Featured Image Credit: Leisure Time Features
Topics: Film and TV, Weird
Lucy Devine
Warning: This article contains content which some readers may find distressing.
A film was branded so 'revolting' that it was actually banned in six countries.
The movie is a 1987 German horror flick and was hugely controversial at the time it was released, due to its sickening subject matter.
It tells the story of Robert, a street sweeper who likes to have sex with corpses.
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His 'interests' in necrophilia are shared with his wife, Betty, and the pair even have body parts all over their home.
On one occasion, Robert is involved in recovering the body of a man, who had been discovered in a lake.
He manages to secretly take the man's body home for Betty and the pair carry out their disturbing fantasies.
Robert ends up getting fired from his job, dumped by Betty and taking his own life after committing two, gruesome murders.
The movie - called Nekromantik and starred Bernd Daktari Lorenz as Robert and Beatrice Manowski as Betty - is seriously dark, so it's no wonder that it was banned in several countries, including Iceland, Malaysia, Singapore, certain provinces in Canada, Australia and Finland.
It had been banned in the UK, but this was lifted in 2014 when it was released by Arrow Films.
At the time, Arrow Films' Francesco Simeoni said: "Unless we decide to do a cover-mount DVD on a tabloid, which will obviously never happen, who's going to be offended?"
Some people who have watched the movie ended up regretting it, however.
One wrote on Reddit: "I think this is the only horror movie I can remember that I regret seeing. It revolves around necrophilia and is basically soft core necrophilia porn."
The film ended up having a sequel, Nekromantik 2, which picked up from where the first ended, but this time it focused on a nurse named Monika.
It is Monika who appeared at the end of the original movie, where she retrieved Robert's body and took it home to her apartment.
Monika is also a necrophiliac, but desperately wants to live a normal life.
When she meets Mark, Monika tries to give up her gruesome hobby, but Mark ends up finding Robert's genitals in her fridge, where she had decided to store them.
Speaking about making a sequel, director Jörg Buttgereit told Virginie Sélavy:
"After I had that freedom with Der Todesking I wasn’t afraid to do a sequel anymore because I knew I could do something different, I didn’t have to do the same thing all over again.
"The fact that the Wall came down in between the first and the second Nekromantik was a good way of having a different point of view on the topic.
"And of course this time the film was made from a woman’s point of view, which is something I felt was necessary, because all the movies I made before had a male audience."