Postwar German Cinema and the Horror Film - Scarecrow Press

xiv Steffen Hantke
lacking in examples to illustrate the non-existence of postwar German horror
film, though every single example he mentions seems to be “almost,” or
“barely,” or only “somewhat” appropriate. Gruenberger resolves this contradiction
as a matter of irreconcilable categories: there are authentic horror films on
the one hand and inauthentic imitations on the other (e.g. the series of films
based on novels by Edgar Wallace, popular in the 1960s); there is the absence of
a genre and the presence of individual films as “oddities” or categoric anomalies
(e.g. sexploitation films like Spider Island); and there is the difference between
what academic critics and what fans would consider a genuine horror film (e.g.
the low- or no-budget films of Jörg Buttgereit and filmmakers like him). As in
Hake’s account, the disavowal of the existence of horror film is coupled with the
assignment of individual films and filmmakers to other cinematic genres and
categories. Again, horror film as a genre is written out of the historical record of
postwar German film.
In order to suggest not empirical reliability but an interpretive mechanism,
I have deliberately used the term “disavowal” in my discussion of these critical
sources and their description of the conspicuous absence of the horror film from
postwar German cinema. That is to say, an argument could be made that the
non-existence of horror film in postwar Germany is the product of a rhetorical
and argumentative strategy invested in ideological concerns about historical
continuity, about the artistic and political integrity of postwar German cinema,
and about the policing of the boundary between serious auteurist filmmaking on
the one hand and light entertainment on the other. In order to create the space for
an alternative reading, let me go back and point out the traces that interpretive
choices have left on each of the constitutive elements of the larger argument.
In regard to the crucial importance of prewar German film to the development
of the horror genre, almost all of the critics I have quoted earlier express
concerns about the use of the term “genre.” A sense of unease prevails in these
discussions regarding the generic status of the canonical German horror films of
the Weimar period. Mark Jancovich, one of the critics I cited earlier, registers
this unease as a general concern with the “constructedness” of any history of the
horror film, cautioning his readers that his own account “should not be seen as
the history, but only as a history” (3). Instead of claiming that his own version of
cinematic history is any more valid than any other historian’s, he points to the
difference between the “sense of how academics have understood that history”
(2) and how fans might construe such a history.
Peter Hutchings extends the range of this argument by acknowledging that
genre plays a role both not only in the consumption of films but also in their
production and distribution. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu (1922)
were not “produced [or] originally marketed as horror films but instead as ‘art
movies’” (3), and The Student of Prague and The Golem (1913), though they
“might well anticipate and be an influence upon later horror production” were
also not “deemed to be horror films when they first appeared” (9). 12 Given the
fact that, “after WWII, unlike in the United States, German horror films never