The Nightmare, induced by the consumption of raw pork chops, according to Fuselli, was an enormously influential inspiration to the writers and artists of the Romantic movement. The description of the dead Elizabeth in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, appears to be modelled on this painting. She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair.

Sigmund Freud had a copy of this painting in his apartment in Vienna. It is also the basis for the illustrations in Nodier's Smarra.

The admiring Erasmus Darwin wrote:

So on his NIGHTMARE through the evening fog
Flits the squab fiend o'er fen, and lake, and bog;
Seeks some love-wilder'd Maid with sleep oppress'd
Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast.
-Such as of late amid the murky sky
Was mark'd by FUSELI's poetic eye;
...
Back o'er her pillow sinks her blushing head
Her snow-white limbs hang helpless from the bed;
While with quick sighs, and suffocative breath,
Her interrupted heart-pulse swims in death.
- Then shrieks of captur'd towns and widows' tears
Pale lovers stretch'd upon their blood-stain'd biers,
The headless precipice that thwarts her flight,
The trackless desert, the cold starless night,
And stern-ey'd Murderer with his knife behind,
In dread succession agonize her mind.
O'er her fair limbs convulsive tremors fleet;
Start in her hands, and struggle in her feet;
In vain to scream with quivering lip she tries,
And strains to palsy'd lids her tremulous eyes;
In vain she wills to run, fly, swim, walk, creep;
The WILL presides not in the bower of SLEEP.
- On her fair bosom sits the Demon-Ape,
Erect, and balances his bloated shape.