After Bremen horror “crime scene: love rage”: The most frightening “crime scenes” of recent years
Hermetically sealed bedrooms with a woman’s corpse in a wedding dress, apartments with false floors, childhood trauma: Was Bremen’s “Tatort: Liebeswut” the scariest crime thriller in a long time or just showmanship? And what other terrifying “Tatort” crime thrillers have there been in recent years?
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The “Tatort: Liebeswut”, the third “crime scene” in Bremen with the commissioners Liv Moormann (Jasna Fritzi Bauer) and Linda Selb (Luise Wolfram) – the exiled Dane Mads Andersen (Dar Salim) was missing – was a real scary piece. Scenes like from a blood-soaked graphic novel, larger-than-life dark suspects and – in the truest sense of the word – winding locations. But did you really get scared because of the large pictures by director Anne Zohra Berrached (“Tatort: The Holdt Case”)? And what other “crime scene” episodes from the last few years do you have to be extremely careful that no children are secretly watching?
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What was the Bremen “crime scene” about?
The apartment fire in a tenement makes for a bizarre corpse discovery. A dead woman in a wedding dress lies in good condition behind a glued-up, plastered door. Liv Moormann and Linda Selb read a cryptic message in large letters on the wall. The devil speaks through the walls and wants to get someone. Is it the suicide of a mentally ill person? The dead woman was the mother of two small daughters who cannot be found. The father (Matthias Matschke), who lives separately from the family, is waiting with his young pregnant girlfriend (Milena Kaltenbach) for the arrival of twins. And then there are the parents of the dead (Ulrike Krumbiegel, Thomas Schendel), who describe their daughter as extremely unstable.
What was it really about?
The crime thriller was a stylistic exercise in terms of horror culture: observation holes in the wall, hidden rooms, extremely exaggerated characters such as the whimsical caretaker (Dirk Martens) or the fat neighbor in his undershirt (Aljoscha Stadelmann) who was always sucking ice – all of this was so far removed from classic TV Investigative thrillers like Freddy Krueger’s Mickey Mouse. The creative duo of Martina Mouchot (script) and Anne Zohra Berrached (director), who went against the genre cliché that horror is a male domain, immersed the investigative duo in Bremen in old traumata and chases in underground caves. Until viewers gave up any desire for realism to join in the silence of the lambs. If you like Wallander scary pictures or David Fincher’s “Sieben”, you’ve come to the right place.
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Why is there more and more horror from Germany?
It is striking that in recent years German premium thrillers such as “Tatort” and “Polizeiruf 110” have repeatedly played with the horror and scary genre. Something that German TV creatives have previously kept their hands off for decades. Were you afraid of angry protests from old “Derrick” fans, who see crime novels more as TV crossword puzzles with the solution word “criminal”? With the horror series “Hausen”, Sky Germany and its star Charly Hübner even created a complete series in 2020 in rather mannered pictures that celebrated the scary house genre. In fact, German filmmakers, who previously looked enviously at the exoticism of foreign genre cinema, are only returning to their cultural roots with their new zest for horror. During the 1920s, Germany was known for expressionist horror works such as Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), Dr. Mabuse, the Player” (1922) or “M” (1931) as influential pioneers of this film genre. This legacy is apparently celebrating a renaissance in the “crime scene”.
Those were the scary “crime scenes” of the last few years
Which “Tatort” episodes recently played with classic horror elements and how successful was that? If you follow the “timeline” chronologically back from the present, you will come across the Dresden case “Parasomnia” (October 2020) on what is perhaps the best horror “crime scene” of recent years. A girl who sleepwalks sees dead people in her house – and a real killer too? Rarely did horror figures on German television look as scary as they do here. But even in the years before, the “Tatort” had already played with the genre: In the Bremen vampire “Tatort: Blood” (October 2018), the Kiel episode “Borowski and the House of Ghosts” (September 2018) and also in the Frankfurter “Crime Scene: Fear You” (October 2017).
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Where was Mads Andersen in this episode?
The Bremen investigative trio was just a duo this time. Mads Andersen, played by top Danish actor and “Game of Thrones” star Dar Salim, was reportedly busy in Copenhagen. But does that mean that we have to say goodbye to the cool Dane after two episodes? When asked about this, Radio Bemen said: “It doesn’t always make sense to have Liv Moormann, Mads Andersen and Linda Selb investigate together. Depending on the script and dramaturgy, the film can also be stronger if two investigators carry the story. This creative freedom is inherent in the constellation, and we implement it in ‘Tatort: Liebeswut’.”
How is the Bremen “crime scene” going on?
Here’s another quote from Radio Bremen: “Planning for the next case is already underway, and we’re not revealing much yet, but Liv Moormann (Jasna Fritzi Bauer), Mads Andersen (Dar Salim) and Linda Selb (Luise Wolfram) will see each other again soon in Bremen’s ‘Tatort’.”
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