Nerdly » ‘Watch Me Sleep’ DVD Review

20th Mar2026

‘Watch Me Sleep’ DVD Review

by Phil Wheat

Stars: Darren McAree, Zane Hopkins, Sarah Wynne Kordas, Holly Laura Platt, James Whitehurst, Charles O’Neill | Written and Directed by John Williams

Stoke-on-Trent filmmaker John Williams follows his 2022 low-budget horror anthology, Tales of the Creeping Death, which also screened at that year’s Romford Horror Festival, with Watch Me Sleep – another low-budget affair that deals with death, loss and addiction in terrifying fashion.

The film follows Sean, a recovering alcoholic who, after the death of his abusive mother, pays a company to insert a camera inside his mother’s coffin – a service that’s “normally” done for a couple of months but Sean, who is unperturbed by his mother’s death thanks to her abuse towards him, wants camera access for a year. Why? To make sure his mother stays dead because for some reason Sean is struggling to believe that is the case.

Let’s get this out of the way first. What kind of company puts a camera in coffins? THAT’S creepy to start with, never mind letting a customer see their loved one decompose on camera after or a year. A WHOLE YEAR! But Sean doesn’t watch his mother, not at first. It’s almost as if he’s too afraid to watch the camera, for fear that she might not be dead, that she wasn’t buried. Instead, he almost taunts himself in front of the video access website, hovering over the entry button not willing to put the unlock code in – seemingly still afraid of his mother even in death.

And you would be if you were Sean, as he tells the group all about his mother’s ritualistic abuse of him growing up. Eventually opening up about what happened to him in an AA meeting means Sean can finally log in and see his dead mother, who lies in her coffin, buried six feet under, open-mouthed and still. Or does she? Did she move on camera behind Sean’s back? Is the writer/director playing a game with the audience AND Sean? Or is Sean’s mother so evil that she can’t stay dead?

As if watching your dead mother on a streaming camera wasn’t bad enough (Sean even does it whilst eating his takeaway), weird things start to happen – a stranger stood in the dark staring at his house from the road; a decapitated pigeon’s head delivered to his doorstep; Sean thinks he sees his mother already decomposed on camera. Then there are the nightmares, visions of cult worship, human sacrifice and discovering a jawbone in his garden – possible flashbacks to memories of his childhood or just the product of an overactive imagination charged by the passing of his mother AND the fact he’s gone cold turkey from alcohol?

Though with what is happening to Sean, staying sober doesn’t last long. And that’s where the line blurs even more between what’s real and what’s not. If Sean’s already seeing things sober, it should surely only get worse when he’s not. Writer/director John Williams keeps the audience firmly on the side of Sean, too – we only see things from his perspective, and our judgment is as clouded as his is.

Things keep escalating until Sean cracks – exploding into violence, the lines between what’s real and what’s not well and truly gone. Gone as much as Sean’s mind ultimately goes – the grief at losing a parent, the relief of losing a parent as “evil” as his mother and the booze finally catching up with him in a powerful denouement that takes Watch Me Sleep firmly into British folk horror territory, echoing the madness of The Wicker Man and Hammer’s 1966 film The Witches, with just as terrifying consequences.

This DVD of Watch Me Sleep is presented in widescreen format. The audio track is an English stereo track, with English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing. The DVD transfer is good; there are no signs of digital artefacts or audio anomalies. As for bonus features, this DVD includes the film’s trailer, additional trailers, and an image gallery – which is disappointing but not unexpected given the low-budget nature of the film and Wild Eye Releasing’s track record when it comes to DVD releases.