Der Fan

One working definition of horror might be any story that depicts innocence under threat of annihilation by dark forces. In which case, every coming-of-age story is a horror story, as anyone past puberty can tell you. And Der Fan (1982) may be the most horrific of all. Eckhart Schmidt’s film makes its first U.S. theatrical appearance in New York City before traveling the country in a new 4K restoration, so that you can enjoy it in all its glacial blue glory and fussy graphic weirdness. The movie’s portrait of superfan Simone (Désirée Nosbusch) and her obsession with German New Wave pop star “R” (Bodo Staiger) still shocks and resonates because it paints an adolescence so barbed with danger that one parasocial relationship provides a disturbed young girl with her only safe space.

If we could build a spectrograph to detect genre as it emanates from the cold astral body of Der Fan, what we might observe are shadowy Gothic bookends, festooned with delusional voiceover, one half like a John Hughes script adapted by Werner Herzog, the other half like Peter Greenaway’s take on Druidical human sacrifice, and, in the middle bit, a ruthlessly sustained ’80s video about mannequins—the centerpiece that ties the planet together. Simone is a young girl from provincial Ulm who fantasizes in her diary about climbing the steps of the Gothic Ulm Minster with R, whose deadpan TV musical performances she stares at in slack-jawed ecstasy. She runs away from school and home to Munich, where she meets R, who tells her all she wants to hear, ditches her in postcoital pop-star fashion, and then pays quite a price for doing so.

What keeps this from becoming a tabloid tale of madness is the slow accretion of predatory atmosphere surrounding Simone as she prances into adulthood. Men crowd her perimeter, pointing at her, whispering and laughing, prowling in cars around her like sharks on the scent of fresh blood. Though largely inscrutable throughout, Nosbusch provides a sensitive, nuanced performance, especially in the sad, quiet moments when she flashes an unguarded smile, quick to wither on her lips as she detects transactional desire on the latest male face to gobble her with its eyes. In one poignant shot, she crouches in a playground, clutching the bars of a metal fence like a prisoner enclosed. Is it any wonder that she wants a life-size human doll, not a man? Simone discovers in R the fully posable body of the pop star, an empty vessel to fill with her fervid love fantasies.

Words in this film are mostly irrelevant. The newly restored stereo soundtrack—cheerful electric-guitar riffs colliding with synthy video-game trills, ominous hornet buzz, and shuffling sounds like a body being dragged across a floor—expresses what the purposely vapid dialogue cannot. Turn off the sound, though, and you might think this is a story told from the perspective of a human hand: hands touching hands, reaching out (as the song goes), letting go; hands that explore the body and wield the weapons. There’s a Hitchcockian visual grammar at work as the camera breaks people into fragments before Simone does. The descent into a formalist nightmare begins with an excruciatingly uncomfortable sex scene in which all is not well between Simone and R, as they float into a bedroom that looks as if a Pop artist, in a sick fit of inspiration, decided to abstract the flag of the Third Reich into decorative swaths of red, black, and white. The 4K treatment brings these colors and the blue dream light associated with Simone’s bed from earlier fantasy sequences to lurid life. The watery blue breaks its dam and floods the climactic sequence, as Simone makes the graphic fragmentation literal, writes her own ending, and cuts R into pieces, the better to eat him.

Long before her inner cannibal manifests, there is a haunting tilted shot of Simone and R’s faces: his on the left, looking obliquely at her while radiating the blue-white pallor of a corpse, and hers on the right, bathed in amber glow, as though she has transformed his ghoulish rays into sunlight by means of some internal ardor. Later, after she opens her face to release a pent-up scream and then extinguishes what little life R has in him, Simone lavishes attention on his corpse in an intimate wake-like scene sculpted by chiaroscuro light. She returns the exposed void of celebrity to Gothic shadow, where relics are made and spirits kept alive. There remains only the ritual of taking apart the mannequin, so that fantasy can consume the void. First the blue light, then the electric knife.