A horrifying film like none other, with strange resonance today: The Cremator

Czech director Juraj Herz's 1969 movie, The Cremator, is a creepy and horrifying film that's unlike anything I've seen before. Made in the height of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the film slips around the obviously censorious political climate of its time by adapting a period setting: Set in Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s, as the German armed forces were amassing at the border and the Czech's were anticipating the inevitable invasion and occupation. The film has the look and feel of the time of its setting; you could think it was a film from the 30s (the bw cinematography, the chintzy decor) except for some odd quick edits to shift from scene to scene and a haunting, contemporary score that makes everything seem nightmarish. The odd story line concerns a middle-aged, unctuous, completely bourgeois businessman, the strange name Kopfrkingl, who has practically the only speaking part in the film (played well by Rudolph Hrusinsky). He's in charge of a crematorium, and at the outset he's trying to build up his business by holding information sessions at which he touts the virtues of cremation. He's proud of his business and honored to take visitors on a tour of his facilities. Slowly and subtly over the course of the film we begin he hear statements and observations about pure German blood and the evils of Jews and Judaism and over time Kopfrkingl gets drawn into these discussions, which pervert his mind and turn him into a psychopath, while maintaining his odious facade: a family man who goes to brothels, and loving husband he murders his (half-Jewish) wife and his children, an enthusiastic proponent of a super-crematorium that can incinerate hundreds of bodies at once. What happened to him? How could he have been taken over and transformed, without any recognition of remorse? This film is history as metaphor, and is in addition to its dissection of the Nazi mentality it's also a sly warning about the ease with which supposedly good people can be blinded and perverted by a fascist ideology - something the Soviet censors were too dumb to see [note: Have learned that Soviets did crack down, but after the release of this film], something with painful resonance today.