Original subtitles

Hello, I'm novelist and critic Kim Newman, and I'm here with...

Author and filmmaker Sean hogan.

And what are we here to talk about?

We're here to talk about sleep, the new German horror film.

I mean, I suppose it is a horror film, but it's a number of other things as well.

Yeah, I think it's...

I mean, and I should footnote a bit

that it's rather unusual for us to be doing a commentary on a new film.

It's also a new film by a first-time feature filmmaker/director.

So we can't fall back on,

"and here's what they did in their earlier work,"

and make connections with the auteur vision.

It's a film in and of itself.

I think it does relate to some other films in interesting ways we can talk about,

but we're working a bit in a vacuum

compared to our usual commentary.

We've got lots of cultural detail to draw on.

So, in a way, we're on a journey with the listener.

Yes!

We're not positioning ourselves, I should say, as experts

in any way on this particular film or...

No, but it's an interesting film that warrants discussion

and so, hopefully, we can manage that.

I hope that we can elucidate a bit.

And it seems to be a film that's not had a great deal of exposure

in this country previously.

No. I...

I had heard of it, but I had not seen it before.

It came up as a possibility we should do this.

You generally see, obviously, more of the new releases than I do

so I wondered whether you had seen it previously.

It had not quite crossed my radar.

I mean...

But then again,

don't you love it when you get a film you've never heard of?

It does all kinds of weird, surprising things.

And the next Michael Venus film I'm now really looking foward to.

I hope he doesn't take as long about it

because, ahhough he's a first-time filmmaker,

he's not a young filmmaker.

He's in his mid-40s.

He's directed a couple of short films before.

And this is a very assured film formally. It's a very controlled film.

It's also a grown-up film, I have to say, which...

I don't think that's a particularly risky strategy

in, as it were, continental horror,

but it's not what American horror has tended to be,

aimed at teenagers.

I think that the European tradition...

And this film is steeped in the brothers grimm

and all kinds of... And e.T.A. Hoffmann

and other German gothic images, as always.

Even though the brothers grimm, in theory, wrote for children.

Yeah!

Yeah, it's interesting, in fact, that there's almost a bit of a feint

in the opening.

We assume that the mother, played by Sandra hiiller,

who is the most familiar actor from her part in Toni erdmann,

which was an international hit,

is going to be the lead character, but no, she goes to sleep!

And it's the daughter, the younger woman,

who receives the sins of several generations passed down,

which, again, is a particularly German theme.

The director has talked about this

as being his dark version of a heimat movie.

Do you want to explain a bit what a heimat movie actually is?

So, I'm certainly not an expert on heimat movies,

but, as I understand them, they were a genre

that was very popular in the '50s

and presented kind of idyllic visions of small German towns

and were very romanticized pictures of the German rural life.

And it was something

that traditionally newer generations of filmmakers have reacted against.

In new German cinema there are several anti-heimat films.

In fact, the famous TV mini-series heimat by Edgar reitz,

which is actually one of those astonishingly influential works,

invented binge-watching in the early 1980s.

Before there was a medium that was suited to heimat,

heimat was disguised as a TV series in Germany

and a film in britain.

And it had... there were several follow-ups to that.

And I think that that meant that outside Germany

we got a sense of what heimat film was.

And Michael haneke has had a go at heimat film as well.

The white ribbon is very much an anti-heimat film.

But I think what's interesting about this is...

A lot of those films tend to be quite dour

in their rejection of that image of Germany

whereas this is quite funny in a creepy sort of way.

We'll obviously get to that point later in the film, but...

It exposes the rot in the rural village,

but then proceeds to poke fun at it.

Yeah, it's...

In some ways it reminded me of the British movie hot fuzz

by Edgar Wright,

which is much more parodic than this is

but also has the idea that what you need to be terrified of

is what ray Davies called

"the village green preservation society".

- Those are your actual monsters. - Yes!

We do get that in this.

There's a creepiness to small-town life.

I suppose Stephen King is kind of a heimat writer in america

in the way that he reacts to Thornton Wilder's our town

or grace metalious' Peyton place,

with Salem's lot or it,

which explicitly relate to the earlier works.

I think this does explicitly relate to a great German tradition,

something that I suspect is common on German television.

It's... there's a sort of soap-opera feel to it,

although we're in a particular slice of...

It's actually former east Germany here, isn't it?

So it's got several layers of totalitarianism to kick against.

Jessica hausner made a film called hotel a few years back

that actually had a slightly similar feel to this.

That's also about a hotel at the very edge of the deep, dark teutonic woods.

That's a very German theme, isn't it?

Possibly even more enigmatic than this is,

which does at least clear up most of its mysteries in the end.

You have a mystery that is solved.

And this stretch of it is almost Italian giallo

in terms of its setup, isn't it?

It's dreams rather than something glimpsed or a clue,

but it's still...

Those children's pictures, the sketchy visions,

and the thing that happened that nobody has quite understood

and that our outsider protagonist realizes

is intimately involved with their own origin.

Yes.

Actually, also underlying the structure of all this

is h.P. Lovecraft's the shadow over innsmouth,

where the outsider realizes he's not an outsider.

Not an outsider. Yes, yeah.

That this is where he comes from.

And also, as you were saying,

in the way it seems to position her as a protagonist,

it's almost a little bit of psycho

in that she goes to this strange hotel and she doesn't die,

but she's basically sidelined for most of the rest of the movie.

Which, I mean, the first time I saw it I found very disorienting,

because I had assumed that the younger girl,

who was not an actress I was familiar with,

I assumed she was going to be a secondary part

rather than, as it turns out, the character that we spend all our time with.

And this moment, I think, signals towards another big influence on this,

which would be lynch, and specifically twin peaks.

Which also includes a motel at the very edge of the deep, dark woods.

But no, yeah...

Hogs are the big...

The monster animal or the totemic animal, the absurd animal here.

Yes.

Which, again, given that Germany is famous for its sausages...

Strikes me as being a knowing...

There's also a lot of quite grotesque sausage-eating in this film later on.

Yeah.

I don't... do Germans know that sausage-eater is a demeaning term?

I think it goes back to the first world war, but it's...

But it does seem to crop up here. It's almost like... yeah.

But in terms of what you were saying about this being a grown-up horror movie,

I suppose it makes sense lynch being such an overt influence on it

in the sense that, you know, both you and I share the opinion

that lynch is probably one of the foremost horror directors

of the last 30 years or so,

but he's not often categorized as such.

