The Sandman (Paul Berry short film)

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was one of the most important writers of German "Schauerromantik" (more or less: "Spooky Romanticism") and even posed an inspiration for some of Gothic's greatest, including Edgar Allan Poe. His 1817 short story "Der Sandmann" is regarded a classic of the genre and is to this day a popular topic of German A level exams.

The story of the deeply disturbed main protagonist Nathanael begins with a childhood trauma, that started with a gruesome fairy tale and ended with the violent death of his father. And it has always been this very fairy tale that I found the most interesting part of the tale. Quite fortunately the English animation artists Paul Berry (who also worked on Tim Burton's Nightmare before Christmas) seems to have felt the same, and thus he created a 10 min. stop motion short film in 1991 which in a visually and stylistically most intriguing way retells the story of the evil creature called the Sandman, who tries to steal children's eyes in order to feed his offspring in the crescent moon.