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Nekromantik 2: Interview with Jörg Buttgereit

nekromantik-2-1
Nekromantik 2

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-Ray)

Release date: 3 July 2017

A new special edition release, includes the director’s short films and music videos, and a director approved High Definition transfer

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: Jörg Buttgereit

Writers: Jörg Buttgereit, Franz Rodenkirchen

Cast: Monika M., Mark Reeder, Lena Braun

Germany 1991

102 mins

The German filmmaker talks about women aggressor characters, the banning of his film in Germany, realism and truth.

After last year’s groundbreaking DVD release of Jörg Buttgereit’s punk-art bombshell Nekromantik, Arrow Video is making its 1991 sequel, Nekromantik 2, available on home video for the first time in the UK. Banned in Germany at the time, Nekromantik 2 is the female pendant to the original film, starring the disarmingly sweet Monika M. as a necrophile torn between a dead and a living lover. Slicker and more melancholy, although still punctuated by moments of hilariously incongruous humour, the second instalment of corpse love mixes pop art and gore to probe the limits of the normal and the abnormal.

Virginie Sélavy talks to Jörg Buttgereit about women aggressor characters, the banning of the film in Germany, realism and truth.

Virginie Sélavy: After Nekromantik, you initially refused to make the sequel people were demanding. What prompted you to make a Nekromantik sequel after making Der Todesking in 1990?

Jörg Buttgereit: I was always playing with the expectations of the audience, so when I made Der Todesking after Nekromantik people were surprised. I was trying to get more freedom to do what I wanted to do. After I had that freedom with Der Todesking I wasn’t afraid to do a sequel anymore because I knew I could do something different, I didn’t have to do the same thing all over again. The fact that the Wall came down in between the first and the second Nekromantik was a good way of having a different point of view on the topic. And of course this time the film was made from a woman’s point of view, which is something I felt was necessary, because all the movies I made before had a male audience.

Did you always want to make the film from a female perspective?

Yes, I think so. The idea might have come to our minds when we did one of the episodes for Der Todesking, the ‘ego-shooter’ woman. That was also a female take on the male character from Taxi Driver. That was something we explored more accurately in Nekromantik 2. And in the first Nekromantik we had Beatriz, who was also a very strong woman, so it was just taking it a step further.

So you were interested in depicting a woman aggressor rather than a woman victim.

Yeah, which is something that from today’s point of view may not look too exciting, but 25 years ago it was still necessary. And it worked out in a way, because one of the first festivals the film was invited to was a feminist film festival in Vienna. It was a film festival that only showed films with women aggressors. But I wasn’t allowed to go because I was a man. That was a little depressing! They screened films like Empire of the Senses and Ms 45. They made a hardcover catalogue for the festival. I think it was the first film book that Nekromantik 2 was in. They told me that afterwards they had a shooting lesson for women. The festival was called Mörderinnen.

You have said that the film was liked more by women than by men. Do you think that’s still the case?

Maybe that was the case when the film came out. But the fact that the film got banned in Germany made it very attractive to people who didn’t like it in the first place, which didn’t do any good for me because I wasn’t allowed to distribute the film for two years. But for me it was very satisfying that there was a female audience at all for a horror film. That wasn’t very normal in those days. We’ve just been to some festivals with German Angst in Austria and with Nekromantik 2 in Finland, and I was surprised to see how many female audience members we had – really young female audience members. After a screening of German Angst I was so curious that I approached the young girls and asked why they watched a film like that. My episode [in the three-part anthology] is very close to Nekromantik 2 I think. To them it felt very normal to watch these films, they couldn’t really explain. So it was a very satisfying experience to see so many young women attending screenings of horror films.

Do you think that the fact that the film is about a woman also played a part in the reaction of the authorities in banning it?