He's certainly, I would say, the most influential on horror.

And another...

It's not even a director, but there is a single film

from...

From 2015

that, I think, has turned out to be

an all-pervasive influence on subsequent horror

and Michael Venus cites it.

It's Rodney ascher's documentary the nightmare about sleep paralysis

and the vision

that so many sleepers or half-sleepers claim to have seen.

It's the inspiration of a nightmare on elm street.

It's the man with the hat in the room.

But that particular film, which examines that phenomenon all around the world

by interviewing a lot of sufferers, or people who have had this experience,

this common...

It's not even a paranormal experience,

but it's something that seems to pervade all culture...

A sort of shared unconscious.

And people have talked about it in jungian terms

and come up with all kinds of other rationalizations for it.

But that particular film seemed to have crystallized so much material

that immediately there have been, like, a dozen creepypasta-type movies.

Slender man, the bye bye man, all these movies that tap into that.

And this doesn't go quite as full-on into that theme

as some of the other movies that played with it as an idea,

but it certainly seems to be floating around in the background.

I mean, sleep is a strange title for a horror film.

It's an Andy warhol title, isn't it?

Not that anybody has ever actually watched that film.

It's one of those, as with a lot of those Andy warhol films,

it's essentially a joke, wallpaper that moves if you look at it,

not a narrative feature you're supposed to sit there and absorb.

But... yeah.

Here we're back with giallo stuff.

Yes, now established as our lead protagonist.

She's even wearing a yellowjacket.

The notion of the bad place you see in dreams

and then find in reality,

that's almost one of the oldest ghost stories or fairy tales.

There are precedents in horror movies, aren't there?

Lucio fulci's the psychic does that for instance.

But it's not something that's done very often.

And here it's done in a rather odd, naturalistic way

because she sees a place that somebody else has seen in dreams

rather than she has.

She's really just trying to find out what happened to her mother.

She is our detective, our narrative hook, Mona.

Gro swantje kohlhof, who's been in a couple of things,

but this is her first real lead.

I saw her in an earlier German film called nothing bad can happen,

which is... she's much younger. She was probably about 15 in that.

It was a supporting role. She plays the daughter of this family,

but similarly has to bear witness

to a lot of strange, weird, bizarre things going on in front of her.

Yeah. I think she's very effective in this.

And I really like the relationships she forms

with the other misfit or younger people in this isolated community.

But again, because they're all slightly oddballs,

she has to be the straight man, but she does it very well.

And here...

Yes! It has to be a knowing moment where the whole bar turns round.

Yeah...

It's like, it was done in American werewolf in London

as a reference to the fact that it happens.

It's usually westerns

where a stranger walks into the bar and everybody shuts up.

But since American werewolf it's become a trope,

I think, or a running joke.

It's like you can't even say that it's a cliche.

It's just a signifier, a thing that happens.

But, you know, again, in that sort of lynchian way

this film isn't afraid to have moments of bizarre humor

in amongst the weirdness.

And the fact that our villains are sort of sitcom absurd as well.

I think that differentiates it from some other films

that have had similar themes.

I think of the Polish film demon,

which is another "don't mention the war" horror film.

That seems much more wrapped up in the specific horrors

and injustices of the 20th century.

Here they're generalized horrors.

It's almost like... although there are jokes about Nazis here.

Notably, there are no jokes about communists,

which may be too recent and too painful, I don't know.

But also, because it's an ancient forest,

you have a feeling that whatever's wrong here has been wrong well before.

And that's the notion of an anti-heimat film, isn't it?

The notion of an heimat film is there's something rich and good

and strong and powerful.

It's like "tomorrow belongs to me" in cabaret.

That vision of the German countryside as nurturing and friendly and folksy.

This is the German countryside as chilly and unwelcoming and dangerous.

The lynch vision of the insects under the lawn.

Yeah.

And it's another empty-hotel story, isn't it?

Yeah. I mean, again, another obvious influence on it

would be the shining in that sense.

Another grown-up horror movie that uses the bland eeriness

of these kind of transitional empty spaces.

But so many urban legends are about hotels.

Which, I mean... Not so much the shining,

but in king's later one... Was it room 1407?

I can never get the number right.

Which almost collects urban legends about hotels and hotel rooms.

- Yes. - Yeah.

It's an anthology of those.

And Stephen King, I would assume, has probably stayed

in quite a lot of hotels in his life.

Yeah. It's a thing you learn in the creative business when you're...

Particularly in america where you have to go on the road.

I always like these puzzling-together sequences.

Yeah, well, it's...

It's nice when you watch characters figure things out

and yet you're not being spoon-fed the plot along with it,

you have to sort of figure it out along with them.

And now we're in a creepy supermarket.

I mean, again, it's a small town, but it's weirdly empty.

Yeah.

The hotel is off season so there's a reason why that's empty,

but you'd expect the town to have some...

We saw a whole bunch of people in a pub.

But that seems to...

I think that's the last time, until we get the gathering later in the film,

that we actually see...

And, in fact, this is a film that has no sense of community.

You never see where these people live.

I mean, I assume that the family live at the hotel.

I don't even know if they do, because they've got that bar,

which seems to be separate from the hotel.

- Mona. - Hi, Mona. That's christoph.

We 7! See each other tomorrow.

Bye, you two.

- Are you staying at the hotel? - Yes.

What do I owe you, then?

It's on the house.

Thanks.

I mean, one wonders if it was a budgetary thing

that they had this hotel as a location but couldn't afford to put guests in it.

Yeah. It feels more...

There's a nice bit of set-up there with the two doors.

You know that's chekhovian.

But there's something quite unnerving about the idea

of staying in this huge empty hotel all on your own.

Yeah.

And yet, I mean, there are various places around the world that that can happen.

I've had it happen to me.

And actually, it's probably something that is...

It seems surreal, but it's actually observed.

Because of various economic reversals in the last couple of decades

you have a lot of places that were built during the boom

and then come online during the bust.

I remember particularly going to a film-related event in Dublin

and they'd had that.

They'd built a whole business area that had not thrived.

And they put me in one of those hotels.

Presumably it was dirt cheap, but it was exactly like this.

You were in this big, modern, not ultra-luxurious but comfortable place

with nobody else.

And you would go out to get a cup of coffee

and find that, instead of actually having coffee bars,

they had empty shops with big pictures of coffee bars

as an advert to try and get people to put their businesses there

that hadn't happened because the recession had hit.

