditionally.
The heroine suffers from life-threatening attacks of somnambulism. The cause of such sleep problems is hypothetically evil spirits, especially the spirit of her comatose abusive husband. Suddenly, religion and beliefs related to mysticism also burst into the investigation of what is happening. Let all this be given quite schematically and superficially, but it grounds the plot, leading it away from the fantastic worlds of "Insidious" and other films where the otherworldly opens its doors.

"Nightmare" is obviously another drama [not without humor] about family abuse, deep guilt, trauma, and the burden of the past that is hard [if not impossible] to let go. All this drives the heroine and her relatives crazy. And I must say that Hayden is very cool in this role. As always in any role: she captures the balance between drama, irony, and detachment without overacting.
But while watching the film, I couldn't shake the thought of how autobiographical it is for her in many ways. Perhaps she felt it too when she agreed to the project. In general, it's for her sake that this film is worth watching, especially if you are her fan. But overall, it's a decent average horror for an evening, with a good ending that you wouldn't expect from such an average film.

Are there fans of the series "The O.C." with Rachel Bilson and Adam Brody? Mischa Barton from the series plays here

#reviews