Rachel Williams
Contributing Writer
This review contains spoilers of the first couple of episodes of The Edge of Sleep (2024).
Wake up guys, a new psychological horror miniseries just dropped! And maybe don’t go back to sleep, or an elephant monster may come for you in your dreams. The Edge of Sleep is an indie series produced by QCode, based on their horror podcast series by the same name, and directed by Corey Adams. It premiered on Amazon Prime on Oct. 15, 2024, and it hit the Top 10 within 24 hours. They have already teased a second season of both the podcast and the television series.
The main cast who we follow into the apocalypse are Dave Torres (Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach, who is directing the cosmic horror movie Iron Lung), Katie Dowd (Lio Tipton), Matteo León (Franz Drameh), and Linda Russo (Eve Harlow).
The narrative, sprinkled with flashes of impending fears which place unanswerable questions beside undecipherable symbols, centers around Dave and his chronic nightmares. He is already in a state of exhaustion but trudging on when we learn that people everywhere are suddenly dying in their sleep, creating a terrifying apocalyptic scenario. We get to see Ground Zero first hand, including the physical effects on the world as well as the psychological effects on our crew of survivors. I feel like this is a different, though not radical, take on standard cinematic apocalypse narratives. At no point do we get to see the future, the decay of the bodies or the regrowth of nature taking back colonized land. Rather, we stick with this really personable, small group as they navigate the apocalypse in a time crunch, for they can only survive as long as they can stay awake.
Plain old fear is for nerds. The images in this series inspire dread: that pit in your stomach when something is just off. When Matteo and Dave are driving their friends to the hospital, the camera pans out to the empty highways and abandoned cities, but the audience knows the cities are not truly abandoned. Corpses of people lying in their beds, reclining on their couches, kicking their feet up at their desks litter the city and the world. The motion of the universe as we know it has paused, but Dave and Matteo don’t notice something is off until they drop their dead friends off at the hospital only to find body bags sitting in the hallways. We see their minds try to rationalize this; perhaps this is just a bad hospital or their friends’ drugs were laced. Emergency operators aren’t answering the phone, and the FBI and CDC aren’t responding to Linda, the only nurse left in the hospital. Determined to find answers using makeshift research equipment, Linda pushes harder than the other three characters, always keeping a sarcastic demeanor to control her focus in the face of approaching doom. But, the emptiness sinks in as the cast realizes this phenomenon isn’t personal or local, but global.
When glimpsing into flashbacks of Dave’s nightmares, the audience feels that they must be related to what’s going on: A horrid and mysterious figure looms in the periphery of Dave’s mind, unexplained but ever present, taking the shape of an Elephant Monster. It connects to a fear that Dave has had since childhood but becomes much more real when we realize that it might relate to the mass death of humanity. The monster’s grotesque fleshy face is a mashup of concepts both abject and childish which suggests that, even in childhood, we are not safe. What’s worse is that in childhood, nobody would believe a story about an Elephant Monster. Innocence becomes the enemy. Dave keeps his nightmares hidden from the other survivors, including his ex-girlfriend Katie, to protect himself from mockery, disbelief, and pity. But he also wants to protect them from his own mind, which he seems to fear above all else.
The Edge of Sleep offers a narrative that is deeply unsettling, using confusion as a vehicle for dread. It also begs you to invest your emotions in the characters, who at times are willing to risk it all for possible answers, solutions, and survival. At other times, they lose all hope and faith in themselves and the world they once knew. The narrative orients itself around the now in a way that is powerful and moving. And when you lie down to sleep after watching it, you might feel a glimmer of fear that you won’t wake up.