And so you have these places.

I found this one in Ireland,

but I am sure they're all over the world.

I have stayed in large empty hotels in the former east Germany as well.

But here we just got into...

It's not quite a dream sequence,

but it's a moment where it's a bit more colorful and strange and surreal.

It is... is that a dream or is that a vision?

I think... well, as the dreams progress in the film,

it becomes clear that they're a separate reality almost.

It's not quite... They're not quite a dream.

And we get our first glimpse of what we take to be the monster

and then it obviously turns out to be something quite different.

One other film filmmakers talk about being an influence

was kill, baby... kill!

Yes, which is an interesting one because that's another film

that turns out to be amazingly influential on all kinds of people,

like fellini and scorsese.

When the last temptation of Christ came out,

I remember scorsese was interviewed and someone said,

"in your depiction of the devil as a little girl"

"were you thinking of fellini's Toby dammit?"

He says, "no, I was thinking of Mario bava's kill baby... kill!"

Which is where fellini got it from.

But, yeah...

And it's not so much just that... I mean, the...

The weird figure of the child, who's not quite a child here,

that also is big empty-spaces...

Although I think that in kill baby... kill!

The gimmick that's used there is the same gimmick

that Vincenzo natali used in cube, which is that if you change the lighting,

you can just have one set that represents almost everything.

And there, there's a chase through identical rooms, isn't there?

Of doppelgangers, whatever.

That's a really disturbing thing about the guy who's buckled in bed at night.

Yeah. Again, presented in a very matter-of-fact way.

You sort of think, "what's really going on here?"

But he's coping, actually, with a supernatural curse,

but it sort of seems a bit like a kink at first rather than...

It's in fact... and I don't know whether we're supposed to admire this guy,

but after the other three people on the monster's death list

have been checked off,

he has come up with an effective strategy.

He's very practical about dealing with the curse.

Resisting the curse.

If this were a nightmare on elm street film

you'd admire him, no matter how guilty he was.

And this struck me as a very sort of twin peaks scene

with this eccentric hotel.

Yes. The weird maid.

She has to remain completely stony-faced

while this other girl is imitating a boar.

Yes.

And do you think this woman is doing an act

or has she really dreamed of a boar?

Does everybody dream of a boar in this place?

You know what, in that long shot

I think I can see kohlhof's face just starting to corpse.

Just before the out there's that little twitch.

And I suspect there are several takes where...

Strangely, I think one of the reasons that's a disturbing moment

is that you could see both faces.

It's a very underrated ability as an actor,

not to laugh, to stay in the moment

while someone else is doing something absolutely crazy.

I always admire the supporting cast of Dr. Strangelove

for standing around while Peter sellers is doing the funniest shtick in the world

as if it was really serious.

On the flip side of that, Peter sellers always blamed

the fact that he didn't win the best actor Oscar for being there

on the fact that they showed him corpsing over the end credits

and he thought that meant that people didn't take it seriously.

Oh, well...

But this kind of...

Although, as I say, lynch was doing this 30 years ago,

this mixture of eccentric humor and dreamlike horror

still feels quite distinctive.

There's not too many other films that do it.

Yeah.

It may well be because it's genuinely difficult to pull off.

I mean, I suspect this is not a film that a director younger could have made.

I think you need to have some life experiences, some maturity

and some control to get away with this.

And we've seen other films that have tried to do this.

Even this pan, it's sort of... It's almost Addams family, isn't it?

We referred in another commentary track recently to...

There's that character in Disney's beauty and the beast

who uses antlers in all his interior decoration,

and that's something that is a signifier of wrongness.

Yes.

And... yet, I don't know whether...

In britain, the hunting issue is something that is really divisive.

There are basically two armed camps who will never reach any...

I don't know that even the German Greens have any particular...

In Germany, and indeed in France, boar hunting is just one of those things

that is absolutely central to country life.

And, yeah, woe betide any city slicker

who comes along with animal rights leaflets or whatever.

Here, there is a sense that the people who represent those sorts of country values

are the baddies.

But not in the way that they would be in a British film or even an American film,

where you have the Texas chainsaw massacre

where there's lots of bones and stuff hanging around.

Here, there's still a closeness to nature.

Yeah. I mean, it's a way of life.

Yeah.

And it's almost like the reason these people are sinners, as it were,

is that they fall away from that way of life,

not that they embrace it too much.

I mean, it's not...

The thing you occasionally get in...

I suppose, British films do folk horror and this isn't really that, is it?

It's almost like they accept.

And these really matter-of-fact visions

are very disturbing, but also...

They break up the notion of what ghostliness is or what dreams are.

At this point, the film is beyond

the easy division between waking and sleep.

And this creepy guy turning up...

We always wonder if he's going to look to the guy hanging

and it's going to be a fake, a joke.

But no, it was an apparition.

I don't think we know whether everybody else sees the apparitions.

Yeah, whether it's something to do with her lineage

that she has some, you know... Is able to discern this more clearly.

While she was upstairs, they didn't hang that boar on the wall.

They just stood there.

But again, the ghosts in this feel somewhat like the shining

in that they're presented in these quite brightly lit tableaux.

And here we have the three boars' heads linked to the three suicides.

Yeah.

And the survivor actually almost seems to commemorate them.

And they've lived for years with the dead guys on the wall

and they're now replacing them with the dead animals.

And this is the backstory, which is salted in very subtly.

I mean, I do quite like the way that, by the end of this film,

we do know what has happened.

Without it being overexplained.

And here we have the sort of ruins in the woods,

which are not really explored in this. I suspect they're just on the location.

Yeah, I think there's mention of them being the old armaments factory,

which again, sort of ties in

with the backstory of the generations of women.

But it's there as a kind of signifier of something

but isn't really, you know, laid on too heavily.

Do you think there's a possibility that the mother is dreaming this whole story?

There is also that, yeah!

It's like we're not going to get closure on that.

There's a little evil dead camera move there.

I should say... It's sort of extraneous to the film

but maybe explains some of the way we're thinking about it.

In this session we have just done a commentary track

for pupi avati's film zeder,

which is not something you would have thought of in connection with this film,

but we're seeing all kinds of threads between them.

They are both what I think of as "don't mention the war" horror films.

Zeder, an Italian film, is overshadowed by this great abandoned fascist structure

and here it's the ruins of totalitarian regimes

that people are living with.

I mean, you know, it's almost a commonplace now

that people obsess over.

What about the villagers who lived near death camps?

