10 great German horror films

The history of German horror cinema is a U-shaped curve. For it peaked right at its beginning, with silent expressionist works like Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920) and F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) laying down monstrous tropes, perverse psychopathologies and uncanny stylisations that would define the nascent genre.

Yet after the rise of Nazism, there was little room, or need, for horror’s fictions in a state quick to condemn any art deemed degenerate. Only one horror film – Arthur Robison’s The Student of Prague (1935) – was produced during Hitler’s regime. Conversely, as Germany emerged from the guilt and shame of the Third Reich, there was little taste for horror. Despite occasional forays into exploitation cinema over the following decades, horror remained scarce.

In 1979 Werner Herzog, whose Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) was at least horror adjacent, released Nosferatu the Vampyre, remaking Murnau’s classic, while reinstating character names from Bram Stoker’s now copyright-free novel Dracula (1897), and radically changing the ending. Here Klaus Kinski’s melancholic Dracula craves mortality, while Isabelle Adjani’s Lucy perversely enjoys his predation, Walter Ladengast’s van Helsing proves useless, and Bruno Ganz’s Jonathan Harker himself becomes a questing nosferatu. Herzog’s film remade the genre’s past, reinventing it for different values, sensibilities and audiences. 

German genre would reemerge in an extreme form as part of the underground horror movement of the 1980s and 90s, and has been respectably resurrected in the new millennium.

Director: Robert Wiene

Robert Wiene’s feature is by no means the first German horror feature – in fact Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s The Golem: How He Came into the World, released later in the same year as Caligari, was the prequel to Wegener’s now lost The Golem from 1915. Yet the sets and painted backgrounds of Wiene’s small-town murder mystery, all neurotic angularity and unnaturalistic shadows, epitomise the mannered expressionism that would permeate German horror of the 1920s, while also hinting from the outset that this is all a subjectified nightmare in a damaged brain.

The stylised chiaroscuro would influence not just the next decade’s German horror, but the film noir of the 1940s and 1950s, while its mesmeric themes and twist ending would find their ways into films as otherwise varied as Herschell Gordon Lewis’ The Wizard of Gore (1970), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure (1997) and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010).

Director: Fritz Lang

Not just Fritz Lang’s first talkie but the first ever feature to focus on a serial killer’s modus operandi and eventual unraveling, M follows compulsive psychopath Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) – loosely composited from several real-life German pattern murderers. Beyond the pale yet oddly sympathetic, Beckert is a child-killing monster – but in this negative city symphony, Beckert’s cause célèbre exposes a grotesque monstrousness in multiple layers of society, and puts all of Weimar Berlin on literal trial (in a kangaroo court). For here the criminal demi-monde, the police and press, and the underclass of mendicants and invalids, are all part of the corrupt culture from which this killer has emerged.

Lang’s personal favourite of his own features would be a considerable influence on the urban shadows of film noir, and on later German serial killer films such as Ulli Lommel’s The Tenderness of Wolves (1973) and Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove (2019).

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

Murnau’s Nosferatu and Herzog’s remake will always be Germany’s most famous vampire films, but the best is this extremely loose adaptation of two stories from Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 horror collection In a Glass Darkly. As its German subtitle (‘The Dream of Allan Gray’) makes plain, this is an oneiric feature, showing the dreams of an impressionable bookish man, played by Julian West, fallen asleep at an inn, and only ever seen again to reawaken within his dream.

In keeping with his surname, Gray occupies a twilit area between reality and its reflection, between life and death, between silence and sound (this was Carl Theodor Dreyer’s first ‘talkie’, with unsettling post-synchronised dialogue). Vampyr is a collection of eerie, uncanny scenarios, full of night terrors, narrative discontinuities and surreal shadow play. Here irrationality rules over all, even as the horrors of death, brother of sleep, constantly threaten to cross the threshold.

Director: Hans W. Geissendörfer

Featuring a funky contemporary score with electric guitar but set in a 19th-century alternate-universe Germany, writer/director Hans W. Geissendörfer’s debut may feature a few ‘quotes’ from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but is no straight adaptation, and is as much a folk horror, with cinematographer Robby Müller’s slow tracking shots taking in the desperate rituals of a rural community caught in apocalypse. Here the count (Paul Albert Krumm), his three brides, an assortment of nobles and mesmeric dancing girls together form a vampiric elite who feed off the local villagers.

Jonathan (Jürgen Jung) may not ultimately succeed in his reconnaissance mission to the castle, but there will nonetheless be a violent revolution against these bloodsuckers. With its singing witch, travelling trickster and public sex ceremonies, this is a genuinely strange horror, reinventing myth, reversing history and fancifully undoing the more recent failure of the German citizenry to rise up against their Nazi oppressors.

Director: Eckhart Schmidt

Some 18 years before Eminem released ‘Stan’, Eckhart Schmidt was already focusing on crazed fanaticism in his film adaptation of his own novel. If the camera uncomfortably adores schoolgirl Simone (Désirée Nosbusch), closely tracking her every blank-faced move even as a number of male characters objectify her with their own leering interest, she reserves a similar gaze for Gary Numan-esque electropop singer ‘R’ (Bodo Staiger).

