10 Disturbing German & Nordic Horror Movies That Reveal Humanity's Darkest Secret

[00:00:03]There's a film from Austria, 1983.

[00:00:07]The director showed up to his own premiere in a regular theater. Full audience. Lights went down. Film played.

[00:00:17]People threw up and demanded their money back. The cinema pulled it after a [music] week and handed it off to a porn theater because nobody else wanted it.

[00:00:28]The distributor in America slapped it with a triple X rating. And it wasn't because of sex. It was violence. Because what this film does to you physically is that extreme. That film has a 100% rating [music] on Rotten Tomatoes.

[00:00:46]Gaspar. No way. The man who made masterpieces called it the rarest masterpiece of cinema. It's on this list. And [music] it's not even number one. I'm Dr. Na. You're in the Dominion.

[00:01:01]And today we're going somewhere [music] that most horror fans underestimate.

[00:01:06]Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, [music] and the neighbors. The countries that made horror from ice, repression, guilt, and brutal cold that last 9 months of the year. These aren't countries that scream their horror at you. They get inside you quietly. And by the time you realize what happened, it's already too late to look away. Here's what I want you to think about the whole time we're doing this. What does the culture's horror reveal about what that culture is actually terrified of? And it's not the monsters on the screen. The real fear underneath the movie, because Germany and the Nordic countries are terrified of something very specific.

[00:01:52][music] And once I name it, you'll see it in every single film on this list.

[00:01:58]They're afraid of ordinary people, not monsters, demons, or supernatural things. People just like you.

[00:02:08]So why Germany and Nordic together?

[00:02:12]Because they share something that almost no other film culture shares quite the same way. the weight of a specific documented history of ordinary people doing extraordinary evil things. Germany has the Holocaust. That's not a horror movie premise. That's a factual record of what a modern, educated, industrialized, culturally sophisticated society did when it decided certain people weren't people. And German cinema has never been able to fully escape that weight.

[00:02:47]How could it? Every German filmmaker working in the second half of the 20th century [music] is making art in the shadow of a question that has no clean answer. How did this happen here? How did normal people participate? And what does that mean? What's inside all of us?

[00:03:08]The Nordic countries have their own version of this. Sweden was officially neutral during World War II and collaborated economically with Nazi Germany for years. Norway was occupied and had a collaborationist government. Denmark too. Finland fought alongside the Nazis in the continuation war against the Soviet Union. These aren't small footnotes. These are national roots that shape entire culture and never got the same kind of open reckoning. Germany eventually attempted through let me say this right ver heights oh my god I can't say this verun heights their very German word for the effort to come to terms with the past and then there's the landscape I want you to understand what it [music] actually feels like to live through a Nordic winter and I don't mean cold. It's dark.

[00:04:16]In some parts of Scandinavia, the sun barely rises at all for months. You get a few hours of gray twilight and then it's dark again. That's not a metaphor.

[00:04:27]That's a psychological condition.

[00:04:30]Seasonal effective disorder was first formally studied in Scandinavian populations because the incidence is so high. Living in that much darkness for that much of the year does something to the nervous system. It rewires how you process threat. It makes the interior world louder because the exterior world is dim, silent, and terrifyingly indifferent. So what you get from Germany and the Nordic countries is horror made by people who live in a lot of darkness, not metaphorical, and spent generations to trying to figure out how ordinary people become monsters. That's the thread. That's what run [music] throughs everything we're about to discuss. Now, let's count down. Number 10, let the right one in. 2008, Sweden.

[00:05:27]We start with the one you might actually already love, and I'm putting it number 10. It isn't the least disturbing, but it [music] kind of is the gentlest entry point into a very dark room. 12-year-old Oscar is bullied relentlessly. He lives in a bleak suburb of Stockholm in 1982.

[00:05:49]And he's the kind of quiet, thin, pale boy who becomes invisible to everyone except the people who want to hurt him.

[00:05:59]And a new neighbor moves in next door.

