Horrors: The Cremator


Last week's film (Witches' Hammer) was so resolutely bleak that one of my housemates had to retreat to a comic novel and not talk to other human beings after it. Therefore, this week things take a turn for the lighter, with Juraj Herz's The Cremator (1968). With the story of an obsessed cremator who gets involved with the Nazis. OK, lighter is the wrong word. This is a nasty, dark, brutally surreal, nightmare of a film. But in its ugly stew of psychotic expressionist Caligari reloaded horror, there is an undeniable comic streak, comedy blacker than the night. This is required viewing, the unsettling mixture of bad taste with an evil world against which bad taste may be our only antidote.

Thursday, 8:30, the big projector screen at my house.

2 comments:

owen hatherley said...

Excellent, I LOVE this film. Will you be posting about it at some point?

ECW said...

Yeah, writing something on it today. It is such a stunning, hypnotic, obscene piece of brilliance.