What did they think was going on

and how much did they know?

And this isn't as on the nose as that.

I mean, demon is, isn't it?

The sin at the heart of demon is explicitly a world war two story.

This is almost like the rot in the community or in the country

has expressed itself over the years in many ways.

But the actual story we've got here, although it is about a guest worker,

isn't it, the Polish worker, who's...

Yes, the so-called monster is the daughter of the Polish worker,

who we assume was raped by a Nazi.

Yes.

Or probably more like raped by a communist, isn't it?

- I mean, because of the dates. - I think they say German.

Possibly, maybe. Yeah, maybe.

- I thought it dated back to the war... - The war ended in 1945.

Yeah.

Yeah, I need to sit down and work out the generations properly.

Yeah, but it's almost...

When I first saw this, I had a moment of trying to work it out and thinking,

"is this actually set in, like, 1992 or whatever?"

But no, you see mobile phones at some point, don't you?

There are a few signifiers of the present day.

I think. I mean, I may well be misreading the cues,

but I think we are...

Yeah, it's called "wellness". That's a contemporary reference.

One of the things I liked about this scene is he starts dropping in

contemporary references like "wellness" and "co-working"

and all of a sudden they sound quite sinister.

This is the scene where you start to get a sense of him being not quite right.

Yeah.

I mean, it's not too much of a revelation to say he's the big baddie in this film.

Yes.

"Homeland return. I coined that phrase."

Yeah.

And then we have a shot of him where it sinks in

that maybe that's a really bad thing.

Yeah.

But I'm wondering, is the heroine a little too young

to pick up on how sinister that is?

Because part of the subtext of this story

is parents not telling their children what's been going on.

She talks about how her mother has been troubled and difficult all her life

and has not communicated.

And so, she's having to put together a personal backstory.

But on the same level,

it's like the whole country has failed to tell rising generations

what really happened.

Although, actually, it's mandatory in German education

that they do recognize the country's past.

But it's... you know, it's actually franzi, the other girl,

who sort of deals with the Nazis, as it were,

because she has to live with them every day,

whereas, you know, Mona has no awareness of this.

Yeah.

We get the sense that she's seeing something before we see it,

but, again, played very matter-of-factly. She's not reacting.

The problem is, I mean...

From our point of view,

British homes or apartment complexes don't have laundry rooms

so our only reference points to laundry rooms are horror films,

because it's always where bad things happen.

They're always dark and in the basement.

Yeah, it's never a good or a happy place.

Yeah. I'm sure there must be some apartment-living sitcom

where the housewives get together in the laundry room

and chat and have a good time,

but that's not the image of them that I've taken away

from my lifetime of watching horror pictures.

Yeah.

I notice Venus likes these slow, creepy track-in shots,

which is very kubrickian.

But they're always... It's a visual form of underlining,

but it also somehow puts you on edge.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Do you think there's still a place

for the grown-up horror movie anymore?

Do you think it will ever come back with the force that it...?

In recent years there's been a kind of contrived artificial debate

about elevated horror, which I think is a foolish term.

I mean, what it means is good horror.

And, yeah, we've always liked good horror.

Yeah.

It's the val lewton approach to horror.

And it strikes me that it's something that pretty much always works.

And certainly, I would say, yeah, maybe...

We are talking in late 2021,

so after two very, very unusual years in the cinema,

where, actually, for a period it was almost like horror movies

were the only things that were regularly coming out.

While the studios held back their big-franchise tent Poles,

we were still getting the regular diet of good creepy horror pictures.

And streaming services seem to be doing a lot of adult-skewing horror.

Even slow-burning horror seems to be something

that's made a bit of a comeback in recent years.

I think what it is, it's the kind of horror

that general audiences can almost be seduced into watching.

People who wouldn't go and see even, like, a conjuring sequel

will watch something that's couched as a creepy thriller

with supernatural overtones.

I think if this were a British or an American project,

it would be a four-part TV or streaming show, wouldn't it?

I actually think that this particular story is perfectly suited to its feature length.

- Oh, no, absolutely. - It feels the right length to me.

And mostly because it's the kind of mystery horror

that's so focused on our central character, on Mona.

Yeah.

I think if it were conceived as a streaming serial,

like, say, the German show dark,

which is another deep-in-the-woods show,

it would be an ensemble piece.

You'd have much more about everybody else in this community

and probably dramatized flashbacks.

I mean, we get those but only in fragmentary form,

but not, as it were, an entire thread of dramatized flashbacks

leading up to the tragedy that by now we have worked out.

Yes.

There's still a lot to be said for telling a compressed story in an hour and a half.

I worry that maybe because that's been the default of cinema for so long,

it's one of the things we might lose.

It seems strange that this kind of storytelling

is migrating to, as it were, other media.

And even theatrical horror films are getting longer

or more franchised or it's like...

Every year you get something like the night house, don't you?

Something comes along that is...

What I always think is "one and done". It's not a franchise.

It tells its story, it gets it over with, you come home terrified.

And that's...

Although this, as a German film,

it doesn't seem to feel obliged to fit into a genre pigeonhole

the way even upscale British or American horror...

Yeah. There are a couple ofjump scares in this,

and there's one or two really good ones,

but they feel earned, don't they, rather than posed,

rather than a producer's note saying, "yeah, we're 20 minutes in."

"We got to jump now."

And, you know, the so-called monster

or the woman that's being positioned as the monster,

although eventually it's revealed, there's more to the story than that.

But it never... she's presented as being odd and unsettling, perhaps,

but never in a, like, obviously scary kind of way.

She's not even Japanese ghost scary.

And actually, the basic narrative of this is very like a grudge film, isn't it?

Yes, absolutely.

Something wrong was done to a woman many years ago

and she's still here and she's never gonna let it drop.

But that's also the basic witch-in-the-woods story, isn't it?

Everybody forgets something terribly wrong was done to medusa

before she became a monster.

Our icons of female monstrousness usually have these tragic backstories,

almost invariably involving a horrible betrayal by a man,

aflhough_.

And often with the compliance of an older woman.

That's how we get our female monsters.

What's interesting about this

is that it shows how the Nazis appropriate that myth

and turn it into something...

You know, a scary story about why you should be afraid of women.

It shows how that sort of myth-making works.

And I always like it when horror films address the underlying myths

and start asking the questions.

And the risk there is you take away the scariness.

Yes.

Because here the threat does extend to essentially innocent people,

but our major victims are people that we would necessarily tag as bad.

