Behind the Couch

1992 Dir. Paul Berry A young boy who stays up past his bedtime receives a nasty visit from the sinister Sandman… The usual notion of the Sandman as a benevolent character from European folklore who sprinkled 'sleeping' dust into children’s' eyes to send them to sleep, is darkly subverted in this beautifully realised and highly stylised animated short. The filmmakers have instead opted to base their titular character on a menacing creature that brings horror and suffering to children inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann's novella The Sandman . Hoffmann’s richly textured and harrowing tale abounds with psychoanalytical readings such as the Jungian notion that sleep equals a denial of life, therefore the state of unconsciousness is an invitation to death. Berry clearly draws influence from early Expressionist classics like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, M and Nosferatu to create a dark and anxiety-ridden atmosphere, awash with nightmarish colours and a distinctly gothic feel...

Filmmaker Tim Hope began his career experimenting with computer graphics and editing packages. His short film The Wolfman was apparently inspired by a performance piece that he and a colleague created and titled ‘Man-chine’, a hectic story involving a character comprised of part man, part machine. Hope was eventually inspired to transform his ‘soundscape-laden mechano-human exploits’ into a short animated film. The result is The Wolfman , the strangely disturbing tale of an astronomer whose love of the moon is so strong he longs to become a werewolf. I just caught this by chance, very late one evening on Channel 4, a few years ago and it has remained lodged in my head ever since. The film opens with a creepy fairytale-esque scene in which a young girl gingerly picks her way through a spooky forest – all the while she is stalked by intimidating camerawork while a worrying nursary-rhyme warns about a mysterious man with ‘a hairy back.’ Something pounces on the girl and an increasingl...

2000 Dir. Jan Svankmajer Little Otik is the troubling tale of a couple whose desperation for a baby pushes them to the brink of sanity. In an attempt to alleviate his wife Bozena’s distress, Karel offers her a tree root which she accepts as their child. Eventually however, they realise to their horror that the root has a voracious appetite that can’t be quelled by milk and carrot soup alone. Not since  Eraserhead  has parenthood seemed like such a nightmare. Svankmajer is renowned for his ground-breaking and innovative use of stop-motion animation in his films. Many of his surreal short films comprise of his experiments in this medium. Svankmajer imbues his animated creations with so much life and character, more so in fact than those of his human/live action characters. Indeed Little Otik seems to highlight this trait of Svankmajer’s and even steps it up a notch. The human characters are drawn with the broadest of stokes, however the writhing mass of roots and twigs...