[00:06:01]Ellie, she's 12, or at least she looks 12. She's been 12 for a long time. She's a vampire, and he starts to fall in love with her. She helps him push back against his bullies and he helps her survive. This sounds like it should be sweet. And there are moments of genuine heartbreaking tenderness in this film.

[00:06:25]But here's what Linquist and Alfredson do that's so psychologically honest it hurts. They don't let you forget that Ellie isn't choosing Oscar out of love in any sense. She needs a protector.

[00:06:41]She's done this before. The older man who helped her get blood was almost certain was Oscar is now. The lonely boy she chose. And the film shows you exactly where that path leads. So, the love story is real and it's also a trap and you're rooting for both things at the same time. What makes this film disturbing on a clinical level is what it does with attachment formed under extreme conditions. We know from research on trauma bonding that people who need each other in circumstances of high stress, high isolation, and mutual vulnerability form attachments that are more intense and durable than those formed in normal conditions. Oscar and Ellie are perfect for each other.

[00:07:36]They're also each other's most dangerous relationship, and the film is wise enough to leave you with that ambiguity than resolving it. The American remake came out 2 years later. It's not bad, but it's it's just warmer, and warmth is exactly the wrong thing for the story.

[00:07:57]Tread scale, 6 out of 10. It'll break your heart more than it'll frighten you, but the fright is in the heartbreak.

[00:08:06]Number nine introduces us to the filmmaker who's going to dominate the middle of this list. And this is where the comfortable heart ends, Michael Hani, Austrian, which I love. One of the most coldly intelligent directors alive.

[00:08:24]Before funny games and the white ribbon, before the palm Dior and the criterion box sets in the film school syllabi, there was Benny's video 1992.

[00:08:36]Benny is a teenager from a wealthy Austrian family. He's obsessed with video and he records everything. His bedroom walls are screens. He watches footage of a pig being slaughtered on a farm and he rewinds it and rewinds it again. Slow motion, forward, back. He finds the mechanism of death more interesting than death itself. One day he invites a girl from his building up to his room. He shows her the pig video.

[00:09:09]He has a bolt pistol from the farm. You know where this is going. But Haneki shoots it in a way that's so matterof fact, so clinical and deliberate in what it shows and doesn't show that what you feel isn't horror in the genre sense.

[00:09:27]You feel something closer to vertigo, like the ground is shifted and you just realize you're standing somewhere you didn't consent to stand. The film's actual horror doesn't come from the murder. It comes from what happens after when Benny tells his parents and what his parents do about it. I'm not going to tell you what they do, but I'll say this. Hanicki is making a film about what happens to empathy in a society that's been thoroughly mediated by screens that the line between watching something and experiencing something has dissolved. Benny doesn't know the difference between the pig and the girl because he's processed them both as footage and his parents when faced with actual consequences reveal exactly the same capacity for abstraction.

[00:10:23]Clinically what Benny has is something we look at in terms of callous unemotional traits. The research term for what used to get called psychopathic features in adolescence. But Hanke isn't making a film about a bad seed. He's making a film that asks whether Benny's disassociation is his defect or is society's product. That question is the most disturbing thing in the film. Dread scale 7 and a half out of 10. Number eight, Speak No Evil, 2022, Denmark. One of my favorite movies is number eight. And we're moving into something that I want to describe very carefully because this film works by doing almost nothing that horror films typically do and somehow producing more sustained dread than most things I've seen in years. A Danish couple, Bejorn and Louise, go on vacation in Italy and [music] meet a Dutch couple, Patrick and Karen, who were charming, warm, they were funny, they were good. After the vacation's over, they stay in touch, and a few months later, Patrick and Karen invite them to their farmhouse in the Dutch countryside for a weekend. Bejorn and Louise go, and the weekend gets progressively, more and more wrong. Nothing dramatic happens, not for a very long time.

