Another Kind of German Horror Ban

It’s getting terribly tricky to make horror films in Germany these days.

Fresh on the heels of enacting new restrictions that have resulted in the banning of extreme films such as Hostel, the courts are now having a go at a 2006 film released in Germany as Rohtenburg.

The movie, also known as Grimm Love, currently is working the film festival circuit, with a recent showing at the Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

“Aha,” I hear you say. “It’s a gay-themed film, hence the problem. Bloody closed-minded Europeans.”

Not so fast. The problem is much more interesting.

According to the Frankfurt Regional Court, Rohtenburg, which is about a man who kills and eats a voluntary victim, appears based on the real-life 2001 crime of German Armin Meiwes, who courted his victim online. (Damned Internet!) According to Meiwes, the movie (you’re going to love this) infringed upon his “personality rights,” since the picture is so-clearly about him.

The usual sturm und drang about censorship and killers’ rights aside, I must admit that I probably never would’ve heard of this film had it not been for this bit of legal music hall. What’s more, I never would’ve known that our Felicity, Keri Russell, has actually wound up in a proper horror film – a German one, no less. Thank you, German legal system. Now I’m gonna have to go out and see this movie for sure!

Germany’s British Import: The ‘Video Nasties’ Ban

Occasionally something happens in the world of horror that sends me scurrying back to what I’ve already written of The New Horror Handbook to make changes to ensure the finished text, when it finally goes to press, will be as up-to-date as possible. Usually this is a positive thing — the chapter on the recent French masterpiece Inside, for example. Unfortunately, it’s not always that pleasant.

Earlier this month, Eli Roth posted this entry to his MySpace blog, highlighting new regulations that went into effect in Germany on June 10th. The uncut DVD of his Hostel Part II, along with many other films, were declared illegal. The picture he paints of video stores being raided and DVDs being removed from shelves is as deeply disturbing for a genre that celebrates transgression as it is hauntingly familiar to fans with long memories.

In the 1980s it was Great Britain that turned on its own citizens, raided video shops and threw their video sellers into chokey for no better reason than that they rented or sold any of more than 70 movies to another member of the public. Here are some of those sins against cinema that could’ve driven you bankrupt if you were unlucky enough to be a video store owner at the time:

• Fulci’s The Beyond
• The Evil Dead
• The Funhouse (!!!)
• Dario Argento’s Inferno

Sure, there were also some pretty disturbing films that were also targeted, but it’s all rather beside the point. (Search out a copy of See No Evil by David Kerekes & David Slater for an excellent look at this period of British history.)

Setting aside all of the usual arguments against censorship (including the observation that the intelligence of decisions is inversely proportional to the number of people involved in making them, e.g. governments), there remains one very large one. And it has nothing to do with the right to see stage blood.

Societies that restrict expression, both individual and in the arts, almost always stagnate – they stop moving forward, stop innovating. This is as true of the societies that breed terrorists who aim to create a utopian society crushed beneath a single religious ideal as it was of the Germany of the 1930s, and onwards back into history.

No, horror films do not guarantee social growth. But transgressive art and ideas keep the minds of their audience questioning, fertile. Take a look at the headlines, at the quotes from warring factions that seem to float over one another without ever maturing beyond simple schoolyard tuants, and tell me the answer to it all is to allow yet more minds to go fallow for want of challenge and use.

Bouncy Banality of Evil

We'll have a proper New Horror Handbook entry coming up later this week. In the meantime, we just had to share with you what is reputed to be a recruitment video from the Aum Shinrikyo cult that attacked Japan's subway system with sarin gas in 1995. Might want to pay a bit more attention to those anime your kids spend hours at a time watching.