Why Nazi-Occult Horror Never Dies

Nobody defends this subgenre and nobody can kill it. Underwater SS zombies surfacing off a Florida sandbar, Himmler’s archaeologists digging in Tibet, a Wehrmacht garrison waking something in a Carpathian keep, an Ark that melts a face in a Nazi field lab: the material has been discredited by historians, savaged by critics, exhausted by three separate exploitation cycles and produced perhaps two genuinely good films in fifty years. It came back in 2009, in 2013 and in 2018 anyway. It will come back again.

The persistence has two causes, and neither is that audiences enjoy Nazis. The first is that the premise contains a small, awkward core of verified fact. The second is that the subgenre solves the hardest structural problem in horror, and solves it so completely that filmmakers keep returning to the cheat regardless of the taste cost.

The five per cent that is real

The Ahnenerbe existed. Himmler founded it in 1935 with the Dutch amateur prehistorian Herman Wirth and the agriculture minister Walther Darré, and it operated as an SS research institute for Germanic ancestral heritage until the regime’s collapse. It ran real expeditions — Ernst Schäfer’s German expedition to Tibet in 1938–39 is the one every film borrows, complete with the anthropometric skull measurements and the newsreel footage. It later became institutionally entangled with medical atrocity, which is a fact of a different order entirely and which no zombie film has ever earned the right to touch. Himmler really did acquire Wewelsburg castle and remodel it. The Thule Society really existed in Munich from 1918 and really did stand at the edge of the party’s founding.

That is the deposit. Everything else — the Spear of Destiny, the Vril, the Antarctic base, the surviving Führer in a jar — was manufactured, and the manufacture has a date and an author. Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier published Le Matin des magiciens in 1960, an enormous bestseller that assembled the modern myth of a magical Reich out of speculation and journalistic verve, and Trevor Ravenscroft’s The Spear of Destiny (1973) monetised the sequel. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985) is the scholarly deflation, and its conclusion is unglamorous: the occultists were cranks on the periphery, the party used them and discarded them, and Himmler’s mysticism was a personal eccentricity indulged with state money rather than a governing programme.

So the films are adapting a 1960 French paperback and calling it history. What keeps the fraud alive is that the five per cent is checkable — a reader who looks up the Ahnenerbe finds it, and the confirmation of the small thing lends unearned credit to the large one. That is the same mechanism that powers every good conspiracy, and horror has always been a conspiracy delivery system.

The problem it solves

Horror’s structural difficulty is the antagonist. A monster with a grievance invites sympathy; a killer with a childhood invites a psychiatrist; a slasher with a mask invites forty years of fans in T-shirts. Every villain in the genre eventually accrues a defence, because audiences are generous and screenwriters get bored.

The Nazi-occult film is the one place where that never happens. The antagonist arrives pre-condemned, the audience needs no orientation, and the film can spend its entire budget on the supernatural apparatus without a minute of moral scaffolding. It is a cheat, and it is enormously efficient. Compare the effort Hammer had to spend establishing that its Satanists were bad people — The Devil Rides Out (1968) devotes reels to the theology before it can menace anybody — with the zero seconds a film needs to establish that the SS officer with the grimoire should lose. A Dark Song (2016) shows how much work a genuine occult ritual takes to dramatise honestly, and the Nazi film skips all of it.

That efficiency is why the subgenre is a magnet for the underfunded.

The Eurotrash floor

The 1970s cycle is mostly indefensible and worth understanding anyway.

Ken Wiederhorn’s Shock Waves (1977) is the honourable exception and the best of the drowned-SS films by a distance. Made in Florida for a sum usually cited around $200,000, with Peter Cushing as a broken Nazi commander and John Carradine as a boat captain, it puts its dead soldiers underwater in goggles and lets them walk up out of the shallows in broad daylight. Cushing plays it entirely straight, which is what a professional does, and the film’s dread comes from silence and sun rather than gore. It has almost no plot and it works.

Below that is a floor with no bottom. Zombie Lake (1981) was set up for Jesús Franco, who walked, and finished by Jean Rollin under the pseudonym J.A. Lazer — the same Rollin whose vampire films are among the most beautiful things in French genre cinema. The man who made The Iron Rose and Lips of Blood shot green-painted extras in a swimming pool because someone was paying. Franco then made Oasis of the Zombies (1982) himself. The prolific king of Eurotrash took every job offered, and this is what the bottom of that filmography looks like.

Further down again sits the Ilsa cycle, which began in 1975 and was shot on the standing sets of Hogan’s Heroes after the sitcom was cancelled — a production fact that tells you everything about the seriousness of the enterprise and about what American television had already done to the material. There is no craft argument to make here. The films are pornography wearing a death camp, and the reason to name them is that they are the honest terminus of the licence described above: once the antagonist requires no moral work, nothing requires any moral work.

The one that nearly worked

Michael Mann’s The Keep (1983), from F. Paul Wilson’s 1981 novel, is the subgenre’s great ruin. A Wehrmacht detachment garrisons a Romanian keep and starts dying; an SS unit arrives; the thing in the walls turns out to have its own agenda, and the film’s best idea is that it is delighted to be found by exactly these men.

Mann shot it in Wales on a purpose-built set, with Tangerine Dream scoring, Alex Thomson lighting it in shafts of smoke and blue, and a cast including Scott Glenn, Ian McKellen and Jürgen Prochnow. His assembly reportedly ran to three and a half hours. Paramount released ninety-six minutes. The effects supervisor Wally Veevers died during post-production, and the sequences that most needed him were finished without him. What survives is a film with the most beautiful ten minutes in this entire essay and a third act that collapses into fog and light, and it has never had the restoration it needs — Mann has been consistently unenthusiastic about revisiting it. The precision he brought to Manhunter three years later shows what the material lost.

Spielberg’s fix

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) is the film that made the subgenre commercially permanent, and it works because Lawrence Kasdan’s script treats the occult as machinery rather than as mysticism. The Ark has rules. It requires a headpiece, a specific staff height, a map room and a time of day. Belloq’s ritual follows a procedure. When it opens, it behaves consistently, and the survival condition — close your eyes — is stated in advance and obeyed.

That is the whole lesson, and almost nobody has learned it. The Nazi-occult film works exactly to the degree that its supernatural element has terms. Give the thing in the keep a rule and you have a film; give it an aura and you have fog. Guillermo del Toro understood this when he built Hellboy (2004) out of Mike Mignola’s comic, opening on a Nazi ritual on a Scottish island and then spending the rest of the film on the creature it summoned, who is a person with a job. Del Toro’s monsters are the good guys and the humans do the ritual.

The modern cycle mostly keeps the rules and drops the pretension. Tommy Wirkola’s Dead Snow (2009) is a Norwegian splatter comedy about treasure and consequences. Julius Avery’s Overlord (2018) put around $38 million into a serum, a bunker and a genuinely fine paratrooper set piece, and took roughly its budget back. Both are honest about being adventure films.

The uniform is the special effect

The craft observation nobody makes about this subgenre is that its most powerful asset costs nothing and arrives from the costume store. The SS uniform was designed as a semiotic weapon — the black service dress was worked up in the early 1930s by the graphic artist Walter Heck and the SS officer and painter Karl Diebitsch, manufactured by contracted firms across Germany, and engineered to read at a distance as authority, order and threat in a single silhouette. It is, in the coldest professional sense, superb design.

That is why a film with no money can put an actor in one and get an antagonist for the price of the hire. Wiederhorn’s drowned soldiers work almost entirely on this: goggles, black tunics, wet fabric, sunlight. He has no dialogue for them and no budget for prosthetics, and the audience arrives fully briefed. Compare the effort a Hammer production had to spend to make a robed cultist frightening — colourising the gothic took Bray Studios years of trial and error — and you understand why the underfunded keep coming back to this well.

It also explains the subgenre’s aesthetic problem. A costume engineered to look magnificent will look magnificent on screen, and the camera does not editorialise. Every Nazi-occult film is fighting its own production design, because the thing it wants to condemn was styled by professionals to be photographed. Klimov solved it by dressing his killers in filthy improvised gear and letting them look like what they were: bored men in the wrong clothes, drunk, doing a job. Almost nobody else has even noticed the problem exists.

What it costs

The case against is real and it is made by a single film.

Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) is what actually happened. A Belarusian boy follows a partisan unit and the film documents, with archival rigour, and with live rounds reportedly fired over the lead actor’s head, the systematic destruction of a village by an Einsatzgruppe. There is no occult. There is no ancient evil. There is a barn, a loudhailer and men doing paperwork. It is the hardest film on this desk to recommend and the one most worth seeing.

Hold Zombie Lake against it and the charge writes itself: the occult Nazi is a comfort. He is a supernatural aberration, a cult with a spear, a thing that could never be us. The historical Nazi was a clerk with a rota. Every film that reaches for the Ahnenerbe instead of the ledger is performing a small act of laundering, and the subgenre’s popularity is partly the popularity of that reassurance.

The defence — and it is thin, and I hold it anyway — is that the good ones know. Cushing’s commander in Shock Waves is a man ashamed of what he built, hiding on an island from his own competence. Mann’s keep is delighted by its visitors precisely because they are ordinary careerists who will say yes. Both films locate the horror in the men rather than the artefact, which is the only version of this material that has ever been worth anything. The rest is a French paperback from 1960, filmed in a swimming pool, and it will be back before the decade is out.