"The Sand-Man" (1816)

"Mr. Sandman" was the most popular song Pat Ballard ever wrote, publishing the sheet music in 1954 and seeing it promptly recorded by Vaughn Monroe & His Orchestra, the Four Aces, the Chordettes, and many others. (The music industry was different then.) The taffy-sweet pitty-pat Chordettes version was the hit and the one I like best, soaring on old-fashioned acapella close harmonies, propelled by a vibraphone, grounded by a waggling sax, and full of bobby-soxer high spirits. The dream they long for has lots of wavy hair like Liberace and the Sandman was there to deliver it all. It went to #1 for seven weeks. In memory, I heard the strange bedtime thing first, but I could well have heard the song as an infant, before memory. The story my mother told was that the Sandman came to sprinkle sand on my eyelids to make them heavy so I would fall asleep. This never made sense, partly because I have a phobia about things like grit near my eyeballs, though recently it occurred to me that the beach activity of burying oneself in warm sand might be conducive to comfortable napping, more or less. Grownups tells kids a lot of weird things they spend the rest of their lives trying to figure out.

Moving forward nearly 40 years, we find Metallica with a spectacularly successful fifth album in 1991, named Metallica but known as the Black Album and slated to join Carole King's Tapestry and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon for commercial persistence over the years. A generation of kids all agreed on something again. Metallica opened the proceedings with the five-minute track "Enter Sandman" and this is quite a different view of the nighttime bedroom sleep artist. It steals in like bad weather and grows into an ominous cathedral of dread, pounding and thrashing in the Roman style, with libretto as follows, in part: "Sleep with one eye open / Gripping your pillow tight / Exit light / Enter night." Goodness, I don't recognize this Sandman. What in the world has happened? And what does any of it have to do with the 19th-century German Romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann and his long, antiquated, disjointed tale? Yeah, I'm getting to that.



The first question, how we got from the Chordettes to Metallica, is more or less the easy one, involving a stunning alley-oop play across the decades by singer Roy Orbison and filmmaker David Lynch. Orbison, first, had a top 10 hit in 1963 with "In Dreams," his typically doleful take on the Sandman, whom he beseeches for the peace of sleep and, per usual, dreams of the one he cannot have. It's classic Orbison: "It's too bad that all these things / Can only happen in my dreams / Only in dreams, in beautiful dreams," the song finishes on an operatic high note. At the top, it opens with a strummed chord on an acoustic guitar and a line, virtually spoken: "A candy-colored clown they call the Sandman." Lynch, figuratively, held up a hand and said, "Hold it right there." And in 1986 he made a movie, Blue Velvet, about a candy-colored clown they call the Sand-Man.

Frank Booth, though he's not the only candy-colored clown in the movie, is the Sand-Man practically as conceived originally by E.T.A. Hoffmann. A monstrous infantile sadist who conducts himself as a sleazy businessman, preying on the weak. Tony Soprano is another model (as is our prez), but Booth is the better picture of soulless demented corruption, doomed for eternity. Hoffmann's Sand-Man extracts eyeballs using live embers, Lynch's saws an ear off one of his victims. He's so perverted he can barely control himself most of the time, and sometime he can't. Hoffmann's Sand-Man doesn't tote around an unexplained face mask, but his breathing in the clinch sounds a lot the same ("a strange hissing noise proceeded from between his tightly clenched teeth").

Lynch, who wrote the screenplay for the film as well as directing, seems to be fully aware of the Hoffmann story in Blue Velvet, in big ways and small. He's using much the same elements but mixing them up in different ways, often more effectively. Hoffmann can't seem to make up his mind what he's doing. First he creates a fearsome human monster, the mysterious and sinister Sand-Man, glimpsed in a voyeuristic peeping scene that could be a dream. Then he abruptly abandons it for an automaton story. Well, that's cool too, and even has some erotic charge, but Lynch has a better strategy for unifying these points with a much more powerful erotic charge, making his robot woman more deeply, pathetically, and actually human, a woman enslaved and made an automaton. Lynch—and Dennis Hopper, playing Booth—enter so deeply into the psyche of E.T.A. Hoffmann's Sand-Man that the picture reaches its most terrifying climax when Booth roars along with the Orbison song, turning it inside out from anything Roy ever intended: "In dreams I walk with you, in dreams I talk to you / In dreams you're mine, all of the time." (That reminds me—Freddy Krueger is another model.)

On some level it may be fair to argue that Blue Velvet is the full and superior realization of Hoffmann's Sand-Man. It's certainly far more entertaining than the story. But credit where due—the mission belongs to Hoffmann, who consciously set out to undo the comforting fairy tale and thereby created a broad template for horror, among other things. Lynch and then Metallica implicitly followed it and we still see the impulse all over the place, for example in movies like Silent Night, Deadly Night, which makes Santa Claus himself a psychotic serial killer. For that matter, even comforting fairy tales often have their macabre elements. Again, with the Sandman thing, the story is that he's literally in our bedroom at night after dark packing our eyelids down with small particles of rock, and this is supposed to help us sleep. Or Santa Claus, coming down the chimney. How does breaking and entering at night—home invasion—get normalized into a cheery tradition? Why are fear and joy so routinely mixed up in these ways?

Well, those are the hard questions, and not necessarily what Hoffmann was ever after. I think he just thought it would be a kick to undermine the age-old bedtime story and be spooky about it, but wasn't sure how to do it. So he came up with a human monster, a pretty good one, then set him aside, and invented what might really be his best innovation for horror, the automaton, the simulacrum, the doll. Hoffmann may use it clumsily but it is still lighting up effective horror two centuries later. Hoffmann also has an early version of a hoary trope of horror, the man gone mad from what he's experienced. Unlike, say, H.P. Lovecraft, Hoffmann has some pretty good lines for his raving lunatic: "Fire-wheel—fire-wheel! Spin round, fire-wheel! merrily, merrily! Aha! wooden doll! spin round, pretty wooden doll!" Off to the booby hatch with ye now.

The Sand-Man is a great creation, and so is the doll, but Hoffmann's story itself is too busy and scattershot for my taste, an overlong pastiche of letters and plot points set aside for the sake of other plot points, with not enough good scenes and some egregious gaps. Did the Sand-Man attack Nathanael with his father looking on or was it a dream? Did the Sand-Man really kill Nathanael's father on a separate occasion? These scenes are not very convincing as dreamscapes, or even lucid. Maybe Hoffmann had a hand in inventing dreamscapes too, but others would do it much better. Taking fairy tales and turning them back on themselves, however—there's an idea I can get with. It explains, for example, making a Bobby Vinton song so prominent. That song has never sounded like early '60s prom night glory since the movie. It's never sounded innocent again. Instead, it's haunting.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
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