[00:11:55]Patrick says something slightly off. A boundary gets tested gently. They're asked to leave their toddler's comfort item behind. A door's lock that was unlocked before. The wrongness adds up in tiny pieces. Each one deniable on its own. Each one requiring Bejorn and Louise to make a choice. Say something and risk being awkward. Or let it go and stay comfortable. They keep letting it go over and over again. Here's the clinical frame I want you to really sit with. Sit with I say that a lot. What speak No evil is saying is textbook demonstration of what psychologists call social compliance under gradual escalation. The research on this goes back to Stanley Mgrim's obedience experiments in the 1960s where ordinary people were shown to administer what they believe were severe electrical shocks to strangers simply because an authority figure in a lab coat told them to continue. The mechanism isn't evil. It's social. It's the deep human need to avoid conflict, to be polite and not make a scene, to give people the benefit of the doubt and keep giving that benefit right up until the moment where taking it back costs more than it's worth. Patrick and Curin don't threaten Bejorn and Louise. They just make non-compliance feel slightly more uncomfortable than compliance at every step until the steps have taken you somewhere you never have agreed to go in the first place. The film ends in a way that one critic describe as the most upsetting [music] final sequence in any film this decade. I'd argue it's the most honest because it doesn't give you a horror movie ending. It gives you an ending that the psychology of the entire film earns. The lesson is don't be too kind and stand up for yourself. Dread scale 8 out of 10. My husband and I watched this and we're still talking about it. There is no way in hell I would have let that happen. My husband is the nice one. I'm not. Oh, and the American version is the worst remake in history. Changed everything about it.

[00:14:28]Changed the message and turned it into another girl boss fatigue story. Number [music] seven, Funny Games, 1997, Austria. Another favorite of mine. This is actually my top 10 of all times. And here's where I need you to understand something before we go in. Most horror films are on your side. They give you a monster you could root against. They give you a protagonist you could identify with. They follow the rules.

[00:15:01]Rules so deep and consistent that you don't even think of them as rules. The villain is scary and the victim fights back. Then the catharsis arrives.

[00:15:11]Michael Hani hates those rules. He spent his entire early career methodically dismantling every single one of them. A wealthy family, George, Anna, and their young son, Georgie, arrive at their lakehouse for a summer vacation. Two young men show up at the door politely wearing white gloves, asking to borrow some eggs. Their names are Paul and Peter or Tom and Jerry. They keep changing. They torture the family and make them bet on whether they'll still be alive by morning. They murder Georgie while his parents is tied up and Hani shoots a offcreen, holds on the family's faces and lets the silent sit. Onethird of the audience walked out a can. Jacqu Ret, one of the most respected directors in French cinema, called it a complete piece of [ __ ] Hanukki said he made it specifically for violence consuming audiences in English-speaking countries and was frustrated that because it was in German, it only ever played in artous where the wrong audience watched it.

[00:16:28]Here's what makes funny games so clinically precise. Paul breaks the fourth wall five times. He winks at the camera. He talks to you directly. At one point, [music] he asks you, literally you watching, whether you'll bet on the family survival. And later, when the family manages to fight back, when it looks like there might be a moment of rescue, Paul picks up a TV remote control and rewinds the film itself, resets the game, keeps you from getting the catharsis you came for. Hanaki's argument is one of the most serious and uncomfortable in cinema. The audience of violent entertainment is a participant in the violence. When you sit down to watch a family get tortured for 90 minutes and you're waiting for the satisfying payoff, you're doing something morally compromised. You've already agreed to the terms before the opening scene. Paul and Peter aren't the villains of this film. You are. You kept watching. I've thought about that argument a lot. I think it's partly right. I think Hanek is also to some degree being self- congratulatory about his own refusal to satisfy. It's its own kind of performance. But the question he's asking is real and it doesn't go away. And honestly, I don't want him to change. Dread Scale, 8 and a half out of 10. A horror film that's genuinely hostile to its own audience. One of a kind. And also, the American remake was great, too. It was the same because of the same director. And reportedly, [music] Michael Hanuki really did make the actors cry. Give them high anxiety and pressure, and the great acting shows.

