After a rewatch, I can confidently say that The Empty Man is a rare case: a film that is so unendingly dour and tapped into darkness that I was baffled. I don’t often get scared by a horror film anymore unless it's something tapped into my fears (i.e., this year’s Talk to Me, which I wrote about here and here) or generally reprehensible and vicious (like my beloved Terrifer 2). So, why does The Empty Man qualify as a nightmare, as we’ve defined it during this whole month of discussion? It’s because I couldn’t sleep the night after watching it. It’s because images from the film's most horrific sequences still hang in the back of my mind like distant trauma. 

With our discussion of Kelly’s career, I want to separate these two words and focus solely on what makes a film a “nightmare.” None of Kelly’s films are explicitly horror films (heck, only one of them could even be considered such), but they supplant themselves in worlds that are wracked with anxieties and pressures that would sit nicely at home in the dark recesses of your mind; reconjuring themselves into nightmares when you lay down to sleep. The three films we will discuss today are not horror films; the topics they discuss and the worlds they create are nightmarish.