Colin Tilly’s 2025 gothic horror, Eye for an Eye, revolves around Anna Reeves’ haunting experience after she moved to the suburbs to live with her grandmother, May Roberts. Anna had recently lost her parents to a car accident, and she was still processing the grief. Leaving behind her life in Brooklyn to live in a sleepy suburb of Miami was not an easy decision, but she didn’t have much of a choice. May enthusiastically welcomed Anna to her humble abode. She was visually impaired, so she used her fingers to trace Anna’s face, and she immediately knew that her features were just like her daughter’s. May showed Anna to her room, and she sternly added that she expected Anna to respect her privacy. There was not much Anna could do in the quaint suburbs, so she decided to explore the woods even though May had warned her not to go there.
Spoiler Alert
Who was Mr. Sandman?
Anna couldn’t help but wonder how May had lost her vision. She had seen her without her dark glasses, and it looked like someone had scooped her eyes out of her sockets. To find answers, Anna ended up at her grandaunt Patty’s house. She explained that May had been a cheerleader in high school. She was a proud young woman who loved the attention she got. She quickly added that May was mean and careless and she always had to have things her way. Patty knew that what she was about to say might seem impossible to Anna, so she cautiously stated that in small towns like theirs, the myths and lore controlled their lives, and one such lore was that of a Mr. Sandman. He was said to have taken away May’s vision because he always punished the bad ones. Leading up to the night May lost her vision, she repeatedly saw nightmares, and it left her traumatized. The last thing she remembered seeing was Mr. Sandman, right before he plucked her eyeballs out of her sockets. Those that didn’t believe the myths thought that May had done that to herself. It was in the emergency room that May learned she was pregnant, but she was not really in the state to raise her daughter.
After Patty’s eerie introduction to Mr. Sandman, we learn about him in detail towards the end. Anna had discovered the giant tree in the forest where, if one wrote down the names of their bullies, Mr. Sandman sought revenge against them. She thought of axing down the tree, but it was impossible. She collapsed on the ground, and that was when she saw Mr. Sandman’s past. He was once a little boy named Vincent who was visually impaired and had glass eyes. One day, after school, two of his classmates lured him to the woods. They stole Vincent’s glass eyes and used them as slingshot marbles to hurt him. They laughed at his misery, and he died after one of the glass eyes hit his head too hard. Vincent admitted that the bullies perhaps didn’t think they would end up murdering him, and maybe it was an accident. But even then, there were no excuses for the bullies. Vincent’s body was never found, and his corpse gradually decomposed into the sand. While he was ostracized by his peers, his soul found a home in the giant tree he was tied to. The roots of the trees made his soul feel alive, and while the little boy, Vincent, had died, Mr. Sandman stayed to protect the vulnerable living in the small town.
What happened to Shawn and Julie?
The only friends Anna made after moving in with her grandmother were Shawn and Julie. They were about Anna’s age, done with school but still figuring out their lives, and their usual routine involved spending most of their days drinking beers and just hanging out at the old docks. Considering May and Patty were the only people Anna knew in town, she was glad that she’d come across people of her own age group. They seemed harmless at first, but soon Anna witnessed their dark side. Shawn didn’t have a parental figure to look up to; his father had recently passed away, and he had never known his mother, and that seemed to have a damaging effect on him emotionally. He searched for ways to amuse himself, and he often ended up targeting the vulnerable, kids and old people, to assert his dominance. In simple words, he was a bully, and watching him frighten Connor, a young skater, just because he dared to cross paths with him left Anna feeling clueless. She was too high to react, but she was also repulsed watching Shawn target the kid. Julie thought that it was funny, and she started recording the incident. Shawn ended up throwing the boy off the bridge they were on. Connor broke his arms, and he whimpered and screamed in pain. Shawn thought it was best to leave the boy, but Julie insisted that they rescue him. They were both too high to walk Connor to the hospital, so Anna offered to do it. She despised herself for not stopping Shawn when she could have, and the guilt started to slowly consume her.
When Patty met Connor, she immediately knew that he’d been targeted by bullies. When he refused to discuss the incident, Patty encouraged him to carve the names of the bullies into the giant old tree in the woods, and she promised that Mr. Sandman would take care of all his troubles. Soon, Shawn, Julie, and Anna started to experience vivid nightmares. They couldn’t run away from their mistake even in their sleep. Anna’s dark circles became prominent; she was fatigued; she wanted to sleep, but she couldn’t, and the nightmares kept her on her toes at all times. She knew that she was experiencing exactly what her grandma did when she was in high school, and she feared that, just like her, she too would lose her vision because she chose to be a silent spectator instead of actively helping Connor. Anna discussed her theory with Julie and Shawn. She showed them that their names had been carved into the tree. Shawn tried to erase it, but it didn’t work; his name reappeared on the bark. It was obvious that there was something supernatural at play, but Shawn refused to acknowledge it. Julie and Anna were done with him (especially after he pushed Anna into the lake when she’d stated that she didn’t want to be around him).