[00:18:29]You feel it in your bones how great it was. I told you at the beginning that German and Nordic horror is afraid of ordinary people, not monsters. People, we're halfway through the list. Do you see it yet? Benny is a teenager from a nice family. Paul and Peter are polite, well-dressed, well-spoken young men who ask to borrow eggs. Patrick and Karen are charming vacationers who invite you to their farmhouse. Even Ellie the vampire looks and acts like a lonely 12-year-old. None of these things announce themselves as danger. They pass. They fit in, knock on your door, and you let them in because they look like people you let in. And then the rules that were always protecting you stop applying. This is the fear in the heart of the German and Nordic extreme cinema, not supernatural evil. The possibility that the person standing next to you in a normal situation has made a decision that you don't know about yet. In clinical terms, what this horror tradition is mapping is the specific anxiety produced by what we call predatory camouflage. The documented forensic reality that people who commit the most serious violence against strangers [music] are overwhelmingly more likely to present as normal, charming, and socially appropriate than they are to present as obviously threatening. The research is consistent and decades old. We're terrible at identifying dangerous people before they act. Our instincts evolve for visible physical threats. They're useless for the kind that wear white gloves and nice people that invite us to their vacation home. So when a horror tradition keeps returning to this specific dynamic, the polite stranger, the friendly neighbor, the ordinary teenager. It's doing something that goes way past genre film making. It's documenting a real statistical truth about violence that our entire social architecture is built to ignore. Now, let's go somewhere darker.

[00:20:54]Number six, Necroantic, 1987, West Germany. And I need you to understand what we're walking into. The director made for roughly 40,000 Deutsch Marks pocket change shot on Super 8 film with his friends in apartment and basement in West Berlin [music] in the years when the wall was still up and you couldn't take this kind of material across the border without getting searched. Rob works for a company that cleans up accidents.

[00:21:29]He collects body parts. He and his girlfriend Betty keep them in jars in their flat. One night, Rob brings home a full corpse from a roadside accident.

[00:21:41]It's been in water. It's decomposing.

[00:21:45]They consider it a kind of gift to each other. I'm going to be honest with you about what happens next because this is the Dominion audience and you can handle it. What follows is one of the most notorious scenes in the history of extreme cinema. One of it, a three-way sexual encounter involving Rob, Betty, and the decomposing corpse shot with slow motion and piano music framed exactly like a romantic interlude in any other film. That last detail is what the director was going for. He said in interviews that he deliberately used every visual and audio cue of conventional romantic cinema for this scene, the slow motion, music, and the careful framing. Because the point wasn't to horrify you with the corpse.

[00:22:41]The point was to make you sit with the fact that your brain kept trying to process it as a love scene despite the corpse. That's what's disturbs. Here's what I want you to know about this film that most people don't. The director made it as a direct act of rebellion against German censorship. In the 1980s, Germany had extremely strict film classification laws that were cutting and banning horror films constantly.

[00:23:12]But the director wanted to make something that proved the sensors right, something that would genuinely exceed the acceptable. and he did. The film was eventually banned in Germany. It's still banned outright in several countries today. It took until 2014 for the UK to allow an uncut release. The film ends with a scene I won't describe except to say it connects orgasm and death in a way that at the same time the most disturbing and the most formally coherent closing image in German underground horror cannon. It's the thesis of the entire film delivered in about 90 seconds. John Waters, who made Pink Flamingos and isn't easily shocked by anything, called Necroantic the first erotic film for necroiliacs.

[00:24:09]He meant it as a compliment. Dread Scale 9 out of 10. Not for everyone, but for understanding what happens when a filmmaker decides to make the sensor's worst nightmare on purpose. It's essential. Number five, Inks, 1983, Austria. This is the film I mentioned in the beginning, and we talked about it in previous videos. The one with the 100% Rotten Tomato score and the one that made Gasper Noa the filmmaker he became.

[00:24:44]Directed by Gerald Cargle based on the real crimes of Warner Keniga, an Austrian man who at 16 stabbed his own mother 10 times while telling her, "Mommy, you must die now. Nothing will help you now." His mother survived and he went to prison. He got out in 1980.