That’s very hard to say. If I think about it today, maybe. But the Werkstattkino cinema in Munich, where the raid happened in 1992, was raided on a regular basis. The same thing happened for Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. So I think that for the authorities it was just another one of those films, and they didn’t even know it was a German film. When they banned a movie like Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 or an American horror movie nobody complained because in the case of TCM 2 there wasn’t even a German distributor, so it was very easy to get rid of those films. But when they took my film I had to fight back because they were trying to destroy the negative, something that was really frightening, and that resulted in raids on our homes as well. So what they did was more like a political attack. And maybe it was also due to the fact that it was my third movie. When I made Nekromantik it played in exactly the same cinema in Munich but nothing happened because the authorities didn’t know me. After the third movie it was ‘OK, this guy is not going to stop if we don’t do something’.

It’s interesting that you made the first Nekromantik as a reaction to German censorship but nothing happened and it was only with the sequel…

Because Nekromantik was so small. It was me driving around with the film prints to all the different cities. Nobody had seen the film. If you wanted to see it you had to go to a midnight screening and district attorneys don’t go to midnight screenings. Sometimes it’s easy to get away from censorship by just making it exclusive. We hadn’t put it out on VHS, that came a year later, so it was a really underground independent film. Everybody heard about the movie. I think the first screening in Berlin of Nekromantik was in a three-seat cinema and 500 people came. After that screening it was just word of mouth. But with Nekromantik 2 it was different, it was reviewed like a normal movie.

Did you still feel you were making a film in reaction to German censorship when you made Nekromantik 2?

I was feeling quite secure, quite free to do what I wanted. So when I heard that the movie was confiscated in Munich, I wasn’t there, I was in Paris, promoting the release of Der Todesking I think, and Nekromantik on VHS. Someone phoned me in Paris and told me the cinema had been raided and I would be charged with ‘glorifying violence’. I didn’t take it very seriously in the first place, but when I got back home and they had raided the place of the producer it got quite serious.

What do you think of that accusation of ‘glorifying violence’?

That was the usual way of getting rid of movies like this, it’s a paragraph of the law where you can skip artistic freedom. It’s aimed at Nazi propaganda. If you glorify violence against foreigners you’re doing something against the law and you should be treated like a criminal and not like an artist. That’s the concept behind it. So I didn’t take that accusation very seriously because I knew that it was not true. That’s why the film was unharmed in the end, because it was not true. The judge watched the movie and an art historian came up with a thesis about it being a metaphor for East Germany and then the film was cleared. If you watch it it’s very obvious that it doesn’t promote violence against other people. It was stupid to take this kind of bullet-proof paragraph of the law to get rid of it, they were just too lazy to think about it.

There is a direct reference to real-life necrophile Karen Greenlee in Nekromantik 2 through one of her drawings, which appears on Monika’s wall. This grounding in reality always seems essential to you.

Yes, of course, because that’s something normal horror movies do as well – ‘what you’re about to see is based on actual fact’ – all this stuff gives films a more realistic and threatening kick. But my films are about real horror, not about walking dead and ghosts from another world. I wouldn’t dare to touch stuff Hollywood could do better. If you work with friends, there’s no money, it’d be ridiculous to do something like Lifeforce [laughs]. You have to stick to your abilities, throw everything away that could be ridiculous if you tried it. I think that’s why so many independent or low-budget horror movies suck, because they want to do the same things as Hollywood, which is pointless in the first place because those movies already exist, so why bother doing it again?

The film pragmatically looks at the reality of being a necrophile, for instance in the first scene, when Monika can’t have sex with Rob’s corpse because it makes her physically sick.

That’s something Dennis Nilsen describes in his book, Killing for Company, which I’d read before doing Nekromantik. There are pictures in Killing for Company where he drew how he put the corpses and the heads in plastic bags, and where he put air freshener in, which I was trying to copy exactly. If they could choose I think they would prefer a living person, but that’s so complicated sometimes [laughs]. Dennis Nilsen had living people in his flat but he was afraid that they would go away, and so he got them drunk to make sure that they would stay. It’s a very innocent and childish concept but he, and Monika too, would have preferred to have a living partner, and that’s what the movie is about. That’s why she’s trying to make the straight relationship work with Mark Reeder.

There’s something funny, but also quite poignant, about the scene when Monika is taking pictures with Rob’s corpse on the sofa.