When Simone runs away from home to Munich and actually meets her idol, the realisation of her dreams seems more like paedophilic exploitation and abuse on his part – but despite his merely passing interest in her, Simone will find one or two ways to ensure that her communion with him lasts forever. Schmidt’s slowburn study in stardom and sociopathy ends up as horror, while also engaging with national politics by equating (via a poster) Simone’s fandom with the adulation of the German populace for Hitler.

Director: Jörg Buttgereit

In the late 80s and 90s, when horror was still on the outer margins of Germany’s cinematic output, ultra-low budget underground horror dealt in culturally taboo subject matter. This loose movement is associated with directors Jörg Buttgereit, Andreas Schnaas, Timo Rose, Olaf Ittenbach and early Uwe Boll, and would, for all its transgressive content, fuel the eventual return of mainstream horror to Germany.

Concerned with an accident cleaner (Bernd Daktari Lorenz) who takes his work home with him, only to find that his girlfriend (Beatrice Manowski), like himself, prefers the dead to the living, Buttgereit’s feature debut is a scandalously scuzzy Liebestod. Scenes of gory death, casual murder, animal cruelty, hilariously soft-focus necrophilia and atrocious acting are offset by metacinematic moments focused on a sleazy slasher film’s amused, indifferent audience. For here everyone’s – including the viewers’ – perverse desires and masturbatory fantasies risk ending up disinterred as fuel for someone else’s.

Director: Christian Alvart

“What did you expect, Hannibal Lecter?”, Gabriel Engel (André Hennicke) asks Michael Martens (Wotan Wilke Möhring) some way into Christian Alvart’s bleak grand guignol. The devout rural police chief Michael is in Berlin to ask Gabriel about the murder of a local girl, but in his interviews with this convicted killer of boys, he will find his views being manipulated and his faith tested, as evil emerges closer to home.

Like Robert Schwentke’s Tattoo (2002), Alvart’s film is heavily influenced by Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and David Fincher’s Se7en (1995) – although Gabriel’s opening words not only acknowledge but also interrogate such influence. For much as Michael’s dog Schimanski shares its name with a major character from the long-running German TV series Tatort, Antibodies brings a decidedly German flavour to its Hollywood-style thrills, while interweaving into its twisty plot the certainties of Catholicism and the moral horror of doubt.

Director: Dennis Gansel

Having already starred in Christian Petzold’s Yella (2007) – which reimagined Herk Harvey’s psychological horror Carnival of Souls (1962) to bridge East-West divisions in a contemporary, reunified Germany – Nina Hoss plays a Berlin-based vampire in Dennis Gansel’s feature. Her Louise is so old that one (Jennifer Ulrich) of the companions that she turned was then an actress in the silent era, around the time that the original Nosferatu was made – which is to say that these bloodsuckers ring the changes on a mythology that has defined German horror since its earliest days. They are an all-female crew of nocturnal lesbian hedonists, even if the heterosexuality of their latest convert Lena (Karoline Herfurth) threatens to change their misandrist ethos. And here a change can last a very long time.

Shifting the themes of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla to modern-day Germany, Gansel’s film traces old-world bloodlines into a postmodern age.

Director: Till Kleinert

If a samurai and his razor-sharp katana seem entirely out of place in a German woodland village near the eastern border, then Till Keinert’s feature is precisely about being a misfit surrounded by small-town values. Much like the real wolf circling the community and being fed rather than hunted by local policeman Jakob (Michel Diercks), a peculiar person nicknamed ‘Lonely Wolf’ (Pit Bukowski) lives on the margins, sports a woman’s dress and sword, and is this very night about to slash his way through conformity. Jakob, both frightened and fascinated, follows this man on his rampage, unsure whether to repress his licentious onslaught or to join his shameless dance.

Kleinert’s tense, at times surreal psychodrama is a queer retelling of both the werewolf mythos and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as Jakob struggles not just with the lonely wolf, but with his own closeted identity.

Director: Michael Venus

Michael Venus’s ghost story opens with a mother and a daughter playing a dreamy game of Jenga that establishes the film’s key metaphor: a future being built on the shaky foundations of the past. After Marlene (Sandra Hüller) is drawn by recurring nightmares to a small-town, off-season hotel and falls into a coma there, her daughter Mona (Gro Swantje Kohlhof) comes to investigate this place of mysteries, and finds long-buried family history.

Sleep evokes Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and Christophe Gans’ Silent Hill (2006) to tell a very local tale of both dormant Nazism and revenant revenge against the sins of Germany’s history. Here the town is a microcosm of embedded, errant patriarchy on a national scale – and this, it seems, can only be toppled by a new generation of young women (and the ghost of an older one) unafraid to resist the resurgent male oppression of the fatherland.

Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre is released on BFI 4K UHD, Blu-ray and digital from 22 September.