[00:25:07]Within days, he broke into a house and ended three people, an elderly woman, her disabled adult [music] son, and her daughter. He packed their bodies into family's car, and drove to Salsburg, where he was arrested in a diner while feeding the family's dog. Kisk is still alive and still in prison. He was alive during the filming of Angst. At one point during production, he attempted to escape using a replica pistol. The film follows an unnamed psychopath. We know him only as Kay. On the day of his release from prison for an earlier killing, he doesn't go home or try to rebuild. He sits in a diner and just looks at people and then he picks a house. What cinematographers did with this film is technically unlike anything you've ever seen before. The camera is physically strapped to the actor's body so that it follows him at all times in impossible proximity. It orbits him, cranes over him from above while also being locked to his chest. It makes the distance between you and this man's head disappear. You aren't watching a killer from a safe distance. You're trapped inside the same space he's in. His voice over narration runs throughout. A monologue assembled from his testimony and the confessions of real serial killers, including Peter Curtain, the vampire of Docseldorf. and it never explains, apologizes or provides the satisfying psychological need that we expect from crime narratives.

[00:26:55]Number four, Antichrist, 2009, Denmark.

[00:26:59]And here we need to talk about Lars Vontrier. He's clinically one of the most interesting figures in world cinema and publicly documented OCD, severe depression, and a range of anxiety disorders that by his own account have been organizing principles of his creative output. He wrote Antichrist while hospitalized for what he described as the worst depressive episode of his life. He said the film was the only way he could process what the depression was doing to him. That context matters [music] because Antichrist isn't a horror film the way most people think of horror. It's a record of what severe depression feels like from inside. A couple loses their infant son. He falls from a window while they're having sex.

[00:27:56]It was either the mother's orgasm or stopping her son. Selfish needs one. She then downspirals and hospitalized. Her husband, a therapist, decides he knows better than her doctors and takes over her treatment himself. He brings her to a remote cabin in the woods called Eden.

[00:28:17]Nature itself begins to feel hostile and things start to fall apart. The film is split into chapters named pain, grief, and despair. The violence that follows includes self-mutilation of genitals with scissors and a millstone bolted to a man's leg through his calf. All of it is shot with this slow, gorgeous Tarovski influenced visual poetry that makes it look like the most beautiful nightmare you've ever had. Here's the clinical question that this film puts in front and center and never fully answers. Is she actually descending into psychosis or is she experiencing something that her husband who refuses to be her husband insists on being her therapist is pathizing because his response to her grief from the very first scene is clinical distance. He treats her feelings as the symptoms and positions himself as the rational one and her as the irrational one. And the film slowly, carefully builds the case that his version of rationality might be its own kind of violence. Ken gave Charlotte Gainesburgh the best actress award. She deserved it.

[00:29:38]They also gave the film a special anti prize for what the jury called misogyny.

[00:29:44]Vontrer didn't apologize. He rarely does. The misogyny in question is real and it's worth sitting with. She does terrible things in this film. Whether the film endorses those things or is depicting them as the product of a specific kind of suffering is a question that's serious. Critics have been arguing [music] about since 2009. But what I'll say is that this is the most cinematically beautiful film on this list and one of the most viscerally upsetting at the same moment. And that combination is rare. He said of out of all of his films, this comes closest to a screen. Dread scale 9 and a half out of 10. Number three, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920, Germany. Wait, 1920 on a list about disturbing horror. Stay with me, because number three is the one that started everything, and I mean everything. [music] And I need to argue the case for why a silent film from 1920 belongs in the top three of a list that includes necrophilia and genital mutilation. because it does. And the reason why it tells you more about what dread actually is than any of the other entries on this list. A traveling fair arrives in a German town. Dr. Calakari runs an exhibit. A some Namblids named Chazar who can answer any question about the future. A young man named Francis asked Chazar how long he has to live.

[00:31:29]Shazari says, "Until dawn." That night, the young man's friend is murdered and Francis begins to investigate. The murders keep happening. The film ends with a twist that if I told you what it is, would destroy the film for you entirely, so I won't. What I'll tell you is this. The sets in this film are expressionist. They're painted. The shadows are drawn directly onto the walls and floors. The architecture is impossible, crooked, angular, tilted, just wrong. There aren't any right angles. Nothing is straight. Everything leans into the space around it in a way that makes the world itself feel unreliable.