Again it was a way of trying to picture what I read in books like Killing for Company, having a relationship with this person that you killed last night [laughs]. That was something that fascinated me. When Dennis Nilsen killed someone, he took a necktie from them and went to work the next day with these clothes. He was pretending that this was normal, and for him it was normal. I’m trying to show something normal, which is of course funny and creepy.

The idea of what is normal and what is not normal runs through the film. There’s a really interesting contrast in the film between Monika and her very unconventional desires, and Mark, who works in porn, but is very conventional in terms of his romantic relationships.

That was something I had in mind all the time. It’s still true because if I tell people today that I’ve just done a horror movie called German Angst, they don’t say, ‘That’s great, tell me more about it’, they say, ‘Why? Why do you do this? What’s wrong with you?’ In Germany you have to justify what you do, and people treat you like you’re not normal, but I always felt normal, and I felt more honest in doing these kinds of movies. So that’s maybe the main theme behind it, the need for all German horror film fans and horror filmmakers to justify themselves all the time.

Why did you decide to repeat the climax of the first film in the credits of the sequel?

I think it was mainly because of the fact that Nekromantik 2 starts very slowly and I wanted to have something at the beginning that makes you aware of the fact that there will be something terrible happening after a long wait. Many horror fans were waiting for a film like Nekromantik 2 and I was not giving them what they wanted, I was playing with expectations again. So with the credit scene at the beginning I was making them feel safe so they wouldn’t walk out after five minutes [laughs].

You also include a parody of Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André. Why that particular film?

At the time the film was made I had a subscription to Fangoria and I learned English from reading all the letters in that section of the magazine. There was often hate mail that would say, ‘If you don’t like this horror movie, then go and watch My Dinner with André, so My Dinner with André was like the antithesis of a horror movie. When I thought of the concept for a film-in-a-film, I hadn’t even seen My Dinner with André [laughs]! So it’s mainly a spoof on this very dumb approach horror fans have to art movies, where they just won’t watch them, and that was me playing with the expectations of the audience, giving them an art movie. That’s why the characters in that film-in-the-film are played by famous underground artists Wolfgang Müller and Käthe Kruse from the group Die Tödliche Doris. I said they should be naked and I asked them to find out what they could talk about, and so this is like a spoof on the narrow-minded horror fans [laughs], and I’m having a laugh in the back of the cinema about the horror fans who have to sit through this art stuff.

How important was it that you found Monika at a screening of Lucio Fulci’s House by the Cemetery?

The fact that she was there on her own was something that was not ‘normal’ at the time, and it meant that you could at least hope that she would be open-minded to be in an art movie about necrophilia. I don’t know how aware she was of what she was doing. She was very flattered that everybody was giving her so much attention and that we liked every move she made in front of the camera. We never talked much about it. I can’t really remember directing her like, ‘This is your motive’, and stuff like that. It was more like, ‘OK, the camera is here, you walk from here to there to put this on that’. It was a very pragmatic way of directing. That’s always the way it is with me. She had seen Der Todesking and she watched Nekromantik, and that was more than I could have explained.

Did she have a problem with any of the things that she had to do?

No. That was something I was very curious about too. That was maybe one of the main concerns. I told her what we were showing on screen to make sure that we didn’t exploit her. That was something we talked about a lot and I gave her the chance to be in the editing room in case something wasn’t kosher with her.

What do you think she brought to the character?

The most important thing, innocence. Because she didn’t know anything about acting, or about necrophilia [laughs]. And beauty, of course. The perfect contrast to the idea of necrophilia. When we were doing these films we didn’t know what we were doing. But that’s still the idea now. When I work for the stage I make sure I don’t know exactly what I’m doing. For German Angst it was necessary for me to put something dangerous in the movie. So I took this young girl who was not experienced in acting, and that was my dangerous item for the film. That’s what I look for. I’m not trying to make normal pictures like Hollywood, I look for some kind of truth or authenticity.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

The interview was first published in December 2015 for the release of Arrow Video’s limited 3-disc digipak (Blu-ray, DVD and CD soundtrack).

