Eckhart Schmidt directs Désirée Nosbusch, Bodo Staiger and Simone Brahmann in this German arthouse horror where an obsessed teenager abandons her suburban life to meet a New Wave pop star.

All slow build to a violent, yet strangely sterile, finale. If you’ve seen images of Der Fan then you’ve no doubt seen a fully nude Désirée Nosbusch getting up to no good with a serrated blade. That kind of behaviour makes up so little of the movie and is handled so clinically that it probably is not going to satisfy either gorehounds or dirty macs. What the movie does really well is get into this girl’s unhinged but sympathetic head space. At one point the camera is literally swallowed by the vulnerable teen. We understand her yearning, and her delusion. We can barely believe it when it seems her dreams are coming true. Though we are not shocked to discover that the dream cannot last forever and there are plenty of men who want to ignore, belittle or exploit her. So it’s satisfying she gets the last laugh. And as a fully committed artefact of post-punk fashions and the slightly naff pretensions of the manufactured European pop scene, Der Fan is quite the treat.

6

Perfect Double Bill: Raw (2016)

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/