By Miley Guerrero
“Money has nothing to do with a film...and I think it really, in the end, kills you from being creative and from inventing. You know? Finding a way to do it makes you think.” - John Cassavetes
March of 2020 holds a lot of weight to many people. Surprisingly, the emotional impact of the pandemic is a rather taboo topic – everyone was impacted by it, some more than others, so the mutual understanding is already established. However, despite the ongoing threat of sickness, creativity prospered. Everyone spent their time during the stay-at-home order differently: a majority of people picked up new hobbies, some panic-bought supplies and a few subjected their time, money and home value to DIY-influenced home improvements. My vice would lay in films, and I caught myself watching around six...every single day, for two years. While the subject of controversy is a key point in discussing the pandemic, I’m aware that the following statement will ruffle some feathers. Hopefully, you’ll read on to let me explain why the stay-at-home period of the pandemic was the best two years of my life.
I’ve always had a curiosity for horror films. My cinephile father, who I now share a harsh rift with regarding movie opinions, introduced me to William Friedken’s The Exorcist when I was three years old. While most three-year olds would find it to be mortifying, I remember one emotion from the cloudy memory: lethargy. My father recounts my underwhelming reaction as comedic, but looking back, it was my first instance of craving something more. By the time I was ten, I had found myself watching James Wan’s Saw more times than I can count, now to the point of exact memorization of the entire script. Some may equate it to rebellion, which I’m not disputing, however it opened my eyes to a new genre of film: The splatter film.
These films go by many names, with being dumbed down to “gore films” in some circles to being amplified to “torture porn” by various critics. I believe that these genres can be discerned by the contents of each film – A splatter film, at its core, recognizes style over substance. The goal of the splatter film is still to convey a message, but exemplifying the use of practical effects and pints of fake blood to get to a specific point. “Gore” films are in the same vein, but the end goal is blurred and often not found within a few rewatches. “Torture porn” is exactly as it sounds – torture, blood and dismemberment mixed with sexual depictions. These depictions can come in the direct form of sex scenes (for example, A Serbian Film, directed by Srđan Spasojević) or with extreme sexual themes in its message (Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, though it could be argued that it lies under New French Extremity over torture porn).
When the pandemic began, I was admittedly lonely. I didn’t have many friends in high school, and I wasn’t as interested in pursuing movies from an academic perspective as I am now. With this loneliness came the urge to search, to seek
companionship and people who had the same curiosity as me. The same drive to push the limits of what I could stand to watch. My search began on Facebook, because what better way to find older, weird filmmakers? On Facebook, I struck gold, joining circles of the weird, perceived-delusional and likeminded boundary-pushers. I encountered Stephen Biro, founder of Unearthed Films and current owner of A Serbian Film’s distribution rights.
While I was unable to catch Stephen at a good time for this series of interviews, his publicist, Suzie Alaya, pointed me in the right direction and offered her helpful hand. “Everyone helps promote, and it’s just really cool,” Biro stated in a 2016 interview with Body Count Rising. With the growing number of films available on streaming services, Biro bites back by mentioning the physical media collection scene. “It’s changed so drastically,” He explains, “That’s why there’s such an emphasis on the artwork and the extras available when you purchase a physical version [of the film].” However, because of the aforementioned access to streaming, collectors are often discouraged or held back by convenience over collection. “There is always great anticipation for a new release, but collectors will often say, ‘I’ll pick it up when I have the cash’. And that’s more to do with the economy,” Biro wraps up. The impact of Biro’s films is to be noticed and praised – through a deal in 2002 with Paul White, Biro was able to secure distribution rights to a masterclass in the gore film genre, Guinea Pig.
Often considered the introduction of heavy gore media in film, Guinea Pig is a series started in the 80’s that proceeded to push the boundaries of cinema as a whole. Without Guinea Pig, I wouldn’t have had a script to memorize at ten years old. Biro’s release of the series remains the only official collective of all six films, with some copies being ripped and sold for less than $10 by bootleg retailers. Along with sharing the distribution of the original films to the world, Biro and special effects artist Marcus Koch collaborated to create a continuing American Guinea Pig series.
In an interview with Koch, he mentioned to me that his film beginnings began when he was fourteen years old. “I've been in the micro budget/indie horror filmmaking scene...shooting my own features on VHS and Hi-8 camcorders,” He begins. “Nowadays with everything moving over to streaming platforms, it was sorta good for indie/micro budget movies, as new platforms came onto the scene. Like Netflix, [who] was building massive catalogs, and would carry a wide range of stuff.”Koch continues to highlight the difference between streaming platforms and their beginnings, mentioning Netflix as a “wild west” and carrying lower-budget, controversial movies such as Slaughtered Vomit Dolls and Scrapbook. “As Netflix grew bigger, they began to get a little more picky in their content. Films like that were no longer picked up, and they aimed for higher-tier genre films, as well as now producing their own content.”
While this shift in outlook on the future of underground movies may seem bleak, Koch’s wife, Jessie Seitz, affirms young filmmakers by stating, “It is absolutely possible to start from the ground up. Honestly, this is probably the best time to do so, because
there are so many platforms and ways to get your work out there.” She then encourages filmmakers to “do it themselves”, marketing the educational and personal value of learning the ins-and-outs. But bending the rules is only one part of the underground horror scene.
Finally, the last participant willing to help me out is none other than Jörg Buttgereit, a West Berlin native auteur who has redefined the convention of film. Buttgereit has garnered mounds of attention online with his works Nekromantik and its sequel, Nekromantik 2: The Return of the Loving Dead. Ironically, my film school entry essay examined Nekromantik and its messages towards the ghosts of Germany’s past, allowing me acceptance into the filmmaking program.
Buttgereit first directs me to his book, from which he accounts his past experiences and how they’ve influenced his work as a provocative filmmaker. “If I couldn’t make my films, plays and radio plays, I would need a patient psychiatrist,” He states. Taking his various other documentaries and DVD extras into account (Nekromantik 1 and 2 extras via Cult Epics and Buttgereit’s documentary Corpse-Fucking Art), the story goes as follows: After making the first Nekromantik, Buttgereit and his team did not submit the film for official review. It was released to an exclusively adult audience, and controversy arose when the contents of the film defied censorship laws in Germany. It’s currently banned in Iceland, Malaysia and Singapore, among other countries. Due to the amount of controversy surrounding the film, multiple YouTube video essays and ranked lists featuring Nekromantik have allowed it to garner indirect marketing and attention, leading to a 10,000-copy release by Cult Epics in 2014.
Another potential participant of this deep-dive include Ilona Six, sister of Human Centipede series director Tom Six, who has declined to comment.
Any publicity is good publicity in a field where advertisement and promotion are key. My time spent in the underground scene has been a wild, informative and, although financially-questionable, fun ride. I’ve met many amazing and talented people within the “industry”, but as Buttgereit relays to me, “I’m not part of any industry”. So, what do we call this group? While I consider members of this community to be my second family, others would call them vagrants to the horror genre. The collective term is still being debated, but that’s another slugline for another script.
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