The Death King

Infamous primarily on the strength of his shocking 1987 debut feature Nekromantik, German director Jörg Buttgereit was born to make horror films. His grandmother bought him horror trading cards while he was a kindergartner in Berlin, and for his first communion gift, he received a Super-8 camera. At age 14, he made his first short films, and by the time he was 19, the future enfant terrible of the German underground was already creating controversy by showing concentration camp footage with his questionable 1982 short Blutige Exzesse im Fuhrerbunker. For the next several years, Buttgereit honed his talent with a series of increasingly disturbing shorts, picking up what would form the core of his repertory company (Daktari Lorenz, Manfred O. Jelinski, Beatrice M., Franz Rodenkirchen, and others) along the way. Then came Nekromantik, an uncompromisingly grim and savagely appalling study of an Autobahn worker (Lorenz) whose progressive mental collapse leads to grave robbing, necrophilia, and a final ghastly act of suicidal masturbation which became the genre’s most talked-about gross-out scene for nearly a decade. After the less caustic Der Todesking and the disappointing Nekromantik 2, it was a generally held opinion that Buttgereit would never match the ferocious audacity of his debut. Then came 1993’s Schramm, and such premature dismissals were quickly laid to rest. The obsessively claustrophobic study of a necrophilic serial killer (Florian Koerner von Gustorf) who nails his penis to a table and fantasizes vaginal monsters while he isn’t sodomizing nude corpses, Schramm instantly reinvigorated the ebbing Buttgereit cult, solidifying the young director’s reputation as one of the few genuinely disturbing voices in contemporary graphic horror. —allmovie guide