Produced for 'The Uncanny: A Centenary', an exhibition held at the Freud Museum London in the autumn 2019, Sandmann is a poetic take on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale of gothic terror The Sandman (1816) and Sigmund Freud’s essay The Uncanny (1919). For Freud, Hoffmann’s short story was fertile ground in his enquiry into concepts of doppelgängers, fear of death, castration anxiety, the evil eye, automatons, return of the repressed and repetition. The film retells the key moments of Hoffmann’s peculiar story to engage the viewer with the haunted inner world of the protagonist Nathaniel. The main focus is the threat of the Sandman figure - who punishes naughty children by ripping out their eyes - and the frightful power this spectre has over Nathaniel throughout his life. The film is concerned with the mythological, universal concept of the Bogeyman, a figure present in almost every culture on Earth. Sandmann has been directed in the manner of a symbolist marionette play, using a doll with a disembodied voice in place of a human actor.