Tag Archives: German Cinema

The 1964 film Der Hexer, known in the US as The Mysterious Magician, is slightly different in structure than the usual German Kriminalfilm of the era. Often times these Edgar Wallace story adaptations include a title referencing the antagonist, usually ...

While there are a few subgenres adjacent to the horror film that have become beloved over the years—such as nunsploitation, poliziotteschi, or women in prison films—one of the few holdouts that still seems strangely neglected is the German krimi. The ...

For my money, director Jess Franco is the best and most prolific adapter of what I would call Sadeian cinema; he did borrow directly from the Marquis de Sade’s texts from time to time, but even when his loose plots ...

Greatest director of all time (fight me) Rainer Werner Fassbinder covered a range of genres throughout his absurdly prolific career, from science fiction and western to crime film and the melodrama he loved so much, but his overarching theme was ...

Over the last couple of years, Kino Lorber have been resolutely releasing all of Fritz Lang’s early silent films on DVD and then Blu-ray, adding some important titles to the home video market. But their latest Lang offering—a 12-disc Blu-ray ...

The January 1919 death of socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg is often read by postwar historians as a sort of turning point in the Weimar Republic, a symbolic line drawn in the sand between a possible Communist future in Germany and ...

Generally remembered for his contributions to cinematic science fiction, crime, and horror, as well as film noir, with films like Metropolis (1927), M (1931), Ministry of Fear (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), and more, director Fritz Lang’s early silent film titles ...

The pathology of serial murder has always been tricky in horror cinema. Plenty of films have documented and displayed the easiest aspects, namely the killings themselves, but fewer have examined the real meat of the matter. Which are the inner ...

Just before tackling his sci-fi epic, Frau in Mond (1929) aka Woman in the Moon, which I wrote about recently, and effectively ending his early career for UFA in Germany with films like the masterpieces M (1931) and The Testament ...

By 1929, director Fritz Lang was winding towards the end of his prolific period of silent filmmaking for UFA in the Weimar Republic. He had already explored a number of genres, including fantasy (Halbblut, Der müde Tod, and Die Nibelungen), ...