Original title: Mosquito der Schänder

Yugoslavian Marijan Vajda was primarily a director of documentaries and the Swiss-funded Bloodlust was his last film, a curious mix of the sleazy and the arty, based loosely on the crimes of Kuno Hoffman, the so-called “vampire of Nuremberg.” Like the unnamed central character in Vajda’s film, Hoffman was a deaf mute, horribly abused as a child by his alcoholic father and in adulthood a Satanist with a taste for necrophilia, vampirism and cannibalism. Vajda’s screenplay – written under the pseudonym Mario d’Alcala – omits the Satanism but makes great play of the vampirism.

An unnamed young deaf mute man (Werner Pochath, the Austrian actor prerhaps best remembered for his turn in the Dario Argento film Il gatto a nove code/The Cat O’Nine Tails (1971)) is badly beaten, triggering a flashback to his traumatic childhood when he was assaulted by his father and forced to watch (in one of the film’s most disturbing scenes) his sister being sexually molested. The man – who later signs his crime scenes with the graffito Mosquito – is befriended by a kindly old woman (Ellen Umlauf) and her eccentric hippy daughter (Birgit Zamulo) but at work he’s bullied by his fellow accountants. Looking for some kind of human contact, he visits a prostitute but is unable to perform and returns home to his collection of creepy dolls. Becoming increasingly alienated and withdrawn, he develops an obsession with blood and breaks into a funeral home to mutilate corpses, drink their blood and pluck out the odd eyeball or two.

On the surface, Bloodlust is a sleazy psycho drama but it’s rather more than that. It’s beautifully shot (by Norbert Friedländer and David Khan) and features a bonkers but sometimes haunting score (from David Llewellyn), and it’s a more artful film than you might expect. Most of the cast are pretty faceless but Pochath is very good as the tormented Mosquito, though Vajda doesn’t really give his character much of an arc – he graduates from fantasy to, effectively, grave robbing to murder but never gets his moment of redemption – like Hoffman before him he’s arrested and the last we see of him, he’s retreated completely into a dream world where he dances through the forest with the hippy woman.

There are some moments that will leave you deeply furrowed of brow – the scenes with the cynical prostitutes (“how come I get all the ding dongs?”) for example are underscored by sappy romantic pop songs for example. And as gratuitous prostitute-on-prostitute lesbian scenes go, the one featured here really couldn’t be any more egregious. Or any weirder. Nor any noisier come to that. One has to wonder if some of the scenes – Mosquito taking the body of the woman into the woods for a romantic day out for example, or repeated shots of him pootling about town on the smallest, silliest looking scooter you could imagine.

But it’s also a very grim film, full of perplexing and damaged characters, none of them named, all of them varying degrees of troubled. Mosquito’s work colleagues are revolting bullies, no better than he is in many respects, and the spaced-out hippy woman that Mosquito might have stood a chance of a decent relationship with is so far gone she doesn’t realise that having a dance on a rooftop might be a terrible idea.

Mosquito is often referred to elsewhere as a necrophile, but he never has sex with any of his already dead victims, not does he rape anyone despite the original title which translates as Mosquito the Rapist. Indeed he takes little to no interest in sex, consensual or otherwise. For him it’s all about the blood. Bloodlust is a sort of reimagining of elements from Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) via George A. Romero’s Martin (1977). Like the antagonist of Romer’s film, Mosquito is a very modern vampire, using a twin-pronged pipette reminiscent of vampire teeth to get at his victim’s blood. The gore effects representing his depravations aren’t terribly convincing – the corpse make-up is particularly unconvincing – but the grimy, sleazy atmosphere conspires with the low-tech effects to passable effect.

Jorg Buttgereit later cited Bloodlust as a influence on his own necrophile drama, Nekromantik (1987), but while his film attained a degree of cult notoriety, Vajda’s film vanished into semi-obscurity, not helped by shoddy VHS releases of varying degrees of completeness and watchability. More recent blu-ray releases (which do nothing for the shoddy effects) might have come too late to rescue it. It’s not a great film by any means but when it’s not being either deliberately or unintentionally laughable (it’s still hard to work out which is which) it’s morbid atmosphere is impressive and Vajda and Pochath do well to make their disturbed and demented anti-hero strangely likeable – we know he’s a monster but we still hope that he’s going to see the error of his ways and find the simple companionship he’s been searching for. The ending may be downbeat but in its own terms it’s quite devastating.