JASON YU IS a poor sleeper. On the brink of getting married, and conscious of the effect his “annoying sleep habits” were having on his fiancée, the inspiration for his debut horror film arrived. Sleep sees a nasty case of sleepwalking threaten the relationship —and lives —of newlyweds Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) and Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi), who is also pregnant. Speaking with Empire, Yu breaks down the three stages of how he summoned shocks from the sheets.
LIGHT SLEEP
Yu extensively researched the symptoms of somnambulism for the film, from the minute to the most violent, but wasn’t going for a realistic depiction. “There’s no case like this,” he laughs. Hyun-su begins to develop sinister symptoms early in Sleep’s story, which evolve from puzzling (violently scratching himself ) to downright disturbing (munching on raw meat). During this stage of the film, Yu was inspired by how family members adapted to the symptoms no matter how disruptive they were, and had his characters devise new ways to combat Hyun-su’s condition. “[They would] lock them in a room or bind them while they slept,” he reflects of the real-life cases he studied. ‘They would always try to find a way to keep the household together.”