He Controls Your Nightmares, But Is Netflix's 'The Sandman' Actually Scary?

Aug. 10 2022, Updated 4:41 p.m. ET

With an outstanding Rotten Tomatoes ranking of eighty five %, Netflix's The Sandman has been fascinating audiences since its Aug. 5, 2022 premiere. Based on Neil Gaiman's 75-issue DC comic series of the similar identify, which released from from 1989 to 1996, The Sandman follows the rigors and tribulations of a cosmic being named Morpheus.

Morpheus, aka Dream, aka the King of Dreams, is held as a prisoner for over one hundred years ahead of journeying "across different worlds and timelines to fix the chaos his absence has caused." Basically, with out Morpheus, the arena is void of dreaming fully.

Considering it is a DC series, The Sandman boasts a dismal air of secrecy, darkish lights, a way of blue-hued moodiness that isn't present in the MCU. Heck, humanity is in ruins with out Dream, so it makes sense. But in case you are planning on staring at The Sandman along with your wide-eyed youngins, you'll be questioning, is The Sandman actually scary?

Is Netflix's 'The Sandman' a scary series?

Listen, to horror aficionados, The Sandman is by no means a horror series and provides little to no scares. It's no The Exorcist. It lives in the similar realm as, say, Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings. If we are being truthful, Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones) as Lucifer is extra fabulous than horrifying.

However, Entertainment Weekly literally has an article titled "How Netflix's The Sandman brought the scariest issue of Neil Gaiman's comic to screen." But because the comics offer genuine shivers, that does not mean the Netflix series does.

"The Sandman is not primarily a horror series. Over the course of 75 issues, writer Neil Gaiman used his protagonist — Morpheus, the king of dreams — to explore all manner of stories, from fairytales to historical fiction. But The Sandman did get very scary, especially in its early run. The sixth issue in particular might be the scariest horror comic ever published," EW's article main points.

While said challenge — titled "24 Hours" — is certainly scary, featuring a mad villain named John Dee, the horror brought to the display is more emotional than anything. "Our whole approach to the show was emotional and character first," showrunner Allan Heinberg defined to EW. But reasonably than make Netflix's John Dee malicious, vile, and destructive — like within the comics — the show's creators made him "him relatable and sympathetic, the hero of his own story."

"We wanted to craft a part that was almost Shakespearean in its tragedy," Allan shared.

"We knew that we were never gonna go for pure shock or gross-out horror. It had to be psychological, it had to be emotional," Allan Heinberg later said. "Rather than going in with the intention of 'this is our gross-out horror story,' I wanted to fall in love with these people and then be crushed as their dreams are snuffed out."

In phrases of horror motion pictures, don't expect Saw, be expecting something alongside the lines of The Mist's ending. Soul-crushing, no longer sternum-crushing.

This being said, your kiddies will have to almost certainly now not watch The Sandman, as even Netflix itself describes it as "dark." Not handiest that, however it's rated TV-MA for "language, violence, sex, self-harm, [and] suicide," so it gets beautiful heavy. For the little ones, turn on I Am Groot.

The Sandman is recently streaming on Netflix.

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