Nekromantik: Interview with Jörg Buttgereit

Nekromantik
Jörg Buttgereit (left)

Format: 3-disc digipak (Blu-ray, DVD, CD)

Release date: 15 December 2014

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: Jörg Buttgereit

Writers: Jörg Buttgereit, Franz Rodenkirchen

Based on the novel by: Thea von Harbou

Cast: Daktari Lorenz, Beatrice Manowski, Harald Lundt

Germany 1987

75 mins

Just in time for Christmas, Arrow Video are releasing Jörg Buttgereit’s legendary underground sex-and-death shocker Nekromantik on Blu-ray and DVD for the first time in the UK. Banned in a number of countries, the film was never officially banned in Britain, having never been submitted to the BBFC, although any imported copies would have been seized by British customs. Shot with friends on Super8 in the greatest underground tradition, the story of necrophiles Rob and Betty, and the corpse that comes between them, became notorious and sought after for its outrageously grisly imagery. This release, 27 years after its creation, finally makes widely available a film that has much more to offer than shock for shock’s sake.

Virginie Sélavy talks to Jörg Buttgereit about the naivety of serial killers, disappointing people’s expectations and the academic theory that saved him from jail.

Virginie Sélavy: What’s your reaction to the fact that Nekromantik is getting an official Blu-ray release in the UK?

Jörg Buttgereit: The idea of releasing it on Blu-ray is something we had in mind for quite a while. It took ages because we did our old master from the Super8 film stock, which is not negative but positive film stock, because Super8 is made for daddy’s home films from the 70s, so you don’t have a negative. It was a lot of annoying work and I felt, what’s the use, because I prefer the movie to look very dirty (laughs). But when you transfer Super8 film stock to HD material there is not more depth, and there is no 3D effect, you get more dirt and more grain, so I’m happy (laughs).

That Super8 look is very important to the film.

I think so too. When I saw the dailies – as we say (laughs) – of Nekromantic, which was not the dailies, because when you shot on Super8, it took two weeks for the films to come back… so after two weeks, I saw the footage and I felt that it looked too normal and not dirty enough, so I was a little bit worried. So when we made film prints for the cinema in 16mm (this was a blow-up), we made sure we did it on a certain kind of film stock so the movie had this kind of greenish look, which looked dirtier, and the black looked more right in my opinion. But one curious thing happened. When we put out the film on VHS in Germany there were a lot of bootlegs in the US. I read reviews in magazines – because the internet was not there, this was 27 years ago – that said, ‘the movie looks so strange and it’s very dark’, and the viewer had the impression that they were watching real corpses. And I thought, well, it always works for the movie if you don’t see the real picture. I remember when I got my first Texas Chainsaw 2 VHS from the Netherlands, I couldn’t see anything. It was just darkness and noises, and I thought, what’s happening in that movie? I was totally fascinated. It’s the opposite of a movie experience today.

What did you think when you saw it properly?

It looked a little like a TV movie to me! It’s so bright! The first Texas Chain Saw is also very bright but it’s shot on 16mm so it still looks dirty. There was a hazing, they sprayed dust in the air, and it’s something that I did excessively when I did my episode for German Angst, my new movie that’s going to be finished at the end of the year. That film was shot on HD in CinemaScope so I wanted to make sure that it looked like a film and it looked dirty, so we did a lot of hazing. I was really afraid of seeing everything in HD.

The contrast that comes from using a home movie format and the subject matter is great. But using Super8 also makes Nekromantik look like an underground film, like those of the Kuchar brothers. It seems much closer to those films than to a straight horror film.

That was our thing, it is an underground film. The inspiration came from seeing Throbbing Gristle live in Berlin during that time, and watching John Waters’s movies, like Pink Flamingos, and having the book Film as a Subversive Art. And me being a big fan of old horror movies like Bride of Frankenstein. So it doesn’t work as a horror movie, there’s no tension, it’s terrible in that way – it’s terrible in a lot of ways… (laughs)

And as in underground film, you use non-actors who have a very unique presence. Daktari Lorenz has that weird wired energy, and it’s almost as if he’s not acting but just being himself.

