General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Der Nachtmahr

Der Nachtmahr (English title: The Nightmare) is a 2015 German feature film written and directed by Akiz, the artist name of Achim Bornhak, in which a Berlin teenager is haunted by a small grotesque creature that only she can see at first. It combines horror, coming-of-age drama, and techno-party aesthetics, and it was produced independently without public funding for a budget reported between 80,000 and 100,000 euros.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Akiz (d.i. Achim Bornhak), born 1969, graduate of the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg¹^•⁴
Country and year	Germany 2015; German premiere 30 June 2015 at the Munich Filmfest, German theatrical release 26 May 2016¹
Runtime and format	88 minutes (filmportal lists 91 min), DCP, 1:2.39, color, Dolby⁵^•¹
Budget	Made without public film funding; Akiz cited a figure of 80,000 euros, other sources around or under 100,000 euros²^•³^•⁶
Lead cast	Carolyn Genzkow (Tina), Wilson Gonzalez Ochsenknecht (Adam), Kim Gordon (teacher), Alexander Scheer (psychiatrist)¹
Age rating	FSK 12 (certificate 158043, dated 21 February 2016); admitted from 6 with an accompanying adult⁷
Awards	Max Ophüls Preis 2016: Prize of the Youth Jury and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury; achtung berlin 2016: VdFK prize; Fantaspoa Porto Alegre 2016: Best Film⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Tina, a seventeen-year-old played by Carolyn Genzkow, spends a Berlin summer at parties and clubs. After a night of alcohol and strobe light she collapses, and from then on a small, misshapen creature appears night after night in her parents' house, visible only to her.⁸ Her parents, who have no understanding for her visions, send her to a psychiatrist, and her friends turn away.⁸

The psychiatrist advises her to confront her fears and reach out to the creature. After learning of her parents' plan to place her in a mental hospital, Tina overcomes her panic and begins talking to it. She comes to see the creature as an incarnation of her own fears, sharing her exact feelings, and hides it in her room, feeding it and growing close to it, like a relationship with a wild stray animal. For the first time she seems to have the courage to be herself, until her parents and friends see the creature with their own eyes.⁹ The creature is physically linked to her: when it bleeds, Tina bleeds too, suggesting the Nachtmahr is an externalized part of Tina herself.¹⁰

Origin of the creature

The film grew out of a sculpture. Akiz began working on the figure around 2004, while living in Los Angeles, intending a stone statue that was a mixture of a very old man and a fetus; over the years it evolved into a movable creature that he built with his own hands, starting from a lump of clay on his kitchen table.¹¹^•¹² He has connected the design to the idea of life as a circle, joining the beginning with the end.¹² A stone-cast version of the figure existed as an artwork some fifteen years before the film, and Akiz progressively gave it a more realistic surface and then joints, until, in his words, a monster stood before him, a movable being.⁴

After collecting notes and scenes over years, he ordered them into a screenplay written in two or three weeks.¹¹ From first idea to finished film, thirteen years passed, though the project lay dormant for long stretches; between 2009 and 2013 Akiz was in a precarious financial situation and decided to finish the film whatever the outcome.¹³ In the film the creature is realized largely classically, performed by puppeteers.¹⁴

The title invokes Johann Heinrich Füssli's famous painting Der Nachtmahr, in which a gnome crouches on a sleeping woman, and the on-screen creature has been described as a mix of E.T., an embryo, and that painting's demon.¹²^•¹⁴

Production and style

Akiz founded the production company OOO-Films in 2012, and Der Nachtmahr was its first feature film.⁹ Shooting took place from 15 August to 5 October 2013 in Berlin and Brandenburg.¹ Because the project could not be assigned to a genre, financing through conventional channels failed, and the film was ultimately made without funding.²

The film is built as a physical experience: it opens with a warning card about strobe effects and "isochromatic and binaural sounds" and advises viewers to play it loud.¹⁴^•¹⁵ Akiz tells the story in techno beats and strobe light, using wide-angle lenses for an almost hallucinatory effect.⁸^•¹⁶ The soundtrack includes songs by Boys Noize, Oblast, and Wild Style Lion with Kim Gordon.⁵

Kim Gordon, of Sonic Youth, plays a strict English teacher who analyzes a William Blake poem, a representative of "dark Romanticism" concerned, like the film, with febrile states, delusions, and ecstatic moments. She was a fan of Akiz's previous film, collaborated without having read the script, sings the end-credit song, and has a brief on-screen appearance.¹²

Genre position and reception

Akiz rejects the horror label: a horror film, in his view, rests on physical danger to the protagonist, while his creature is quickly established as harmless, with no teeth. He calls Der Nachtmahr a dark film instead, and notes that genre categories could not capture it: coming-of-age misses, science fiction misses despite E.T. references, since the creature is not an alien.² The FSK assessment similarly describes a psychological horror film in which the repellent-looking creature appears more in need of protection than dangerous, and bodily violence plays little role.⁷

Critics responded to the film's ambivalence. The epd Film review called it a coming-of-age drama in which the creature becomes a metaphorically many-sided shadow of everyday teenage fears, praising the radical style achieved on a budget under 100,000 euros.¹⁴ critic.de placed it between David Cronenberg's body horror and David Lynch's narrative experiments, and credited it with drawing teenagers unusually authentically, without pedagogical condescension.³ artechock saw it as a rare example of serious German genre cinema and an open return to the tradition of German Dark Romanticism, from E.T.A. Hoffmann to the paintings of Böcklin and the films of Murnau.¹⁰ Der Spiegel called it a horror, monster, and youth film in one.⁸ On Rotten Tomatoes the film held a 50% Tomatometer from six reviews and a 58% audience score.¹⁷

The film premiered in 2015: kino.de records a world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival,¹⁸ while filmportal.de records the German premiere on 30 June 2015 at the Munich Filmfest and a German theatrical release on 26 May 2016, distributed by Koch Films.¹ It screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015 in the Vanguard program¹⁹ and at the Viennale and the London Film Festival the same year.¹⁶^•¹⁵ German admissions stood at 8,711 as of June 2016.¹

Akiz has described Der Nachtmahr as the first part of a "demoniac trilogy" treating birth, love, and death as a cinematic cycle.⁹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Psychological horror films › Psychological horror films, 2010s and later

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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