Schramm – Into the Mind of a Serial Killer

In Schramm – Into the Mind of a Serial Killer, Jörg Buttgereit pursues the aesthetics and themes of his ‘necromantic’ feature films and plays an absurdist game with cheap porn and horror genres. The Schramm of the title is the lust murderer Lothar Schramm, in everyday life a taxi driver who is not suspected of involvement. The woman next door thinks he is a nice respectable man. The film shows at length the bloodthirsty way he murders his last victims, two Jehovah’s Witnesses who ring his doorbell. He then uses their bodies for a burlesque necrophilic spectacle of lust.

Schramm is later found dead beside his victims. The neighbours had started to complain about the stench of rotting flesh. The man who became known as the ‘lipstick killer’ turned out to have died a lonely and accidental death in a fall.