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Yes, I wasn’t trying to make them act. I was aware of the fact that they couldn’t deliver any lines and I couldn’t deliver good writing. I started doing good scripts when I started doing plays for German radio, but the first was in 2000. Until that time I wasn’t really sure if I could write good dialogue. Now I’m doing comic books, like Captain Berlin.That’s dialogue stuff I grew up with, very 70s, it’s something I can deliver very fast. So dialogue is something that I’m more able to deliver now. But these people who were acting in the film were just my friends, so how could they act? The film was never planned to be seen outside of my circuit. It was done mainly for this punk-rock-spirit audience inside Berlin. We were in this walled city so I didn’t even dare to take the movie and drive out of the city with it because there was the wall and they would have searched you, so it would have been impossible to screen outside of Berlin. With my short films I did stuff like this. But with Nekromantik I didn’t dare until the wall came down, which was two years later.

Did you not have more ambition for the film than just screening it within your circle?

Ambition maybe, but I was aware of the fact that it was impossible to reach this kind of audience. How could I, there was no internet. I’d only made short films before, that was Hot Love, which is also one on the Blu-ray. With Hot Love I did a tour through Germany. That was the only thing that was a little bigger than anything else I’d done before. I went to 10 different cities, in the West of course.

How do you see Nekromantik now? When you introduced the FrightFest screening in August, you seemed surprised that people were interested.

I’m amazed that it gets so much… not attention, because I understand why it gets attention. The poster we did back in 87 is an attention-grabber, but the movie doesn’t deliver on the poster. It does something else, and that’s nice, but I would never dare to hope that it really works. When I see the film I have to laugh. I see some stupid little kids trying to do a horror movie, or trying not to laugh in front of the camera. There’s a new de-noised soundtrack on the Blu-ray and in the first shot, where you see the legs and the panties coming down and then a girl is pissing, if you listen you can hear me laughing behind the camera. That’s how I approached the movie.

I think it is part of the appeal of the film, this anarchic charm, the gleeful pleasure at showing the most disgusting things possible.

I think maybe where we were ahead of ourselves was in the fact that the movie pretends that everything you see is normal. There is no justification, there is no chain-smoking police guy divorced from his wife who is uninteresting, but is there to put law and order into place. The fact that the corpse-loving scene is depicted in a way every normal love scene would have been, with piano music, with slow motion, all the clichés, I think that’s the trick, and that’s what gets people worried. Today Betty is like some emo goth chick, but back in 87 there was no such thing. There was no Tim Burton, no Johnny Depp. I was having fights with people about the fact that the main actress is in the bathtub with sunglasses on. That was actually like making fun of goth chicks before goth chicks were invented (laughs).

The way the music undermines all the romantic clichés is brilliant. You use the music similarly in Hot Love and Nekromantik 2, and running through those three films there is the same disillusioned view of love.

That’s what I was struggling with. If you see the introduction for Hot Love, it’s a revenge against my girlfriend who had left me. And the film is called Nekromantik, you can see it’s a combination of two extremes. Other horror films have the same topic, love and death, but nobody was going straight for the meaning of the word. To me, it’s about a very naïve part of you. I like innocence. And if a necrophile is having sex with a corpse and his girlfriend, then it should be presented from his point of view, that’s the interesting thing. I had some trouble explaining all these things. Two years ago I did a stage production on Edward Gein, the grave robber, so I had to sell it to the authorities by saying that this case is a cultural thing, it’s the basis for Psycho, Texas Chain Saw, Silence of the Lambs. But what fascinates me in this case, and this also became an inspiration for Nekromantik, is the naivety and the childish appearance of this guy called Ed Gein. One and a half years ago I went to his grave and I made a short film there. It’s not on the Arrow disc but it’s on the German Blu-ray. It’s called A Moment of Silence at the Grave of Ed Gein. So you can see that I deal with these people in this sort of sensitive way. I don’t think you can learn anything from them if you just deal with them as monsters. And that’s the same as Nekromantik. You have to care about them, otherwise the movie will be boring. And if you don’t give them a Jodie Foster character in Silence of the Lambs, or someone who can deliver them from evil, then you have to make these so-called bad people sympathetic.