[00:32:16]This was a deliberate choice. The screenwriters Carl Mayer and Hans Yanalitz, both pacifists and both traumatized by World War I, wrote the film explicitly as an attack on the authoritarian institution of the German military state and its power to make ordinary people into obedient killers.

[00:32:40]They wanted the visual world in the film to reflect the psychological state of a society that had been driven mad by a system it trusted and that destroyed it.

[00:32:52]They got overruled in the ending. The studio added a framing device that changes the film's meaning significantly. Mayor and Yanowitz were furious, but the visual language survived and went on to influence literally every horror film made in the West in the next hundred years. Here's what I want you to understand about Caligari. As a piece of psychological horror, Chzure is a sleepwalker. He commits violence in a state that looks like sleep. He doesn't know what he's doing, [music] and he's being controlled by an authority figure. that decided that Chzure's capacity for violence is a resource to be used. And Chzure doesn't even know he's being used. In 1920 in Germany, 3 years after the end of a war that saw millions of young men used and discarded as violence delivery mechanisms by a state apparatus that called itself legitimate authority. And again, this isn't my opinion, so don't get mad. It's what the directors are trying to say. The film is a horror film about Germany's relationship to obedience. And it came out 13 years before the Nazi rose to power. And if you watch it knowing what came after, knowing what Germany was about to do when it fully embraced the logic of obedient violence, the film stops being a creepy silent movie and becomes something else entirely. something that saw it coming. Dread Scale, eight and a half out of 10 on its own terms. 10 and a [music] 10 as a historical document.

[00:34:39]Number two, The White Ribbon, 2009, Germany and Austria. Michael Hankey's third on this list and the one that won Palm Dior at can and became one of the most discussed films in the 21st century. shot in black and white set in a small German Protestant village in 1913 and 1914 on the eve of World War I.

[00:35:05]A series of disturbing violent incidents begin happening in the village.

[00:35:10]Accidents that aren't [music] quite accidents, cruelties that that aren't random. A doctor is injured and a woman dies. A disabled boy is tortured and one newborn is left exposed. Nobody is caught. The film ends without resolution. We never find out who did these things, but Hanek is doing something extremely specific. He's building a portrait of the children of this village, who they are and how they're raised, what's done to them by the adults around them, and placing it right before 1914 so that we understand exactly who these children will grow up to be. These are the children who will be young adults [music] in 1933.

[00:35:59]These are the children of the village who will become the ordinary people who build and run the third right. The tile refers to the custom of tying a white ribbon on children who sinned as a reminder of the innocence they're supposed to be striving toward. The ribbon is a shame device. The children in this film are subjected to relentless shame, psychological control, public humiliation, and the theology of guilt so total that it leaves no room for the development of individual conscious.

[00:36:37]They're taught that their own desires and impulses are evil and obedience to authority is the only safety. That questioning what they're told in itself is a sit. What Haneki is mapping is the developmental psychology of what becomes an adulthood authoritarian character structure. The research on this goes back to Theodore Adordov's 1950 landmark study. The authoritarian personality, the first systematic attempt to understand how ordinary Germans became capable of participating in the Holocaust. What Adorno found was a consistent pattern. Rigid and it was rigid upbringings who produced adults who craved a strong authority and were deeply uncomfortable with ambiguity and were primed to displace their own suppressed shame and rage onto designated algorithms.

[00:37:37]Panicky films the white ribbon as a mystery that's never solved. But the solution isn't a who done it. The solution is the entire village and the upbringing. The solution is the white ribbon. The film is slow and almost suffocating in its patience. It'll stay with you for weeks. Dread scale 9 and 12 out of 10. It's not the most violent film on this list. It's the most disturbing. Number one, M 1931 Germany.

[00:38:11]And here we are. Number one. I want you to think about something. We've been through a list that includes necroilia, genital mutilation, torture, a decomposing corpse used in a sex scene, a killer who eats a sausage after murder, and the most rigorous cinematic portrait of how ordinary children become capable of genocide. And the most disturbing film on this list is from 1931.

