Sudden Nocturnal Death Mystery

When filmmaker Wes Craven developed A Nightmare on Elm Street, he drew on news reports about Southeast Asian refugees in the United States who were terrified to fall asleep after intense nightmares. Some of those men, many of them Hmong refugees from Laos, reportedly screamed in their sleep and then died with no obvious cause, alarming doctors and public health officials in the 1980s. Later reporting and medical investigation connected the deaths to what became known as Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome, a real phenomenon that still has no single definitive explanation.

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