Yeah.

And, in fact, they don't even try and make the three guys who killed themselves

rounded, semi-sympathetic characters.

They're just people who did a bad thing and they're dead.

But we're still having to deal with the consequences of the bad thing.

Yes, and when you actually see them in the flesh, as it were, in the movie,

they have got boar masks on, they're these animals.

And here we've gone from...

It's another lynchian thing, isn't it, the disturbing nightclub sequence

into the, "what?".

And this, I think, is something that I first noticed in Japanese films,

the idea that female contortionists are scary.

I know that the performers who played these roles...

The actress is agata buzek, who's got a clutch of things...

But I wonder if she was cast in this because she could do that.

And, in fact, all of the actors do this, it's not just...

Although she's the one that moves most distinctively, but yeah.

There are actually some performers who now specialize

in doing roles like this.

But we are, I don't know, 20 years into the "contortionists are scary"...

So we have the...

Bonnie Aarons is the American woman,

but there's also Javier botet,

who is kind of the master of those roles.

And our good friend James swanton is picking up...

Hopefully the new generation.

Yeah.

And grace ker, who we work with on stage, does this stuff too.

Yeah, it's a very distinct set of skills.

Yes!

And somehow it's creepier than the cg! Effects that they replaced.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Interesting how this appears to be Mona's dream,

and yet we're cutting back and forth with this and the mother.

There is the possibility that the mother is...

I mean... and in fact, that's also her grandmother.

Yes.

So it's a dream being passed down the female line with a...

I suppose the eroticism is a misdirection.

Although, even though that's a full-contact nude scene,

it's not particularly sexy.

It's more like watching those strange pieces of modern dance.

It's designed to disturb rather than arouse.

And this poor woman.

Again, it's sort of interesting

that when that pair of characters are introduced in the film,

she seems to be being presented as this bitchy older woman

and he's the affable nice guy.

And then it turns out she's lived this horrendous existence.

That's right. She has been fuming all these years.

Yeah.

Yeah, and the actress is Marion kracht,

who was in lady Dracula in 1977.

Which I'm sure you're familiar with!

It's an obscure vampire comedy from the '70s with...

Evelyne kraft is the lead and Stephen Boyd plays Dracula, but...

Marion kracht is...

I mean, actually, she's very striking in it

and she's worked steadily ever since.

This, I have to say, is the film I'm going to remember her for, actually.

There's this moment where she's deciding

whether to let him finally strangle himself.

Yes, that's right, yeah.

You kind of think, "what is she doing?",

and then obviously it becomes clear why she hesitates.

Yeah.

She's been having to do this every night for decades.

And then...

But I suppose we do think, "she could have just let him kill himself."

It's like she has been prevailed a lot on to delay this.

And this is another odd bit.

Yeah.

It's one of those sort of fakeouts, which are fairly commonplace

in horror movies related to dreams, but it's not a scare.

Yeah, it's... at first you think that that's a real development.

Then it's just taken back.

It does make me wonder whether Michael Venus' favorite film

is an American werewolf in London,

because that also has a fake waking-up sequence.

Yeah.

And actually, this is a thing that I've experienced in real hotels,

but I can't remember it being in any hotel horror movie much,

the fact that people have access to your room, your stuff.

And sometimes they can turn up when you really aren't expecting them.

They're supposed to knock and say, "room service", or whatever.

But guys like this who basically think of this as their space

will not recognize the temporary space that you have rented from them,

leased from them, as yours.

No, absolutely. I had a landlord that would do that

back in the days when I used to live in a bedsit in London,

who would just let himself into my bedsit.

No, it's a commonplace violation, isn't it?

Yeah.

And here we are with the horror of German breakfast.

Yeah.

The thing is, that's probably delicious.

I was going to say.

It's just it rapidly is made to look less than delicious

with what's happens in a few moments.

Just for the family.

Don't you like it?

I do. It's just a bit much on an empty stomach.

Yes, the little carved pigs and the "just for the family" line,

it's all tying together.

We've talked before about our love of clues.

- Yes, yes. - And plot points.

The way it all slowly comes together.

And even the camera move there to remind us

he did that, those pigs are his.

And I wonder if it's a sort of storytelling that you don't see as much these days.

There seems to be a constant fear, certainly in mainstream cinema,

of the audience getting lost, so things have to be underlined a lot.

I do think that that is a...

It's something that's an issue with genre cinema

that is, I don't want to say dumbed down,

but it's that sense that they want everything explicable.

And I think that European culture

and France, Germany, Italy, scandinavia, or whatever,

they produce plenty of horror and crime and science-fiction, romcoms, whatever,

but they all tend to assume that they're for grown-ups,

and they bend over backwards not to insult the audience.

And the downside is sometimes you do get films that are too obscure,

particularly if you don't pick up on all the cultural references

because you're not part of the culture.

We've seen films that are completely understood by their audiences

but are impenetrable to us.

Yeah, the deadly sausage-eating.

You're never gonna look at your fry-up the same way.

Yeah.

And this is kind of disturbing because it's a betrayal of us, the audience.

We thought this was the sensible character,

the character who was untouched and untouchable within the story.

Somebody who might be endangered but would never go off the rails like this.

I suppose we had her pegged by now as a final girl,

which she is,

but this kind of stuff is not...

If you tried to sell this to an American exec, you'd get notes! Yeah.

And that is a great shot, isn't it?

Although that dessert looks great to me.

Don't make it even worse.

I like that. "Don't make it even worse."

Yeah.

And now we see him, you know, sort of revealed.

Yeah.

The compulsion to strangle seems to have been the part of the curse he got.

And this guy, the kind of junior bad guy, is so utterly feckless, isn't he?

And I think that, again, it's something you see in dynastic evil, isn't it?

Where eventually you get a generation who are raised in evil

but are also just useless.

And sometimes they can be the scariest people.

- You know, Kim jong-UN is one. - Right, yeah.

People who inherit a position of power or authority

that they've done nothing to earn

and yet they're sometimes capable of the worst atrocities

simply to prove that they're part of... They're on side.

And obviously they've grown up

not really having to work too hard for what they get.

You can see this guy is not going to be able to lead a fascist movement.

Any future is not going to exist past him.

Christoph.

And is this the moment we realize that it's the son?

Yeah. I think it's never really made clear before that.

But because this community only has one family...

Yes, who run everything!

But it's another... because, obviously, he has gone in another direction from...

