People walked out this month’s Horror Movie Night with their heads hung a little low. Almost like they felt a bit uncomfortable making eye contact after what we had all shared on Monday night in that theater. It was a night that will not soon be forgotten by those who were there. Good would be far from an accurate description of writer/director Jörg Buttgereit‘s 1987’s Nekromantik and its 1991 sequel Nekromantik 2. Mesmerizing would be a better description. You just couldn’t look away.
If you have never seen this pair of films before this was the way to see them. In a theater with a group of people watching together like particular scenes in each movie where a theater full of people do just that, watch a movie. In the first film they watched a bad horror movie where just a the killer was starting to kill the girl, the audience started making out. In the second film, the audience was watching an art film of a naked man and woman eating soft boiled eggs as he tells her about various birds. Both films had no shortage of seemingly pointless scenes that went on forever and very often did not include any dead people of living people having sex with them.
That not to say there wasn’t any necrophilia because there definitely was. Especially in the second film. However, as gross out as some of those moments were, nothing made the audience cover their eyes more than the film in the middle of the first movie of the real slaughtering and dressing of a rabbit which was topped by the video of a young dead seal being butchered. One of the weirder moments of the night was the musical number in the middle of the second film. We have no idea what she was singing about because unlike the rest of these German made films, there were no subtitles during the song.
If you missed out on this event I feel sorry for you. I don’t recommend watching these on your own at home because I feel the only true way to “appreciate” this is in a theater. Maybe if enough of you who missed it this time demand it, we can bring it back again in the future. I know I might just need to see these again to make sure I saw what I saw.
Join next month on Monday September 24th for a major change of pace with director Robert Wise‘s 1963 classic The Haunting.
