A man lies in the foetal position in the darkness, then rolls over to lie flat on his back and expires. A little girl knows what this means, and she draws a symbolic skeleton image on a piece of paper: The Death King. This influences people to dark deeds of self-destruction, such as the man we see now, a fan of fish who writes a letter to a friend indicating his intention to kill himself, then telephones his work to tell them they shouldn’t expect him to attend, indeed he’s quitting the job for good. He then spends a few days pottering around in his flat, looking after his pet goldfish, until he decides enough is enough and runs a bath, climbs in and takes a load of pills, then dies himself: the goldfish is so upset that it dies as well.
Der Todesking came about because its director Jörg Buttgereit and his co-writer Franz Rodenkirchen were feeling aggrieved that the only people interested in their necrophilia drama Nekromantik were gorehound horror fans – they were serious artists, dammit! So the conceived a project that would confront the viewer with the reality of death, that it was really not something to get your kicks from, and was actually a very “grave” subject. This portmanteau was the result, yet you could still very well describe it as a horror movie no matter what its creators thought and what their sincere intents were, especially when one of its main narrative “tricks” was to present an in your face set of sequences of a decomposing corpse.
He was that Death King, wasting away before our very eyes, and every time the camera returned to his progress along the way to turning into a skeleton, it spelled doom for the characters we were watching. There was a particularly Germanic mood to the wish to place the audience in the circumstances of witnessing these demises, and the director refused to make it too gory aside from a small handful of shots. Perhaps the most telling sequence was where a horror fan, presumably representing the sort of person they were turning their noses up at, rented a Nazi shocker on video to watch at home, then proceeded to produce a gun and shoot his girlfriend when she demands to know why he’s not at a party.
Buttgereit got used to the fans of his work by and by, but this did render this film somewhat bad tempered and mean-minded from some angles, as if to say, yeah, you think you can enjoy yourselves now, but a day of reckoning arrives for us all eventually, and for some it will be by their own hand. It was a low budget effort, but the director has such a clear idea of what he wanted this meant the lack of funds didn’t show too obviously, sure there were no really lavish setpieces, the decomposing corpse seemed to have had the most care and attention lavished on its effect, but as every instalment was so short and to the point the sheer accumulation of miserable dramas never made it drag. Whether you wanted to have your nose rubbed in the dejected and horrible aspects of death was another matter.
But if you did, you could do worse than watch this, which ranged from a park bench confession of an uxoricide ending in, you guessed it, a suicide, to a more elaborate sequence where a young woman straps a Steadicam to herself and proceeded to stage a mass shooting at a rock concert before meeting her end, a scene that if anything plays even more depressing now after various atrocities than it did back in the early nineties. Yet perhaps the most effective scene featured no people at all, simply a selection of shots from a bridge under an autobahn accompanied by captions displaying a name, an occupation and an age. You quickly twig that these are the people who have thrown themselves from the high point in an act of self-destruction, and the sheer number of them is genuinely sad. The last section is simplicity itself, a man so depressed that he smashed his head against his bedroom wall until he dies. So not exactly a barrel of laughs, though Buttgereit asserted he was making a film that was anti-suicide, and it certainly wasn’t glamorising the matter.