Yeah, he has a potential to escape from the past,

almost because he seems unaware of it.

And yet, he's technically the heir of all this, isn't he?

It also seems to be now being positioned as he's the white knight

who's gonna come to the rescue and yet doesn't really.

This is a film that only seems to recognize female agency.

Yes.

Where all the men are variously useless.

And even the women who are in the wrong are stronger.

Yes.

That's fine. Now put the tablecloths on them.

Yes, very good.

And this is what he's been actually working on all along, isn't it?

It's his mayoral campaign, which seems to be rooted

in a sort of resurgent fascist or right-wing...

And actually, I mean, all throughout Europe, including britain

and indeed america, have had these sort of...

They can't call themselves Nazis,

but they're pretty close.

But I like how he positions it in kind of a village-hall setting.

It's sort of like this is where the Nazi uprising is going on,

in the local community center and village hall.

Yeah, but...

If there's an issue I would take with this film

it's that I don't think it takes fascism seriously enough.

It was made a couple of years ago, although it's a modern film.

I think one of the lessons of the last two or three years

is that, yes, these people are ridiculous, but they are so dangerous.

Yeah, perhaps.

I think that would be felt even more...

They also don't like being laughed at

and I think that can be quite an effective weapon.

And I do kind of like the way it positions...

Obviously, you know, he is the main Nazi character

and it positions him as a threat

and then immediately proceeds to undercut that

by making them all look ridiculous.

I do think that's kind of interesting.

There is a bit of "tomorrow belongs to me" in that sort of music.

It's like, let's say, the two greatest fascist anthems,

"tomorrow belongs to me" and "springtime for Hitler",

both written by Jews.

Both absolutely skewer the...

And in very different ways.

Those two sequences absolutely have made...

Have probably made actual, straight-up, full-strength nazism impossible

for the rest of the century, just because it's so absurd.

I think that this film at least...

This guy is loathsome and disgusting,

but it gives him some points.

There's the moment where's he sat there listening to the choir

and he's visibly moved but not going...

There has to be some sense

that he's not just a complete self-serving bad guy.

Yeah.

There's a core of conviction.

It may be hateful, but there is something there.

And again, I think that that's something that quite often we overlook at our peril.

Yes.

The people are not just...

Bad guys don't think they're bad.

People are not just reviving all these terrible attitudes as a joke.

They really mean it.

Here we have our dead guys in the flesh, as it were, but...

Animal masks have been a big thing in folk horror, haven't they?

It's almost... it's a signifier that's perhaps overdone,

although it seems always to work.

Yeah, that's the thing. There is something creepy about them still.

And I suppose it is at least woven into the fabric of the film.

We have the imagery of the boar

and now we sort of understand why.

And we even saw him carving little ones.

So there's a kind of a feel to it.

I would have thought that maybe this is an image

that has been used too often, but it seems to be inexhaustible.

It's always scary.

And yet, here at the heart of it,

we find that the witch who lives in the woods is actually good.

Yes! A wronged woman.

Yeah.

And it's this strange thing of the heroine actually going back into a flashback

and being there and observing it.

I always associate it as a stratagem with Annie hall

where it's used brilliantly for comedy effect.

I was thinking more... it reminded me of the dead zone a bit,

the way cronenberg has him present in his own visions.

Yeah...

Whereas with this she's interacting with her visions.

Isuppose_. Yeah, there's a mobile phone.

So this is this year, or, well, yeah, 2019.

I see we're before the great hiatus.

Do you think Sandra hiiller got off easy in this?

Yeah. You basicallyjust have to be asleep for half the movie!

The biggest-name performer in it.

Someone who's got a bit of a tailwind behind her, although she's...

I doubt if she'd define herself as a movie star,

but she's obviously a substantial actress in Germany

and must have been a get for this project.

What's interesting about this scene where everything is revealed is

that the moment where we're told that that baby is, in fact, her mother

is kind of thrown away almost.

And it's...

I know that Venus has talked about grimm's fairy tales

and how much is taken from there,

but this is sleeping beauty, isn't it?

The woodcutter takes the baby into the woods

and he's told to kill it but doesn't.

It's actually that moment of soft-heartedness that makes the...

Although, as we see, it's actually his...

It's the wife that saves the child in the end.

He is utterly ruthless about it, isn't he?

I think she's very strong in actually not a huge role.

Yeah.

I mean, she's obviously very sort of striking-looking, but...

Doesn't overdo it either.

And the interaction with the future granddaughter...

Yes.

And this, I think, is the funniest moment in the film

and yet, it's actually quite disturbing.

She's like, "I'm just closing the Nazis."

Yeah.

Yeah, and that long pause.

"Don't touch the white wine."

Yeah, that's right.

Because, obviously, this renders our actual existential threat ridiculous.

And it's another moment of...

I mean, it parallels the flashback.

Again, we've been reaching across the generations

and finding a perhaps unexpected kinship.

Yeah.

I'm assuming that franzi isn't related in some way,

because she seems to be positioned as the girlfriend of christoph.

Oh, extra, extra big dose in the beer!

But I mean, she's... yeah, presumably going to join the...

Yeah, it's the moment where it's revealed that there's suddenly more to her.

It's before we see that she actually saved the baby, but...

Otto!

Thanks.

I'm delighted to welcome...

The subtitles of "the first big slaughter festival".

I think it's something like schlachtfest, isn't it,

which probably isn't quite as disturbing-sounding as...

Yeah.

I see that there are some women among the Nazis.

But they're all wives and mothers and tag-along rather than active.

And it is mostly these guys who are too young

to have been around in the second world war.

They are people who would have lived through the communist period.

Although, of course, that ended over 30 years ago now.

Yes! Fight!

Fight!

To stainbach!

To stainbach!

But, I mean, it is careful, his speech, as you say.

It's not just, you know... Wanton cartoon villainy.

He's making actual points about their community

and making you understand why this might appeal to people.

Yeah. And why it has appealed to so many people across Europe

and certainly in britain in the last couple of years

and definitely in america, this kind of pitch.

The strange thing is this guy's pitch is subtler

than the pitch extreme right-wingers have used successfully,

because he doesn't talk much about othering and the hatred,

which actually right-wing politicians in the west have been doing just nakedly

in the last couple of years,

have nakedly picked on any number of groups of people

to have a go at and, what they say, "rally the base" or "own the libs" or...

It's odd, he's the villain of this film, but he's a better person

than the leaders of many right-wing parties across the world.

