The Holocaust was something so nasty that no horror writer, not even the great ones like Clive Barker or Stephen King, has ever thought to use as a backdrop. There are things that are just too horrible for horror fiction.
It wasn't only Jews, you know. Disabled, Gypsies, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses also made that cattle-truck trip to Hell and there were more. It cannot be made into any form of entertainment.
Unless you are of the preferred groups. In which case you can make stories of love within the piled corpses or of bravery in the face of the ovens and the gas. Such stories make us feel good but they are not the real story.
Tell it as it really was and you are boycotted.
I only watched the less-than-a-minute trailer and that alone was nasty but that is what really happened. It wasn't bloody Disneyland they went to . It was gas and the extraction of gold teeth with pliers and the removal of rings by cutting of fingers and bodies piled in pits, not necessarily completely dead at any stage, and it was absolutely evil.
Boycotting such a depiction is equally evil. This is what happens when a section of society is declared non-human and denormalised. This is where it leads. Everyone should see this film.
It will make you sick, yes. It will horrify you, yes. You will have terrible dreams about it, yes.
But if it is shunted away under the carpet as the gentle souls would have it, there can only be one result.
It will happen again.
It is horrible but it really happened, it was done, and it was done not by monsters and demons but by people like you and me.
Face it. Otherwise we can never change it.
14 comments:
Of course since it's Uwe Boll, a legendarily bad filmmaker, it's very likely to be horrible for all the wrong reasons.
Also used as the backdrop to the Lord Horror novels and comics by David Britton ('Motherfuckers - the Auschwitz of Oz', Meng and Ecker etc.. Banned by the powers that were at the time. Still ferociously dark and not without a bleak humour about the human condition.
This won't be a successful film in the US unless Hollywood sprinkles a little creative dust on it:
American GI's liberated every single camp.
The actor, Leo deCaprio, falls in loves with a suitably thin but attractive love interest. Some size zero actresses may need to put some weight on for this part.
There is a car chase as they track down the Nazi guards (all English accents of course).
They only have 3 minutes to evacuate Auschwitz before the Kommandant (Alan Rickman) detonates a huge bomb. Leo will scoop up the last remaining orpan in his arms and run out through the distinctive gates as the fireball erupts behind him.
Frankly anything less is in danger of being realistic, challenging and thought provoking and therefore a shit film. Did I mention the love interest will also have massive tits?
There's something odd about the way that those who died in the gulags are never mentioned. Can't get my head round that. Something to do with the encroaching EUSSR?
It's like the establishment doesn't want you to have a clue about what they are planning...
leggy, my uncle died in the second world war, he was in the navy his ship was sunk by an italian torpedo, should you as italian descent pay me reparations, or perhaps you could give me a country, corsica will do, i await your reply
@£60: Stalin *only* killed his own people. States don't really mind that; in fact many of them secretly long to do the same to the awkward squad in the body politic ("Daddy, what was 'extraordinary rendition'?"). Hitler broke the unwritten rules by playing with others' toys without prior agreement...
Also, Stalin was on the winning side.
Uwe Boll actually did a Holocaust film? I thought that was just a bad joke that was being circulated.
The Holocaust was something so nasty that no horror writer, not even the great ones like Clive Barker or Stephen King, has ever thought to use as a backdrop.
No Sacred Cow Knowingly Overlooked
"It is horrible but it really happened, it was done, and it was done not by monsters and demons but by people like you and me."
Well said. That the junior perpetrators were ordinary people is a fact too often either denied or swept under the carpet.
Chris - okay, there are sick writers too (and I confess I laughed at the cover image). I wouldn't ban that book. I won't buy it either.
Anon 14:09 -
i await your reply
Await no more, for here it is...
No.
My family were over here before the war, and some were in it. In the British army.
I won't watch the film, partly because the director has a reputation for making terrible films but mostly because of the reality.
I can watch films like 'Saw' or 'Hostel' no problem, because I know the blood and guts are faked and the events are made-up.
With this new film, the events were real. Even the trailer is hard to watch because the gassing, the teeth extraction, the burning of the bodies, all happened as shown. Sure, in this case it's faked, they are actors, but all of it really happened, and not so long ago either.
Still I think it should be made and shown to all those who want to demonise one group of people for whatever reason they choose - because that is where demonisation always ends.
Holocaust, gulags, Inquisition, witchfinders, the American Japanese after Pearl Harbour, the treatment of prisoners in Iraq, it's all the same. It doesn't always get as far as burnings and mass graves but it always involves designating a group as less than human.
Once you have that in people's minds, they feel nothing when attacking the new subhumans.
Did you know that the police are now trained not to think of criminals as human beings? Define 'criminal', if you can these days.
You might be surprised to find it's you.
Stewart - the Holocaust is remembered as some vague, terrible event. We are to remember the gassings and the burnings but the events that led up to it, the reason it happened, well that's quietly brushed aside.
It didn't happen overnight. it started with singling out groups (not only the Jews) for blame and 'denormalising' them. It started with a definite drive to turn the public against those groups, with snitchlines and anonymous reports and tales of how these groups spread disease and were evil.
Eventually, those groups could not find employment or own property or enter certain establishments... it was quite some time before the death camps started.
The Holocaust was the end point, not the beginning. We need to remember not only the 'how', but also the 'why'.
Otherwise we'll be back at that end point before anyone realises how we got there.
Picking up on what happened in the USSR, and also disputing that Stalin only did it to his own people. Look up a history of what happened in the Ukraine. Under Stalin's orders all thjeir produce was taken (some of it rotting in warehouses) whilst Ukranians were literally starving to death.
Boll's movie is 'An Interesting Idea' (aka 'High Concept') - but one that may prove to be too grisly and unacceptable for mainstream cinema.
Now, if only Art Spiegelman would allow 'Maus' to be made into a move - perhaps as an animated comic book in his style - we might be on to something.
BTW, German collective/national guilt should end when the last person born before May 8th 1945 breathes their last.
Good luck to Uwe Boll and his movie, I won't be watching it because I'm too squeamish even for Saw.
@JuliaM, Apt Pupil only has the holocaust in the background to illstrate the main purpose of the film which is to examine the blackmail of Sir Ians character by his Apt Pupil, I recall no graphic scenes from it.
@Sixtypoundsaweekcleaner "those who died in the gulags are never mentioned", depends where you live. In Ukraine it is a State Crime to deny that Stalins purges, deportations and gulags imposed upon the Ukranian people were not equal to those of Hitler.
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