Page 225 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

echo this sense of fragmentation. There is no backstory, as if the characters have no history, and often
little dialogue, no explanation for why these characters do the things they do. Disturbing issues simply
have to be dealt with; thus, dead bodies are sought, washed and prepared.
The relationship between victim and perpetrator is also blurred; Lothar Schramm is both a serial
killer and a potential saviour for Marianne (Monika M.) in Schramm. People voluntarily choose to
commit 'unnatural' acts in Der Todesking and the Nekromantik films. Necrophilia is, confusingly, a
process that involves both mutilation and deification. The killers/defilers are robbed of traditional
notions of overriding desire and evil potency; the films abound with castration and sexual dysfunction
images; attempts at pleasure are banal and futile. The killers/necrophiles are an antithesis of the
perverse power base represented by the SS. Are they symbolic perhaps of Germans confronting their
unarticulated past? The films' reliance on visual images also forces the viewer to confront their own
desire for wanting to watch such material. Are we, like the female video viewers in Nekromantik II,
piilty too?

Marcelle Perks: Why do you like to show male counterparts that are inadequate?
Franz Rodenkirchen: Good question, but difficult to answer because we did not really think
ot them as being inadequate in that sense; they were troubled, peculiar characters, but inadequate in
terms of what? Monika M. is so much taller than her leads because we always rooted a lot stronger for
the women in the films. It was agreed without even talking about it much that the women were the
strong ones in the movies. It just happened the people we approached were mostly friends and the
ones we deemed suitable all happened to be that way [short, dark-haired]. Most horror films aren't
like that, they have a strong male hero who saves the day, but that was never the idea. This was all
about people who are troubled from the start. They were not meant to experience a victorious ending.
It was more like them preferring to go down the path thay had chosen or fate took them.
Lots of details in Nekromantik are unrealistic, most necrophiles don't use a decayed corpse.
We departed from reality with the first shot basically. There could never be anything like Joe's
street-cleaning agency. That's completely fictitious and we knew it. If you enter into a very specific
world which is not really the realistic world, but a kind of rendering of an impression of a world,
you can start in determining the hows and why of this world. After Joe's street-cleaning agency it was
not a problem to have a corpse that was so old. The main reason was that Jorg thought that it looked
better and we didn't have to use an actor!
The endings of Nekromantik 1 and 2 are dependant on shock. With Schramm you start at the end and
Der Todesking has a different structure. Was this more complicated to write?
With Schramm we had a role model for that. A movie both Jorg and I really love is the French
movie Les Choses de la vie (Claude Sautet, 1969). This starts with an automobile accident where the
driver basically dies and is lying there in the grass remembering his last weeks and months. So we
just adopted that structure and then we felt free to play with it as long as we knew that we have this
point to come back to. Actually, what we had to do was compose the short pieces and then think of
a structure to connect it.
Another recurrent theme — bodies wrapped in plastic or wearing yellow gloves or boots.
Firstly, it is a really household thing which underlines the common aspect of it, we also wanted to

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