When the Night Became the Conversation
Horror films are like trains; they come and go. But Rick Bieber’s “Don’t Sleep,” which fell into the indie-horror landscape in 2017, was, to put it mildly, low profile. It did not storm the box office. It did, however, in niche horror circles and online communities, quietly inspired the question, “What if your nightmares were real?” This slept (pun intended) on idea that to sleep could be more dangerous than to stay awake was, in late night watch parties, the subject of jokes, arguments and passionate discourse. Such discourse, after much time, found its way into everyday cultural mainstream.
This idea found enthusiastic fans in India, for example, where social media began to be populated with the phrase “If you sleep tonight, we’ll see what hides under the bed,” a cheeky horror dare that borrowed the title of the film. The phrase “Don’t Sleep” began to circulate as a meme tag as well, especially for those posts that depicted bizarre night terrors, sleepless nights, or even the fatigue that accompanies Monday mornings. The horror film, and more particularly the meme, encapsulated the feeling of underlying horror; of a troubling night or sleeplessness, and of the feeling of being watched.
The Story That Whispered Terror Instead of Yells
At its core, Don’t Sleep focuses on Zach (Dominic Sherwood) and Shawn (Charlbi Dean), a young couple who has relocated to a guest house on the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Marino. Initially, this seemed like a fresh start. But odd things start to happen: Shawn has worsening nightmares, Zach has childhood trauma that he buried and forgotten, and soon the confusion between memory and madness, and then the supernatural sets in.
For a lot of people, it was more about the dread that was so slowly built than the jump scares or the gore. It was a more insidious sense of dread—the horror of feeling that something was terribly wrong. The film employs the idea of sleep, or more importantly, the absence of it, as a metaphor and a mechanism. The longer you stay awake, the more tenuous your grip on reality.
The Faces Behind the Fear
Dominic Sherwood has a reputation of featuring in young-adult romances and supernatural adventures. Yet for Zach, he made a complete tonal shift. In isolation, he tried to prepare for the role to capture the disorientation of someone living in a dream and reality. He later said that for this role, he had to survive through several emotionally draining takes that required him to relive traumatic old memories of fear and vulnerability that was hard to confront, and that caused him exhaustion.
Charlbi Dean’s portrayal of Shawn was noted for its unabashed rawness and passionate intuition. As part of the promotional interviews, she discussed how, during her modeling career, she would also experience bouts of insomnia. For her, the concept of sleep becoming unsafe was particularly resonant. This connection was particularly evident during the quieter sequences where she remains awake, emotionally paralyzed, and engulfed by both dread and denial.
Veteran actors Cary Elwes and Alex Rocco, in one of his final performances, also added gravitas to the film. With their seasoned presence, Don’t Sleep was able to draw on groundedness, steering the young cast’s nervous energy toward performances that were still and hinted at something darker lying beneath.
Trends, Threads, and the Memeification of Fear
Perhaps one of the most remarkable offshoots of Don’t Sleep’s modest release was the title becoming a pop-culture punchline. It was particularly unexpected to see that on TikTok and Instagram, users would post late-night videos with the phrase “Don’t Sleep — they’re watching” and eerie glitch cuts. Perhaps the most sleep-deprived students would joke about it during all-nighters, and use the hashtag in the chaos associated with height, caffeine, and pre-exams.
Even the fashion world caught the fever. Alternative and goth influencers began wearing hoodies and tees featuring the phrase “Don’t Sleep” in fonts reminiscent of the film’s logo. Photoshoots took the film’s dark aesthetic and horror moodboard — blacked out windows, foggy roads, and candles, capturing the restlessness of youth.
In Indian pop culture, “Don’t Sleep” was a line of mischief. Partygoers would tease the first person to doze off with, “Bro, don’t sleep — or Zach will get you.” It was horror reimagined as humor, the ultimate sign a story had escaped its screen.
On-set whispers, sleepy takes, and night shoots
For the team behind the camera, the making of Don’t Sleep was as sleepless as its plot. It was shot mostly at night in a real house that supposedly creaked and groaned with the wind. The crew embraced that ambience, capturing it and incorporating it into the final sound mix.
Rick Bieber explained how the use of minimal CGI creates the desired effect. Unlike most filmmakers, he prefers the real texture of darkness and indeed the effect is remarkable. To attain certain looks of exhaustion, Sherwood would often be asked to perform scheduled shoots with very little rest. He was explained as having ‘glassily’ stared, and ‘slow’ performing, but to be fair it was not acting – he was actually responding in a slow manner. Charlbi Dean also expressed how the effect of a worked through tiredness was achieved with physically demanding performances, most especially in the night shoots. “The line between acting tired and being tired,” she explained “disappeared after week two”.
The work of improvisation, “born from chaos,” in the midst of a “key sequence” was interesting. Instead of stopping a take that was in the middle of a dark power outage, the crew used cell phone torches. The take was shaky and poorly lit, but that was the effect the directors wanted. The sense of raw, claustrophobic feeling that could not be achieved with a planned setup is what Rick was after.
Digital glitches are not always deliberate. Some of the flickering frames happened when the editing software crashed. The crew explained, “if the computer is haunted too, let’s not argue with it”. The haunted computer will also explain the glitches that were not admitted to.
When Art Meets Social Mindset
The film Don’t Sleep uniquely distinguished itself from other louder horror films by documenting a distinctly contemporary anxiety—the fear of taking a rest. In a culture where relentless productivity is the norm, “Don’t Sleep” is a phrase that has become deeply ironic, even antithetical to the culture of burnout, FOMO, and late-night scrolling. Genre fans on forum sites and blogs embraced the film, anecdotally dubbed “a horror movie about our generation’s inability to switch off.”
The film and mental health horror writers even intersected to describe the film’s monsters gaining reference as anxiety monsters in pieces about insomnia and anxiety. Furthermore, its disjointed and surreal dream sequences starkly evoked the overstimulated mind.
Some social media threads connected the film even more directly to politics: “Don’t sleep” as a call to awareness about injustice, media manipulation, and societal apathy. The sentiment in the film, closely and lyrically, evoked political dread. Framed as “Don’t Sleep,” the phrase circulated in tweets and slogans well outside the horror fandom. In that sense, Don’t Sleep transcended cinema becoming a, ironic or not, reminder to stay vigilant.