Page 27 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

While many of the directors and icons profiled in this volume have their names firmly anchored
within a nationally specific context, Brian Yuzna offers a fascinating example of an American director
who has relocated to Europe because of the creative freedom offered to exploitation and underground
cinema within its borders. The director, famed for productions such as Society and The Dentist, is
profiled in Xavier Mendik's chapter, 'Trans-European Excess: An Interview with Brian Yuzna'.
Here, the filmmaker explains the motivations behind his relocation to Spain to launch the Fantastic
Factory with leading producer Julio Fernandez. The Fantastic Factory can basically be defined as
a 'horror Hollywood' located in Barcelona. The production house aims to draw on leading genre
talent from across the world, while maintaining the nationally specific traditions of Spanish cinema.
As an American director whose output has been significantly influenced by European art and genre
cinema, Yuzna sees the Fantastic Factory as encompassing the business acumen of the LA approach
to filmmaking, while maintaining the concept of creative integrity classically afforded to European
auteurs. In the interview, Yuzna explains how this appeal to two very different filmmaking traditions
has affected the structure of recent releases such as Faust and Arachnid. Beyond an examination of his
duel European and American influences, this chapter also considers themes of sexuality, perversion
and immorality that permeate the director's work, while some of the issues surrounding female
depictions within the horror genre are also discussed. The chapter concludes with Mendik providing
an update of the Fantastic Factory's Spanish progress since the interview was first conducted.
While Brian Yuzna's trans-national images of horror and excess often court controversy, some
critics would argue that they are tame in comparison with the cinema ofJorg Buttgereit. This director
is the focus of Linnie Blake's chapter 'Jorg Buttgereit's Nekromantiks: Things to do in Germany with
the Dead'. Although frequently criticised and censored for producing films that conflate bizarre sexual
practices with extreme depictions of the dead body, Blake argues that works such as Nekromantik and
Schramm contain an edgy, experimental feel that reveals Buttgereit's roots in avant-garde rather than
horror filmmaking. Central to her analysis, is the claim that while the directors gore epics remain
outlandish and unsettling, they actually represent an extension of the more legitimate traditions of
New German Cinema dominant in the 1960s and 1970s. As embodied by directors such as Werner
Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, this film movement sought to bind documentary and
experimental film techniques to an examination of the alienated and desolate protagonists inhabiting
the post-1945 German landscape. For Blake, it is these methods as well as the movements focus on
the repression and sublimation of guilt and trauma relating to Getmany's Nazi past that reappear in a
brutal form in the films of Jorg Buttgereit. From his early shorts combining punk and Nazi imagery,
to later works like Nekromantik (where a necrophile couple's activity frequently evokes concentration
camp iconography), Blake argues that Buttgereit is not only digging up corpses, but the memories of
a hideous past not fully acknowledged by the German nation.
As a companion piece to the above article, the controversial Jorg Buttgereit reveals the extent
to which his works have become a crucial index to past issues of national and political significance.
This is indicated in Marcelle Perks' article, A Very German Post-mortem: Jorg Buttgereit and C o -
Writer/Assistant Director Franz Rodenkirchen Speak', which was specially prepared for inclusion
in this volume. The interview explores a number of themes in the director's work, including his
preoccupation with the mechanics of necrophilia, as well as his fascination with the cult of the serial

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