Wild, Weird and Bloody: The Berlinale Shines a Light on Forgotten German Genre Films of the ’70s
German movies of the 1970s will forever be linked with the New German Cinema movement, the auteur directors — led by the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schl?ndorff — who shook the country out of its postwar stupor. “Papa’s Kino ist tot” (‘Papa’s cinema’s is dead’) was their motto, and they held radical new visions of what movies could do.
But alongside this art house wave, ’70s Germany also was a breeding ground for a cruder, more commercial strain of cinema, one that took inspiration from sexploitation and spaghetti Westerns, biker films and grindhouse horror and grafted it onto the zeitgeist-y themes of political upheaval and sexual liberation. The Berlinale pays tribute to this seldom-seen oeuvre of German genre cinema in its 2025 retrospective, which features 15 titles — cult classics and curios from both East and West Germany — that prove that German film could also be “wild, weird and bloody.”
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“There was a lot of crossover between the auteur cinema and the pure genre films at the time,” says Rainer Rother, curator of the Berlinale’s Retrospective program and the head of Berlin’s Deutsche Kinemathek, the German museum of film and television. “Even the auteur filmmakers themselves — like Alexander Kluge, like Hans W. Gei?end?rfer, like Fassbinder — played with forms, sometimes making films that are clearly intended to be taken as genre movies, as horror, as sci-fi or as exploitation.”
When Fassbinder read Kurt Raab’s script to Tenderness of the Wolves — a serial killer thriller inspired by the real-life case of Fritz Harrmann, (aka the Butcher of Hanover, a child molester with a sideline in vampirism), he suggested his protégé Ulli Lommel direct it as “a combination of Fritz Lang’s M and Hitchcock’s Psycho … with lots of blood.” Lommel obliged. The result, with Raab in the lead, channeling both Peter Lorre and Max Schreck, is a bridge between Weimar-era cinema and Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu and a must for any fan of weirdo horror.
Before his more lauded efforts — the Oscar-nominated The Glass Cell (1977) or the Thomas Mann adaptation The Magic Mountain (1981) — Gei?end?rfer got properly gory with 1970’s Jonathan, a campy but surprisingly political vampire movie about a count with a cult-like group of murderous young followers. The film, still strikingly beautiful to watch — with long artful takes shot by Robby Müller, the late Dutch master who would go on to lens Wim Wenders’ 1984 feature Paris, Texas and Lars von Trier’s 1996 film Breaking the Waves — follows a plucky group of students who plan a revolution against the bloodthirsty count, a monster who literally eats babies and keeps a cache of villagers in his cellar for orgiastic party feasts. QAnon take note.
“It’s a horror film, but it’s elevated by its portrayal of this populist, almost Nazi-like movement,” says R?ther. He sees a link with the political movements of the time, particular the Red Army Faction (RAF), the left-wing terrorist group that declared war on postwar German capitalism and its cadre of old Nazis with their hands still on the levers of power.
Rolf Olsen’s 1972 film Bloody Friday, another of the Retrospective films to enjoy enduring cult status in Germany, draws on some of the same political themes but filters them through the form of the exploitation genre. A heist-gone-wrong movie, it was inspired by a real-life robbery and hostage-taking in Munich. An escaped convict teams up with his Italian buddy and an army deserter to plan a spectacular bank robbery, looting a U.S. military base for the necessary firepower. Things will end badly. Olsen goes full giallo — expect exploding guts, bullet-riddled bodies and one seriously disturbing sexual assault scene — but also manages to squeeze in an almost documentary debate on capital punishment and a broadly sympathetic take on the RAF’s “by any means necessary” approach to revolution.
Roland Klick’s Euro-Western Deadlock (1970), another highlight of this year’s Retrospective program, was intended as an answer to the “anti-audience” films of New German Cinema. It has an appropriately pulpy plot, involving three men in the desert, a suitcase full of money and plenty of guns, but with its psychedelic imagery and kraut-rock soundtrack from avant-garde electronic pioneers Can, the film plays out like an LSD fever dream. El Topo director Alexandro Jodorowsky was a fan, calling Deadlock a “fantastic, bizarre, glowing film.”
Things were a little more upbeat on the other side of the Berlin Wall thanks to the East German censors who kept most of the violence and sex off the screen. But Günter Reisch’s state-approved 1976 farce Carnations in Aspic still managed to slip in some subversive satire in its story of a commercial artist with a lisp (a spry Armin Mueller-Stahl) who is too embarrassed to speak. His superiors, assuming he must be a genius, promote him up the hierarchy. And in the GDR musicals Don’t Cheat, Darling! (1973) and Hat Off When You Kiss (1971), also screening in this year’s Retrospective, there’s a lingering subtext of female empowerment (as well as some snazzy dance numbers).
Germany’s fling with genre movies was a brief one. The 1980s brought a new wave of bigger-budget period, sci-fi and fantasy films — Das Boot, The Name of the Rose, The Neverending Story — and crime stories moved to television, where popular serial formats like Tatort and Polizeiruf 110 sated the audience’s appetite for murder and mayhem. “The small screen became the home for crime,” says Rother. “Every day there’s some German cop, thriller or heist film on TV. The funding situation also changed, with genre material having a hard time getting financed.”
Compared to New German Cinema and the films of Fassbinder, Herzog and Wenders, the influence of Germany’s down-and-dirty genre flicks has been more limited. But Rother sees a link between these ’70s pulp classics and the work of contemporary filmmakers like Christian Petzold (Yella, Phoenix), Thomas Aslan (Dealer, Scorched Earth) or Christoph Hochh?usler (Till the End of the Night, The City Below), German directors twisting B-movie genres into new, more cerebral forms. He sees echoes of Klaus Lemke’s outsider cinema — Lemke’s Hamburg 1972 biker-gang classic Rocker is screening in the Berlinale Retrospective — in the movies of prolific German auteur Dominik Graf (Fabian: Going to the Dogs).
“These were outsider filmmakers making outsider, maverick movies, often shot quick and dirty but with an incredible degree of creative freedom,” says Rother. “It’s that approach — that outsider perspective as much as the films themselves — that directors like Graf find so exciting.”
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