Jörg Buttgereit’s debut feature Nekromantik was quite the cause celebre among horror fans in the late 1980s and early 1990s, initially traded on often impenetrable bootleg tapes, it reputation for being fiercely transgressive preceding it wherever it went. And it retains much of its power to shock and offend all these years later for, despite its technical shortcomings and some terrible acting, there’s an intelligence at work here. A dark, uncomfortable intelligence to be sure, but it’s a more interesting film than might at first meet the eye.
Rob Schmadtke (Daktari Lorenz) works for Joe’s Cleaning Agency as part of a team that turns up and scrapes the body parts off the road after traffic accidents. It suits him, as he’s a secret necrophile and gets off on taking body parts home to the flat he shares with his wife Betty (Beatrice M.), pickling them in jars. Betty is no less perverse, bathing in blood-stained water. Elsewhere, a drunken man accidentally shoots a gardener and dumps the body – which Rob finds and returns home with as an aid to pep up his sex life with Betty. Fashioning an erect penis out of a length of steel pipe and fitting it with a condom, the couple have sex with the corpse, hanging their “partner” up on the wall when they’ve finished with him. But when Rob is fired for always being late, Betty leaves him, taking the corpse with her. In a fit of depression, he bathes in the blood of a cat, visits a cinema showing a horror film and tries to take an overdose. After failing to perform with a prostitute, he kills her and returns home for one last act of perversion, taking his own life in the bloodiest fashion imaginable while masturbating.
Though essentially a home movie (it was shot, like Buttgereit’s earlier short films, on 8mm stock), Buttgereit treats it like a “proper” film, Resources were thin on the ground, but he still tries to get the most out of them. Compare and contrast it with the glut of shot on video monstrosities that trailed in its wake, a cottage industry of German extreme gore films like Andreas Schnaas’ Violent Shit (1989) and its sequels and the films of Olaf Ittenbach (Black Past (1989), The Burning Moon (1992), Premutos: The Fallen Angel (1997) et al) which had very little going for them except a plethora of cheap make-up effects.
Buttgereit doesn’t treat the film for cheap laughs. There’s none of that “it’ll do” attitude you all too often get with ultra-low-budget films. It’s clear that Buttgereit was doing everything he could to make a decent film. Whether he succeeded is up to you, but you have to admire that he tried. There are flaws, some more serious than others. Even at just 70 minutes, there’s a lot of padding between the audacious, deliberately provocative set-pieces – the scene with a man accidentally shooting his neighbour and disposing of the body drags on and on – and be warned that there’s a real, very graphic, next to impossible to watch and impossible to justify scene where a real rabbit is killed and skinned.
The latter feels like a cheap ploy, a moment of opportunism – Buttgereit was able to film a rabbit farmer performing the deed – that Nekromantik didn’t really need. It’s a confrontational enough film already without it. We later get a nasty – though faked – scene involving a cat which serves more of a narrative purpose, but the rabbit skinning seems superfluous, just another provocation in a film already overflowing with them.
Nekromantik is not a pleasant film, full of indelible images that you probably won’t like one bit, but it was never meant to be. For so many reasons, it’s not a film you’d want to watch for fun and if you’re offended by it, that’s exactly what Buttgereit wanted. Buttgereit made the film as a reaction to German film censorship of the time, a period when films were regularly being cut, banned or restricted. But no-one noticed. Initially, the film bypassed the state censors, being distributed by Buttgereit and producer his producer Manfred O. Jelinski independently and the film failed to create the stir that Buttgereit was hoping for. The sequel, Nekromantik 2 (1991), caused him more problems, the police trying to confiscate all prints. It remains banned in countries like Ireland and Australia and was only given an uncut release in the UK in 2014.
It’s not hard to see why. The corpse, dripping in slime and fitted with a fake erect penis, is suitably repellent and is the centrepiece of one of the most alienating sex scenes ever filmed. And there’s the ending, the moment that no-one who has seen the film ever forgets. At the depth of his despair, Rob repairs to his bed, masturbates and stabs himself to death at the point of his graphic ejaculation. All this is undercut with the rabbit skinning now running in reverse though it’s no less disturbing for that.
Stir in a startling dream sequence, visible roots in experimental cinema and an extraordinary score by Hermann Kopp, Daktari Lorenz and John Boy Walton and the result is a disturbing but undeniably compelling film that remains challenging, having lost none of its button-pushing power all these decades later (John Waters, who knows a thing or two about shocking people through film, hailed it “the first ever erotic film for necrophiliacs”). Whether you’ll want to watch it more than once is another matter.
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