Today’s Jorg Buttgereit’s Birth­day, and we cel­e­brate by revis­it­ing  two of his great classics.…

With Nekro­man­tik, Jörg Buttgereit mixes cheap gore, trans­gres­sive imagery, and cos­mic dread into a cult-classic exam­i­na­tion of sex, death, and bore­dom among the youth of pre-reunification Ger­many. Pas­sive, blank-faced Rob (Dak­tari Lorenz) spends his days col­lect­ing human road­kill from the side of the Auto­bahn and his nights enact­ing a qui­etly macabre domes­tic­ity with girl­friend Betty (Beat­rice Manowski, cred­ited here as Beat­rice M.) in their autopsy/industrial/Nazi-themed apartment.

Rob is a dis­turbed morgue atten­dant who depends on his job for more than a pay­check. His girl­friend Betty loves him madly. When a cadav­er­ous third fills out a ménage à trois from beyond the grave, the mad­ness pro­pels Nekro­man­tik to its ghastly, razor-edged con­clu­sion! Oddly though this is s love story too. Fea­tur­ing some of the dark­est, most stom­ach churn­ing scenes ever com­mit­ted to cel­lu­loid, direc­tor Jorg Buttgereit’s Nekro­man­tik has been lauded by crit­ics as the first post-modern hor­ror film. But to hard­core gore fans it’s much, much more. A care­fully crafted tale, throb­bing with sick honesty-never cut­ting from per­ver­sity. This is almost the real thing.

One day Rob delights Betty by bring­ing home a decom­posed corpse dredged from a swampy road­side lagoon; with a sawed-off bed­post in place of its rot­ted gen­i­talia, the body serves alter­nately as a vile wall dec­o­ra­tion and the third mem­ber of a grotesque and quite graphic ménage à trois. When Rob loses his job, mate­r­ial girl Betty hoofs it, and her divorce set­tle­ment includes the couple’s favorite sex aid. An alien­ated Rob soon turns to hor­ror movies, ani­mal tor­ture, pros­ti­tutes, and grave­yard sex in his quest to find the unique com­bi­na­tion of utter degra­da­tion and total accep­tance he shared with his one true necrophile love.

Mean­while, the haunt­ing image of a rab­bit being skinned plays like a car­toon in the young man’s imag­i­na­tion, per­haps a child­hood mem­ory, per­haps an exis­ten­tial dream. Ulti­mately, this slaugh­ter­house motif leads Rob to enact a painfully final solu­tion to his deadly eroti­cism; his jour­ney would nev­er­the­less con­tinue in Buttgereit’s Nekro­man­tik 2 a few years later. Although it received its Ger­man pre­miere in 1988, work on Nekro­man­tik started in late 1986, when Buttgereit, the vet­eran of sev­eral shorts, began fash­ion­ing the corpse that would fig­ure so heav­ily in the story; the direc­tor knew that with­out a realistic-looking prop, the project wouldn’t be worth film­ing in the first place.

As Nekromantik’s cult fol­low­ing grew slowly in Ger­many, then abroad, rumors abounded that the film­mak­ers had used actual dead bod­ies dur­ing the shoot. In fact, the film’s main corpse was largely syn­thetic, although real pig eyes from a slaugh­ter­house filled its sock­ets — and, in some scenes, the char­ac­ters’ mouths. Manowski would go on to appear in Wim Wen­ders’ Wings of Desire, while composer/co-star Lorenz would largely give up act­ing in favor of his musi­cal activ­i­ties, which included sev­eral more col­lab­o­ra­tions with Buttgereit.

Der Tode­sk­ing (aka The Death King) is a 1989 Ger­man hor­ror film directed by Jörg Buttgereit. This exper­i­men­tal style movie which does not use cen­tral char­ac­ters explores the topic of sui­cide and vio­lent death in the form of seven episodes, each one attrib­uted to one day of the week. These episodes are enframed by the vision of a human body, slowly rot­ting dur­ing the course of the movie.