There aren’t too many events in my life that I can pin down and say, 'hey you know what; I remember the first time I did this or the first time I saw that'. I do however remember the day I was introduced to Jorg Buttgereit and what became a fascination with extreme cinema.
It was my fourteenth birthday party and my elder brother was at my party with a friend of his. Little did I know that his friend had bought me a gift ; a gift that, somewhat understandably, he didn't want to give to me in front of my parents. So we went to my brother's bedroom and there it was; an original copy of ‘Nekromantik 2’ on VHS. The cover had me interested straight away, a woman sitting down with a corpse cradled between her legs. I had to watch it there and then, so I did. And thus began my love of extreme cinema and all thanks to one director - Jorg Buttgereit. 
One question that often flits through the head of the Risky Cheese staff when watching a movie with extreme sequences is ‘how the hell did the director get them to do that?!?’ Take Nekromantik for example; how does someone convince an actor to pretend to have sex with a corpse, or to jack off whilst stabbing themselves in the stomach? Jörg explained: “First of all: I had no actors to work with. The people in my movies are friends. I had to convince them to get in front of the camera in the first place. Then, I told them to act normal and don`t smile or wave into the camera.”
A more specific question posed to Jörg is the end of his first movie Nekromantik, where we see a shovel hit the dirt on the grave; the film went on to carve out its own niche but did the director contrive the end to hint that a sequel was in the works? He said: “I never thought that my first feature 'Nekromantik' would be a cult movie. You cannot plans things like that. I still don`t know how that happened. I think that last scene is a joke on those typical horror movie endings. They always come back, you know...”
Buttgereit made his name as a true master of the macabre with a series of gory yet cerebral shockers between 1987 - 1992, but after those movies, which many consider to be essential viewing for any extreme movie fan, then moved away from movie making and his visceral exploration of the genre. He said: "After writing, directing and producing 4 low budget feature films I was tired of working with no money. After all those years you don`t want to ask your friends to work for free anymore. So I started to work more professional. I did some work on the SF Series ‘Lexx - the Dark Zone’ in Canada, did music clips for some bands, special effects for films like ‘Killer Condom’ or ‘Journey into Bliss’.
Many extreme film makers have had to fight battles against the censors and the law, not to mention the occasional critic who opts for the moral safe ground. Aside from the classic example of the Charlie Sheen-led campaign against Hideshi Hino, director of the infamous Guinea Pig movies, Risky Cheese was amused to hear a story about people staying away from Wes Craven after the release of ‘Last House on the Left’, on the assumption that he might be disturbed in some way. Did Jörg ever experience similar ignorance; he said: “Well, the authorities confiscated my movies, the police raided my home, I had to fight for my films in court. Enough trouble for me.”
All well and good, but Risky Cheese desperately wants to know if Buttgereit has any plans to unleash another of his bleak and challenging epiphanies upon us again in the near future. He replied: “I am kind of bored by horror movies, but if someone is brave enough to give me a decent budget I might reconsider! At the moment I am very busy doing documentary films, radio dramas, stage plays and being a film critic
in Germany.”
Last year Buttgereit released a documentary called ‘Monsterland’ featuring the likes of John Carpenter, Joe Dante, Shinya Tsukamoto and Rick Baker, and he explained that one of the driving forces behind the project was to produce a tribute: “I made my documentary film to meet all the monster creators I admire.” At present he is working on a number of projects, including some radio and TC work, as well as a foray into acting.
He added: “I am working on a radio play called ‘Green Frankenstein’ for German radio right now, after that I will be starring as an actor in the second season of the successful German mockumentary web series about the porn film industry 
called ‘Making of Susse Stuten 8; I have the part of a frustrated porn director who wants to make horror movies. Next year I might do another stageplay with my very own superhero Captain Berlin - it will be a sequel to Captain Berlin Versus Hitler’ - and there will also be a Captain Berlin comic book that I wrote with artwork by Rainer Engel.”
Interviewed by Gene Dolders / Alex Ballard
