This is the fifth and final in a series of five pieces on “minor” horror films that I’ve been publishing here weekly, throughout October. For more information, please see this post from two years ago, when I first did this. I’m scaling things back a bit this year due to having (more of) a life, etc., but the basic idea is the same. Happy Halloween!
Der Gesandte (Sebastian Panneck / Patrick Hollmann, 1989)
Der Gesandte is a short film made by some German teenagers (or maybe early 20-somethings, somewhere in that range, it’s always hard to tell with young people wearing fashions this out of date) on Super 8, which was then transferred to a VHS tape at some point, which was itself, many years later, ripped and uploaded to the Internet Archive. We can assume that no step of this process was done particularly “professionally,” except for maybe the development of the film itself, and it shows. The film, as it comes to us today, is a wash of underexposures, overexposures, spots, crackles, wavy tracking lines, static blips, and blocky pixel compressions. The whole picture feels on the brink of collapsing into illegibility. There is a fetishistic dimension to how such a film is engaged with, inevitably: the allure of the “degraded” image, of layers of distortion, analog and digital, accumulated like so much grime on an old windowpane. It’s an aesthetic matter, of course, a matter of the pleasure of certain textures of visual noise, certain hardnesses and softnesses, but it goes beyond that, too – one perceives a certain kind of authenticity in a film which exists only in a state which is barely watchable, a state which suggests that it could easily not have survived at all. And this authenticity, in turn, invests the work with an affectual power and significance entirely beyond whatever the images themselves were initially capable of. I suppose all I’m really describing here is the same old Benjaminian aura, how it can find its way back into the mechanically reproduced artwork once again. This is extremely well-trodden ground. I know I’m not blowing anybody’s mind here. But still, these dynamics loom so large over how I, you, anyone else in the 21st century (or any century thereafter, if the film survives that long, if any of this survives that long) will experience a film like Der Gesandte that I feel they have to be acknowledged, right up front. When you watch this film, you are not just watching what was shot in 1989; the next thirty years are part of it, too – part of the image, part of the text, inextricable.
Der Gesandte is not a very serious film, which I mean positively. It’s a party film. It’s about a kid who finds some sort of cursed book (I can’t be sure about the details because these are, again, German teenagers, and there are obviously no subtitles, but the plot here is not hard to follow), brings it to a little get-together some friends are having, and convinces them all to read from it, for fun or whatever. This turns out to be a bad idea, as you might have guessed. But we’ll get to that – let’s stay with this get-together for a minute, because the pleasure of an amateur splatter movie like this, as much as the homemade blood and guts, these glimpses of ordinary people trying to perform something like ordinary life. It’s not a very large party: five or six people, I wasn’t keeping count, some beer, some weed, some snacks. They chat, they laugh. Couples kiss, not very much, it’s not that sort of party, but a little bit. They put on a couple horror movies, Nightmare on Elm Street and Fulci’s Zombie, it looks like. They do this in rooms which are plain in a homey sort of way. Most of the lights stay on, except when they go out in the backyard, light some torches, and recite the incantation. It seems like a good time. A chill hang. An evening well-spent. Then, of course, the guy who found the book goes into the bathroom and starts pulling pieces of his face off. Then he puts on a Halloween mask, a big grinning skull that covers up all his fresh lack of skin. And then everything becomes very different.
Something I really like about Der Gesandte is that everyone dies in it. They get cleavers in their skulls, they get their limbs ripped off, they get knifed in the back, all with admirable amounts of mess. There’s a final girl of sorts, who manages to evade her possessed friend a little longer than the rest of them, making him work for it, but ultimately she gets it too, blocked at the front door by the risen, shambling corpses of his earlier victims. The whole process only takes a few minutes. I like this because it feels real, true. Yes: if your friend got possessed by a murderous supernatural entity at your house party, you and everyone else would probably be killed by him very quickly, without too much difficulty. And obviously you would all come back as shambling corpses. That is what would happen. That is what should happen. The monster should win, and there shouldn’t be any fuss about it. And in a film like this, made by some kids doing for the love of the genre, the love of the craft, with however they can, with whatever they can, there isn’t. And this is something precious. Beneath the layers of grime, the decades of wear and degradation and compression, this is something precious.
