Not your typical horror flick, NEKROMANTIK is pretty strong stuff. I stumbled upon it a while back at a video store which contained its fair share of schlock, took it home, watched it, and thought to myself that this is one sick puppy of a movie; I then sought out a copy and added it to my video collection (much of which consists of "B"/exploitation/horror/independent movies). I have periodically shown NEKROMANTIK to friends and their reactions have ranged from nervous laughter to outright disgust; no one has ever been indifferent.
Somewhere deep in this flick lies what I believe is a message. Recall the scene where Bob is watching television, and the psychiatrist is being interviewed and is taking about aversion to death being a conditioned response? NEKROMANTIK, while on the one hand, an exercise in grotesquery, is also thus an anti-aesthetic reaction against the conditioning of culture and culture's stifling effects. Not that many of us would ever want to f*** a corpse, of course, even in the name of subverting propriety or a philosophy of romanticism.
Beyond this, NEKROMATIK strikes me as a play on nightmare imagery, effectively rendered.
The Germans, with their expressionism, certainly must be credited with having invented the horror film genre, going back to the silent film era and films like NOSFERATU and FAUST. Jorg Buttgereit, a contemporary German maverick filmmaker, here moves the genre forward.
Somewhere deep in this flick lies what I believe is a message. Recall the scene where Bob is watching television, and the psychiatrist is being interviewed and is taking about aversion to death being a conditioned response? NEKROMANTIK, while on the one hand, an exercise in grotesquery, is also thus an anti-aesthetic reaction against the conditioning of culture and culture's stifling effects. Not that many of us would ever want to f*** a corpse, of course, even in the name of subverting propriety or a philosophy of romanticism.
Beyond this, NEKROMATIK strikes me as a play on nightmare imagery, effectively rendered.
The Germans, with their expressionism, certainly must be credited with having invented the horror film genre, going back to the silent film era and films like NOSFERATU and FAUST. Jorg Buttgereit, a contemporary German maverick filmmaker, here moves the genre forward.