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Doing the dead >> Jörg Buttgereit brings his cult oddity Nekromantik to Fantasia '99
by MATTHEW HAYS
"Disgusting?!" says Buttgereit, responding with surprise to my description of the scene. "But it's presented in a very romantic way. The film is called Nekromantik," he says, emphasizing the title's final three syllables. "The idea was to have the film from the point of view of the main characters. And they think it's a beautiful thing. I decided to present it in such a way that it would be a normal romantic situation, with piano music and a soft screen." The corpse in the love scene is a testimony to Buttgereit's commitment and ingenuity; it was a prop he created out of various stuff at a cost of about $100. It looks amazingly real. But another scene in the film was included precisely because he wanted horror buffs to know it was real. A rabbit is skinned at one point as part of a flashback sequence. "Some people have fainted when they watch that scene. Horror fans say they like horror because of the effects. But with this scene, they didn't have that excuse any more. You have to watch this kind of stuff if you eat meat." Buttgereit reports that the making of Nekromantik didn't involve any fears of censorship. The German government allows for a loophole for filmmakers; producers can claim "free self-control," which, as Buttgereit explains it, means you announce that you're going to be making an 18-plus movie (the most restricted rating) and the censorship board leaves you alone from the get-go. "Nobody had ever used it before, but we knew we were going to be making a horror movie, so we went for it." The film was widely censored in other places, in particular Norway, where prints were confiscated. (And Buttgereit did face German censorship later with his 1991 sequel Nekromantik 2.) Critical response to Nekromantik was mixed, though many got Buttgereit's effort to collapse B-movie horror motifs with arthouse aspirations. Since then, the film has been playing somewhere on the rep or fest circuit. And what did Buttgereit think of Canada's own cinematic meditation on necrophilia, 1997's Kissed? "I liked it. When she's burying the animals, that's quite touching. Kissed is sort of the girlie version of my movie."
Nekromantik screens as part of Fantasia on Friday, August 6, at 11:55pm at the Impérial
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The clean-cut-appearing Jörg Buttgereit isn't necessarily the sort of person you'd expect to be behind Nekromantik, the no-budget movie which he made in his native Germany. The 1987 film, which has attained legendary cult status worldwide, involves a young man who finds great pleasure in his work--picking up body parts on the road after gruesome car accidents. His live-in girlfriend is particularly thrilled when he arrives home one day with (joy!) a complete corpse. The love scene that follows, in which the couple engage in a threesome with the corpse, is truly one of the most stomach-churning I've ever witnessed.