I suppose this particular cell or cabal is founded on misogyny.

It's founded on the literal othering of a Polish woman.

Yes, that they've now turned into a scary fairytale.

And it's almost like the film doesn't need to have him, say,

give a speech about how feminism has ruined...

The spirit of Germany or whatever.

Although frankly, you do hear those speeches from far-right politicians

doing all that "back to the kitchen" stuff.

Very good direction of the extras here.

Because it only takes one to ruin this.

Yeah, and he starting to do the gestures and the voice.

Yeah.

But interestingly, because he's, you know...

Been closed.

Because he's tripping, yeah.

It's all coming out now that he's...

I suppose it's the idea

that people reveal themselves when they put the masks on.

And it's a daring strategy

that now our main heroine is as immobilized as our secondary heroine.

And that's the moment where we know this guy is beyond redemption.

Any flicker of sympathy

or sense that we've had of him as a ridiculous figure just goes.

Yeah.

Especially because we're not quite sure whether she's in danger as well,

because it's unclear as to whether this is a dream or a vision.

She's sort of transported back. Yeah, she might die in a flashback

in the way that people say that you can die in a dream

or die in your sleep.

And actually that's one of the things about the nightmare,

that idea that sleep paralysis is actually a dangerous condition

because, after all, if people die that way, they can't tell you.

And actually, in post-mortem, it's really difficult to identify,

but that may well be a factor.

They tend to give it...

An acronym to make it sound like...

Sudden unexplained death in sleep: Suds.

"We'll give it a name that basically admits we don't know what it is."

And this is the thing, of course, that politicians never do.

Of course, the terrifying thing is he would probably win.

It's actually a very good display of stoned acting,

which is, again, something that people think is easy.

Yes.

I assume that there was a notice saying this film contains flashing lights earlier.

But this is a rare instance of flashing lights actually used

as an aggressive weapon.

The revelation that she's been the heroine all along, really.

Yeah.

But there is a bit of suspense as well.

It's building that tension as to: Is she's going to die in the dream?

Logically, in the past the danger is over.

Yeah.

I suppose she could still choke, but...

And here we've been exploded into another level of reality.

Yes!

Now it's that sort of Chinese box structure

where you don't really know at what point you're in reality anymore.

And it's an impossible photograph.

Which is almost a convention in horror cinema, isn't it?

Obviously the shining has one.

Burnt offerings has impossible photographs.

I assume that it's a signifier of this being a fantasy nethennorld

where she can tour the past.

You go further than your mother ever dared to go.

And this is sort of a...

Whatever this particular adjunct to reality is

seems to be warm and sisterly,

but actually trude's kind of menacing still, isn't she?

There's still a bit of a...

A witchiness to her.

She essentially basically wants her to be the instrument

by which she can finish enacting her revenge.

Yeah. Just because the guy's been strapping himself to his bed...

She's plan b.

Her bloodline will return.

Mona just wants to save her mother and that's really all it's about.

But all this talk about, "it ends with him and the bloodline is over", it's not!

Yeah.

Because certainly her bloodline endures, and so does his, but in...

With the dominance of the mother in the family

we presume that's an optimistic or a healing notion,

that we can get past these awful guys

who've been holding Europe back for so long.

I would like to think that that was true.

Let's hope.

A possibility, yeah.

In the short term we can take comfort in how ridiculous they look.

And it's, of course, a risky strategy to give Nazis a load of drugs.

And here, it underlines the fact he's been relying on her all these years.

Yeah.

How can you talk to me like that?

Tie me up!

And her weapon is a meat tenderizer.

Well, it sort of... He is made to look buffoonish,

but it does sort of restore him as a threat by the end.

It does sort of walk that line.

Where's the girl?

In the laundry room.

Because it would be easy to lose suspense and horror

and just go for absurdist comedy or surrealism or whatever,

but it remains something that functions as a suspense narrative,

a thriller narrative, mystery.

Strangely... I don't know how you feel about this,

but it's always struck me that in a way it's easier to make an art film

with subject matter like this,

because you don't have to worry

about the nuts and bolts of plotting and backstory

and all that Agatha christie stuff,

that thriller stuff, that murder-mystery element

where all the clues have to add up, everything has to fit together.

You have to get a picture that makes sense

and you can think about for days aftennards and say, "oh, yeah."

If you just do, I suppose, what David lynch does

and say, "none of that really matters",

you know what? That saves you a couple of weeks.

It does, yeah!

Certainly in the development process.

It's so much easierjust to go weird.

- And say, "you figure it out." - Yeah, that's right.

And let the audience...

And sometimes... I mean, that effect or that approach

can also lead to stuff that is so irrationally terrifying

it scars audiences for life.

And it's entirely valid,

but I think we should notice it's also a shortcut sometimes.

Yes.

It's also a way of saying, "I couldn't be bothered to work all this out, so..."

I think that's why it works with lynch, because you do get the sense

that he is tapping into something genuinely, you know,

that he's dredging up from his subconscious.

Whereas, although it's a film I like a lot, I think the shining cheats.

I think that kubrick couldn't be bothered

to make certain elements of the backstory and the mystery cohere.

I think sometimes he skates over stuff, like how Jack gets out of the fridge.

Right!

It's like, that was a question that must have been debated on the set

and they never had an answer to it.

Yeah. There is no ambiguity.

Well, essentially, that's the scene that confirms the ghosts have to be real.

Yeah. But I think that this is a film that doesn't take that easy out.

- And I admire that. - It does connect.

I admire that as a writer because I know how difficult it is

and I know how frustrating those extra three weeks of work on the script are

where... it's like whac-a-mole, isn't it?

You think you've knocked them all down, but no, some other tab comes up

or some other loose end and you think, "how does that fit in?"

"Is that just an awkward aside?"

"Do we hope people won't remember that or notice it?"

Whereas there's a rigor to this that I admire and appreciate.

And now the mother is coming back into it as a character.

Yeah, and I kind of wonder how we're meant to read this,

her walking very slowly to the hotel.

Is there an element of black comedy in this?

Is she going to get there in time to save the day?

And is christoph our hope for the future of masculinity in Europe?

- He's still a young, blond German. - He is.

But he seems to be a kind of sensitive guy, doesn't he?

And he's got a sense of humor.

I mean, there isn't that much to him,

but his presence means

that this isn't a film that could be accused of misandry.

A word that our politicians don't seem aware of.