[00:38:42]It's a black and white sound film. It has almost no violence show on screen and it's the film that invented the modern serial killer narrative. The modern forensic psychology drama and the modern ethical question that every single entry of on this list is still wrestling with today. A child killer is terrorizing a German city. We never see him commit violence. We hear a child's voice fade mid song and then we see her balloon floating away and we know what happened. The police can't catch him.

[00:39:21]So, the criminal underworld, which is losing business because the police are are watching everything, organizes its own manhunt and catches him. Peter Lorie plays Hans Beckard, the killer. In his most famous scene, he's been caught by the criminals and brought before a kangaroo court in a warehouse. Hundreds of criminals judging him. And Beckard pleads his case. He's compelled and can't stop. He doesn't want to do it, but he's driven by something he describes as mounting terror. and Lawrence and his performance with his bulging haunting eyes that trap collapsing voice is one of the greatest acting achievements in cinema history.

[00:40:09]Who knows what it feels like to be me.

[00:40:11]He says how I am forced to act how I must. I don't want to but I must. The film ends before sentencing. Fruits Lang deliberately cuts away before the state can deliver its verdict. Because the question Lang is asking isn't what should happen to Hans Beckard. It's what does it mean when the criminal underworld, which also murders, steals, and operates outside the law, has more capacity to protect children in this city than the state does. What does that say about the state and about law and who gets to define who the monster is?

[00:40:52]Here's the clinical frame that makes the most disturbing entry on the entire list. M was made in 1931, 2 years before Hitler became chancellor.

[00:41:05]Fritz Lang made a film in which a pathological, compulsive, involuntary offender is brought to justice by a mob that has decided that his own sense of order supersedes the laws and in which the audience is implicitly asked to cheer for the mob because at least they're doing something. At least they caught him. Lor's performance makes you feel something for Beckard against your will. You'll understand him in a way you don't want to. You hear him say, "I must." And some part of you recognizes that as something true about compulsion, about the things humans do that they don't fully choose. And the gap between desire and action in every psychological tradition has tried to explain and none of them has fully [music] closed. and the mob, the tribunal of criminals who caught him. They aren't the heroes, they're Germany, 2 years before 1933, demonstrating exactly how willing they are to bypass due process when they believe they're facing monsters enough to justify it because they believe it.

[00:42:19]And belief is power in its own. The film predicted the not the horror of it, the mechanism, the willingness to form a mob, designate evil, and act before the law could stop you because the law feels too slow and too procedural when something feels urgent.

[00:42:42]Fritz Lang's wife co-wrote this script.

[00:42:46]Shortly after the film came out, she joined the Nazi party. Lang fled Germany. That's where this list ends.

[00:42:54]And it's not by the most explicit content, but the film understood of what was coming before almost anyone [music] else did and put it on screen in 1931 in the language of a crime drama [music] about a child killer. Because that's what German and Nordic horror has always been doing at [music] its best. It doesn't show you cheap thrills. It shows you the mirror asking you to look at what's already there. Dread scale. A million over 10. It's not a dread scale number. It's a reckoning. [music] 10 films. Germany, Austria, Sweden, Denmark. From 1920 [music] to 2022.

[00:43:39]Here's what we come back to. Every single filmmaker on this list made their horror out of something already present in [music] a world they lived in. It wasn't supernatural. Real ones. Real obedience, compulsion, and politeness weaponized. Real shame passed down through generations until it became violence. And every one of them was asking [music] the same question in a different register. What are you willing to look at? What do you close your eyes for? What do you choose not to see?

[00:44:13]Because seeing it would require you to do [music] something about it. I've been a psychologist for a long time and I think those are the most important questions in my [music] field and it's not what's wrong with that person but what are we all capable of under the right conditions. That's the question these films are made of and what's [music] make them beautiful. What's the one on this list you're going to watch first if you haven't. [music] Tell me in the comments. And if you stayed this long, you already know what the Dominion is. Thank you for being here. I'll see you in the next one.