The idea was born and put on paper in the same afternoon in the autumn of 1997, while trying to come up with a story for another film.
The script took only about three hours to finish and would not reflect the coming workload of the following years. 25000 SEK was given for the entire project, from start to completion, by Film i Västerbotten. This would turn out to be far too little, but was not to be realised until later by the inexperienced Andreas and Björn, who now started writing a storyboard and planning the sound. Sound was recorded in Second Home, a sound studio in Umeå, with the great help of skilled sound technicians Henrik Oja and Mats Hammarström. Andreas, Björn and Emma – responsible for all female voices – soon found themselves moaning, groaning and eating bananas for the right sounds of… love. Embarrassing at first, but just hours later different aspects of moaning were being explored with great sincerity. Music by Stefan Olofsson, sound effects as well as voices, were then edited at Second Home to give the complete sound appearance of the film, scene by scene. At Giraff Film in Luleå, the sound was transferred to perfo tape to allow frame-by-frame mapping of individual sounds. These time codes would be important later as the animation would be fit onto the sound.
The summer of 1998 was spent building the set for the coming scenes and the first animation took place in the end of June 1998. Prior to that, Andreas had moulded Schlangemanns different sized extremities in the oven at his parents house. The first scene to be shot was the bar scene where Schlangemann picks up the woman with his love device. Both Andreas and Björn were struck by two things: One, the animation looked better than they could imagine, and two, things would take a lot longer than they had expected. Fernando Altamirano and Runar Enberg both helped with practical as well as theoretical advice during the filming, and they would prove to be indispensable.
A few days before New Year in 1998 the last scene was shot. Three bottles of hand cream were used, and in this suite of filming, both Andreas and Björn felt they had finally reached their goal. It was a wrap.
In spring 1999, some additional material was shot, and then editing took place. Lill Casslind set out on this quest with scissors and great patience and some additional help from Björn. In Studio Langnö, the final sound mix was made, followed by the final touch at Filmteknik AB. An additional 50000 SEK was given from Film i Västerbotten for this, since the project had run out of money. In the autumn of 2000 the film had its première at Umeå Film Festival and would later be screened at other festivals in Sweden as well as in the rest of Europe. Der Schlangemann received the audience award for best short film at the 13th Annual Horror and Fantasy Film Festival in San Sebastian, Spain, November 2002. All in all, Der Schlangemann was a huge success all around the globe, and mainstream Hollywood was quick to follow.