You do that very well in both Nekromantik films and also in Schramm, which is an astonishing serial killer portrait.

I’m trying to do the same thing on stage now in Germany. I found a topic that’s very much fitting because last year I did a German version of The Elephant Man, and that’s exactly the same thing. You have this deformed man and everybody thinks he’s gruesome, but he isn’t. It was very revealing to do that on a stage and to have a different audience. Because The Elephant Man is something that people would go to even if they don’t know who I am, so I have a lot of normal people in the theatre. And they were surprised that the production was so sensitive, that’s what the critics said. Of course they have this picture of me, they see the movie, they don’t see the person. They were saying, ‘we’re so surprised that your stage version of The Elephant Man is so sensitive’. That’s an insult when you think about it, but I was still happy!

Elefantenmensch Buttgereit
The Elephant Man

A lot has been made of the necrophilia, but the rabbit scene remains the most disturbing scene in the film.

Because you know it’s real. For me it was important to have real death in the film, being inspired by underground movies that deal with this kind of thing. I was always annoyed by people explaining why they watch horror movies – ‘because we like special effects’. And I didn’t want to have that excuse for my movie. The scene is there to make people aware of what they’re watching, and to make people sensitive about why they’re watching it. Because when you watch footage like this, sooner or later you will begin to ask yourself, why am I watching this? That was something I was asking myself. I didn’t have all the answers but it’s a movie, I just made it with my friends. I had this guy who was a producer and was giving me all these facilities, but I did everything on my own, I experimented, I had nothing to worry about in terms of budget because nobody was paid anyway. So we were trying stuff out, which is the opposite of the experience of making films nowadays – or in general.

You said you made the film in reaction to German censorship at the time. What reaction did you expect?

With the first Nekromantik nothing really happened because nobody noticed that the film was there. In Berlin we had two film prints and it was screened at three cinemas. One cinema shared one print by driving around all the time. Only people who already knew me and who were from this underground scene watched the film, so nothing happened. People were a little worried that the film was too serious – that was the first reaction. The first review I read was in a gay magazine, saying that this was the first movie about AIDS, because people are going to bed with the dead now, and that wasn’t something I was thinking about. So I was totally surprised by people taking the film seriously and thinking that it was about AIDS.

Did you agree with that interpretation?

I didn’t have that in mind when I did the script, which wasn’t really a script, it was about 20 pages of scribbling. But of course AIDS was a big thing during that time. I knew people who were suffering from AIDS so it was in my head. If something is in the zeitgeist then it will show up in the things you do, I think. So I agreed with it but I was also surprised by it. And it goes on until today. I read reviews explaining my films and I wonder… (laughs)

What’s the weirdest explanation of Nekromantik that you have come across?

I think the strangest, and on the other hand the most convenient, interpretation was done by this film historian when we were in court with Nekromantik 2. The first Nekromantik was shot in the West side of Berlin before the wall came down, and after it came down we shot Nekromantik 2 in the East part. So the thesis is that Nekromantik 2 is art compared to Nekromantik because it’s a film about the decaying East German part of Berlin (laughs). That explanation saved me from going to jail and having the movie destroyed, so I really embraced it. And of course it was a conscious decision to shoot in East Berlin because everything looked so dead and so old over there, like the 60s, or 50s even. All the outside shots look strange, it was like a movie shot in the past. So that was the weirdest explanation, but it’s also true because it documents a version of Berlin that is not there anymore. But the main reason was of course that we could shoot in East Berlin with no money. I wanted to do all these petting zoo scenes, so we went to the West Berlin zoo because they have much nicer animals and they told us it was 350 Deutschmarks an hour. We went to the East German zoo and they told us it was 50 pence a day, because they weren’t used to professional camera teams. You could take your home camera there and film for the whole day for 50 pence. There was no capitalist concept in East Berlin, they didn’t ask for money. So we paid nothing for shooting outside, it was heaven. It took a while for East Berlin to get a hold of the rhythm of the West, but all the West Berlin people were going to the East and doing stuff there, so it was like tourism what we did (laughs).

