Jörg Buttgereit's two movies "Nekromantik" and "Nekromantik 2" will continue to engage and challenge us for a long time to come. Love, death, and sex are humanity's most prevalent topics. Buttgereit intertwines these topics so firmly that his movies, shot entirely on narrow gauge film, were at first categorized as splatter films and subsequently confiscated and banned nationwide. Today they are considered outstanding pieces of art.

In this book six film enthusiasts explain how this controversy played out. Interpretations range from the beginnings of the history of film to today's society with its taboos, possibilities, and mistakes. Buttgereit's movies radically reflect—both humorously and intelligently—what it means to work with the moving image as well as its significance beyond the genre of film.

This book has a cover on each side. You can read it by turning around in English or German.

Jörg Buttgereit (Editor) - Nekromantik
with contributions by Linnie Blake, Christian Keßler, Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, Claus Löser, Johannes Schönherr, Marcus Stiglegger
232 pages, Fotos, Englisch/German
ISBN 978-3-927795-46-4

Nekromantik was one of the last true underground films. A pre-internet flick that made its way around the world via shoddy bootleg videos or through folks like film writer and exhibitionist Jack Stevenson who toured a print in the 1980s. Making one’s way down to the backroom screening room at the Rendezvous on Seattle’s old Film Row was just the way to experience an out-there grainfest like Nekromantik. A small smoky room, curved worn seating next to strangers, and really, something you just had to find, had to discover.

In Martin Schmitz Verlag’s Nekromantik, six German film writers exhume their discoveries as the film unspooled before their virgin eyes. Localizing the responses to Germany creates a more site-specific view of the film, concretizing its nascence to that country with a troubled past and still the producer of the most non-sexual porn available.

Johannes Schoenherr’s sidesplitting piece, “Reality Check—The Gravedigger’s Perspective,” is the most correct American-idiomatic and the most humorous. Completely tossing the film’s plot and characters aside like a shovelful of moist dirt, Schoenherr further scandalizes the actions of the film’s characters with his moribund account of how bodies are planted and exhumed. Marcus Stiglegger, Linnie Blake, and Claus Loser take on more scholarly reportage, while Dietrich Kulbrodt’s essay “Loving Corpses” revels a bit more in the film’s, and Germany’s, excesses, practically rolling around in glee as if the topics were physical piles of gooey warm muck that one could subsume oneself in.

Buttgereit contributes the introduction to the book, which is in both German and English in flip-over style, and includes an amazing collection of unseen stills. It’s rare enough to see an erect penis in any film history book, but to see one with a grimacing blood-coated face erupting in ecstasy, pain and release… that’s why they call them money shots!

Beautifully presented, lavishly illustrated, and thick with informative film history, knowledgeable comparative mirroring, and pitch-black dark humor, Martin Schmitz Verlag’s Nekromantik is a must-belong alongside your Barrel Entertainment releases of the classic films. A priceless addition to any serious horror film fan’s library, and for the closeted corpse lover in us all.

Shade Rupe in Rue Morgue/April 2008