After they left him in the woods, Shawn relieved himself on the tree trunk just to mess with the whole theory Anna had presented. Immediately after, a pair of hands with long, twisted nails appeared from behind and scooped out Shawn’s eyeballs. He screamed in pain, and as he tried to run away, he ended up banging his head into a tree trunk, resulting in his immediate death. Julie, too, had been experiencing nightmares, so she and Anna had decided to spend the night together in Anna’s room, hoping that it would make the nightmares a little less traumatic. But that was not really the case. The next morning when Julie woke up and decided to take a bath, she was attacked by Mr. Sandman. She was exhausted, and the nightmares continued to traumatize her. She started to sink into the bathtub when all of a sudden she came to her senses and noticed Mr. Sandman standing in front of her. He stretched his arms and pulled out her eyeball. Julie shrieked and tried to escape, but she ended up slipping and falling right back into the bathtub. And in the process she was fatally injured in her head, dying within seconds.
Did May die?
While Julie succumbed to her head injury, May drugged Anna and tied her to the bedpost. When Anna woke up, she was surprised to see cryptic symbols on the walls of May’s room. May had misinterpreted the eerie occurrences around her. She assumed Vincent had returned to give back her vision, not realizing that he was back to punish her granddaughter. May assumed that Vincent wanted her to take away Anna’s vision so that she could get hers back. But unfortunately, Vincent didn’t have any plans for May. May was desperate; she had waited for fifty years, hoping that one day things would magically change, but that never happened. Anna cautioned May that her plans were not in line with Vincent’s desires and that she was losing her grip on her sanity. But May refused to back down; she instructed Anna to stay still while she tried to scoop her eyeballs. Anna figured there was no easy way to stop May, so after she managed to break free, she ended up stabbing her grandma in the eyes with the pair of scissors she had in her hand.
Patty sensed something was wrong, so she decided to check on May and Anna. She was terrified to see May lying on the landing of the staircase with a pair of scissors stuck in her eye. To her surprise, May got up on her feet, pulled out the scissors, and ended up falling down the stairs. In her final moments, May decided to confront Patty. She stated that she knew it was Patty who’d carved her name on the giant tree because she was jealous of May’s popularity. May had intentionally scarred Patty’s face because she wanted her to forever remember that she was not better than her. After saying this, May stopped breathing, and Patty assumed she had passed away. As she got close to May’s body to check her heartbeat, May grabbed hold of her and stabbed her in the eye with the scissors. Patty fell off the stairs and died almost immediately as a result of the shock and the pain. The fact that May too had stopped moving after she’d attacked Patty in the end suggests that she too had possibly passed away. She couldn’t get her vision back, but she sought revenge on her sister, something that she’d been dreaming of for fifty years.
Why did Mr. Sandman let go of Anna?
Anna searched for meaning in her nightmares. She tried to understand where Vincent came from, and she desperately looked for ways to convince him that she wanted to be a better human being and she was doing her best to pay the price for her silence. It was almost as if Vincent, too, saw the good in Anna, but because she hadn’t helped the boy, he thought she deserved to be punished as well. But unlike most of his targets, Anna was regretful of her actions, and she felt guilty even before she started experiencing the nightmares. This was probably why Anna’s vision was filled with clues that she could use to find a way out of the curse.
In one of her nightmares, she found the Book of Exodus and read the ‘eye for an eye’ commandment—“fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” Whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him.” Anna realized that the only way she could pay for her mistake was by fracturing her arm just like Shawn had fractured Connor’s. She repeatedly struck her arm with a hammer, and even though it was agonizingly painful, she knew there was no other way out of the curse. As a result of the pain, Anna once again went into a state of sleep paralysis. She found herself in the woods, and she discovered two glass eyes on the ground. She picked them up, and during the ending of Eye for an Eye, when Anna, in her dream, finally came face-to-face with Vincent inside the tree that was now his home, she offered him the glass eyes. As it turned out, this was the closure that Vincent needed. He perhaps had been waiting to experience kindness even in his afterlife, and it was only Anna who truly understood him. The next morning, Anna woke up in her room. She was overjoyed when she realized that she still had her vision. It was her empathetic nature and her determination to solve the mystery that helped her pay for her sin without having to lose her sight.
In Eye for an Eye’s ending, Anna’s name magically disappeared from the giant tree. Vincent didn’t have to punish her because she had repented for her sins on her own. The ending suggests that Vincent finally found closure and his soul possibly left the mortal world, but perhaps the lore will continue to haunt the town and the bullies will always think twice before targeting someone.