At the FrightFest screening you also mentioned another interpretation that was given of the film, which was that it’s about the unearthing of Germany’s past. Do you see it that way?

I know that depicting death in German movies is a problem because of the German past. And if you watch my earlier short film, Bloody Excess in the Leader’s Bunker, which is not as good as the title, together with Nekromantik, you could come to that conclusion. But to me it’s more about Ed Gein than about concentration camps.

But there are references in Der Todesking and Schramm too, so do you think it runs through the background of everything you do?

Nazi trash was something that was part of the punk rock spirit – Sid Vicious was running around in Paris with a swastika. Something like this would have got you in jail in Berlin at once. So doing a film like Bloody Excesses in the Leader’s Bunker… I did a premiere of that film in 1982 in a punk rock club, Risiko, with Blixa Bargeld from Einstürzende Neubauten at the bar and the police came to check if it was a neo-Nazi meet-up. So over there it was daring to use these symbols because even now it is forbidden to use these images.

Is that why the German authorities have such a problem with horror?

Yes I think so. Under the Nazis you had this clean screen thing, there was no dead body during the Nazi occupation, no dead body on the screen. It was just Heimat films, stupid propaganda movies, something like what you would get in North Korea today. And for some reason until today something that is connoted as horror is only possible in the underground, and you need a very good excuse to deal with this kind of matter. So for me it’s only possible to work in this field if I do it for the radio or on the stage. I did a play on Ed Gein for the stage, it would have been impossible to do it for the screen. Because there would have been no money. But for the stage I had lots of money to do it.

Ed Gein Buttgereit
Ed Gein in Kannibale und Liebe

Is that why you stopped making films for the cinema after Schramm?

We did four feature films with no money, so as it was like what Throbbing Gristle did once with all their fans, they sent them a postcard, ‘the mission is terminated’ (laughs). I had everything, the movies were banned, the police raided my home, I was labelled an artist in court, and Schramm was nominated for a German film prize. It was the right moment to stop because it wasn’t subversive anymore. And everybody was running out of money. Because getting our money back like today with Blu-ray editions was not possible.

You said in an interview that you like to disappoint people’s expectations. Is that how you would define your general attitude?

It’s a natural reaction I have. When the first Nekromantik came out it had this strange success, people were demanding Nekromantik 2, and of course it should have been even more gross. To me that just felt so predictable and stupid that we came up with Der Todesking, which everybody was disappointed with in the first place. Later on, we gave them Nekromantik 2, which was also very disappointing because it’s even more romantic than the first one. It’s a natural reaction because I don’t like to be told what to do, in terms of what I’m allowed to do from the censorship boards, but also from the audience (laughs). It’s a childish reaction maybe. Nekromantik 2 is full of jokes about what people expect, this art movie on the ceiling in black and white, it’s all stuff people who were waiting for Nekromantik 2 hated. And only after the film was banned did they try to rethink, and they liked it then. You can never trust the critics or the fans. If you give them what they expect they will tell you that you don’t have any new ideas. If you don’t give them what they expect they have another reason to be disappointed (laughs). But in the long run it’s always more interesting to play around with a concept.

It’s interesting that it seems to define your relationship with both the censors and the fans.

Because to me the so-called artistic freedom is very important. And this freedom can’t be harmed by a fan wanting to have ‘Nekromantik 10’ and also by a guy who says, this tape should be burned. In the end it’s the same for me.

Arrow Video’s limited 3-disc digipak including Blu-ray, DVD and CD soundtrack comes with a bounty of extra features, notably Buttgereit’s short films Hot Love (1985) and Horror Heaven (1984), new documentary Morbid Fascination: The Nekromantik Legacy, a new interview with Buttgereit, as well as a 100-page book featuring articles by David Kerekes, Kier-La Janisse and Linnie Blake.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy