The Cremator

Day 13 of my 31 Days of Horror viewing

For the last few years, I have used October to give myself a viewing assignment: a different horror film each day. Now that I have escaped the real life horror of New Zealand’s public service, I intend to write a piece inspired by each film.

My thirteenth film is Juraj Herz’s The Cremator / Spalovač mrtvol (1969).

Karel Kopfrkingl is a cremator in 1930s Czechoslovakia and a man completely bereft of conviction. When talking about his ‘beliefs’, he simply repeats whatever he heard from the last person he spoke to, even if it contradicts previous statements. This includes everything from how the Tibetan Book of the Dead informs his profession to the risk posed by the encroaching Nazis. He is an austere man who tries to avoid alcohol and smoking. He is an empty vessel which makes him the perfect subject for Fascism.

Karel finds it very easy to let himself fall into Nazism

There is a popular saying: “liberals are like dogs, they understand tone but not content.” Think of the respectability politics in Jacinda Ardern emphasising the need to “be kind” in place of improving people’s lives in any sort of material way. Karel starts the film as a good Czech liberal with plenty of Jewish friends and colleagues. As the German army gets closer, he allows himself to be corrupted, clinging onto some unprovable vibe about blood quantum that allows him to identify as German. The Nazis send him undercover to a Chevra Seudah ceremony in order to report back on what the Jews are saying about them. During the ceremony, the singer criticises Hitler but Karel can only hear the tone proclaiming “What a wonderful tremolo.”

The already sickening subject matter is pushed into full-on horror by Herz’s aesthetic choices. The opening credits feature Gilliam-esque animation of cut-out body parts. From there, the film relishes the grotesque with generous use of a fish-eye lens and montage after montage recontextualising images (a wax exhibit, fish bones, a boxing match Hieronymus Bosch characters) to refer to the Holocaust. I was reminded of similar choices by Herz’s contemporary John Frankenheimer, especially in The Manchurian Candidate and Seconds.

In the title role, Rudolf Hrušínský looks like Orson Welles in A Touch of Evil and acts like a schlubby one-scene character from a Roy Andersson film

The idea of a cremator being uniquely suited to transition into the machinery of the Holocaust is a pretty blunt one but I saw this film as a broader dramatisation of the liberal-to-Fascist pipeline. Time and time again, I was reminded of the countless recent examples of ‘empty vessels’ (whether due to selective political neutrality or ineptitude) who become useful parts of the machinery of atrocities up-to and including genocide.