And although it sets it up

that you kind of want to see her, you know, avenge the other women,

it also takes the time to go, "it's not that easy",

and she can't quite bring herself to do it at first.

It's not a natural thing.

I mean, it's a...

It's a hump that a lot of horror films have to get over.

People don't go from one to a hundred overnight

in terms of what they're willing to do, even in extreme circumstances.

We do have one of those...

Again, it's a horror-movie hospital with almost no staff or patients or...

It's as disembodied and empty as the hotel.

Yeah.

But maybe that's...

Like the hotel, it was probably built during an economic boom

when the community is expected to be thriving.

That fits with the backstory of the village and everything as well.

That all this stuff was going to be big and then wasn't, and actually...

That's something that's in dark as well,

the idea of how communities are dependent on their economy,

which is a subtext in some American and British horror,

but it's very rarely explicitly addressed.

How miserable a place is

can quite often just be down to the factory closing

as opposed to the deep, dark sins of Salem's lot or whatever.

And that's precisely the kind of soil that fascism will spring up from.

And it does ask the question: What do we want to see happen here?

Yeah. Obviously, as an audience we want to see him die.

It's this thing that even if as a person you're against capital punishment,

you want to see screen villains die.

And it's disappointing if a film ducks out of it.

But here, there is a sense that you don't really want to see her tainted.

She's got a chance to get out of this cycle

and she ended it in a very unusual way in the dream.

Although now we have the...

This reverts to a slightly more conventional...

Heroine versus psycho baddie.

Well, you know, I suppose the ultimate moral is

you can't cut a Nazi a break, basically.

Everything ok?

And again, this is the kind of shining moment

of the guy that turns up to help but then doesn't.

I always... And actually, that's a thing

that I know Stephen King disagreed with Stanley kubrick about

but always strikes me as being the right decision in the film.

I'm sorry to see scatman crothers go as well, but...

It's more horrifying to have your expectations overturned like that.

Danny and Wendy have to save themselves for the story to work.

And here...

Yeah, various people could possibly come to her rescue.

Yes!

I do think we have a sense this isn't one of those films

that's going to be so despairing it's going to end with evil triumphant.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think there's a certain good-naturedness to it.

Yeah, it's like, Michael haneke would have killed him.

And made you feel bad about it aftennards.

He would have ended it with him saying, "it's your fault."

"Feel bad, you're supposed to."

Whereas here we do have a rooting interest.

It gives us a positive way out of a horrible situation.

Yeah.

Even if it's that all these awful people are going to grow old and die.

Yeah.

Whereas, I mean, he does eventually get his comeuppance,

but she has to be shown that there's no...

That there's no being reasonable with Nazis, ultimately.

And we have edged into grand guignol for the finale, after having...

I suppose most of the film has fringed on horror without really being there.

And I quite like the fact that literally a lighting change

is what takes us into full-on...

Suspiria lighting, isn't it?

And the ghost girl coming out of the grave like sadako coming out of the well.

Even that big hotel sign has a kind of particular feel.

It's almost like it's advertising that Jessica hausner film.

Which someone should really re-release. It's very difficult to see these days.

It did have... I mean that toured the festivals,

but I don't think it actually particularly got anywhere.

I think it got a DVD release here, but it's out of print now.

I mean, if you like this, you should track that down.

Because it's a different story, but it has a similar feel.

It's a hotel at the edge of the woods with grimm's fairy tales stuff

and an interestingly obsessive female protagonist.

I can't remember whether it was pauline Kael or Susan sontag

who described a certain type of European film

as "come as the sick soul of Europe party".

- That was Kael. - That's right.

That's it, isn't it?

There is a sort of sense of that. And, hey, as an American, she can talk!

But if arrow want to pick up the rights to hotel,

then we'll be back to do the commentary for that one.

Because it's a film that wasn't seen much,

you don't think it could have been influential,

but a lot of subsequent films have done stuff a lot like it.

Maybe this will have a similar impact

because this is its highest profile outside Germany on this release.

And I think it'll impress a lot of people, certainly a generation of filmmakers

who will find bits and pieces of it,

because, although in this track

we have quite often related it to earlier films

or general trends or underlying approaches,

it does so much stuff that is fresh and unusual.

And it's hard sometimes to point that out just because it is new.

It's more than the sum of its influences.

It's taking them and it's doing something with them.

And it's got a real unusual feel.

Even this moment is, you know, it's the heroine and the villain,

but it's also the woman and her dad.

Yeah.

That is there.

She's kind of grieving for a lost father she never had.

Yeah.

- It's the feint at the haneke ending. - Yes, that's right.

We might have gone with that.

And we have come to scrabbling in a grave.

But all through, we've had sort of moments or asides or feints

which have brought in kind of a warmth and a humor

and a spikiness that...

As I say, this is not a complete downer

in the way that so many horror films on this subject are.

It's like... the director of demon committed suicide at a film festival,

which suggests where his head was at.

This subject matter does not provoke warm, happy thoughts often.

But this is a film that does not absolutely depress me.

- I find it quite exhilarating. - Yes, absolutely.

And it ends with love, which is kind of what you want.

So any final thoughts on schlaf?

Well, I think it's interesting to... As you say, you know,

it's unusual for us to take a new film and discuss it,

but I think it's definitely been interesting to kind of dissect it

and hopefully we've managed to point out some interesting stuff

and draw links with the past

but also show why it's fresh and new and a new voice worth looking at.

And I love the fact it has a mid-credit sting as well,

which takes it into a sort of another era.

I'm not quite sure where we're going with this,

but there's a sort of... A kind of limbo-like sitcom feel to this.

Yeah.

As if maybe we're going to get a spinoff in a completely different genre,

which I think is sort of... Again, it's kind of sweet.

Yeah.

Is that a particularly German game?

It's played in lnglourious basterds as well.

Oh, yeah. I don't know. I never would have thought of it as such.

It's not particularly common,

but I knew of it before lnglourious basterds.

I think I'd been at parties where people had played it.

It's a silly guessing game, but yeah...

And yes, here we have the pan to the creepy corridor,

the possibility that...

What do we think is coming out of the darkness?

What's coming out of there?

Yes.

It's a pig.

Which is almost where we came in.

So, yes, I guess what we take away from that

is that the pig will always be there.

You can't just make sausages out of it.

I've just realized it's a joke. It's a fascist pig.

Oh! Yeah, of course.

I don't know if that expression is much used in Germany.

That might be a coincidence.

It's certainly something I heard a lot on the left in the 1970s.