The Death KingMovies like The Death King
- Key Features:
- Suicide, Death, Violence-high, Existentialism, Social commentary, Anthology, Despair, Hardship, Melancholy, Human condition, Mortality, Tragedy
- Tone:
- serious, restrained, cynical
- Target Audience:
- Art house cinema enthusiasts, Fans of experimental film, Viewers interested in philosophical themes, Mature audiences
- Emotional Arc:
- Despair → Dread
The Death King

Seven episodes, each taking place on a different day of the week, on the theme of suicide and violent death.
The Death King
Horror anthology consisting of three episodes directed by Jörg Buttgereit, Andreas Marschall and Michal Kosakowski.

Chronicles three years of a middle-class family seemingly caught up in their daily routines, troubled only by minor incidents. Behind their apparent calm and repetitive existence, however, they're planning something much more sinister.

A necrophilic street sweeper who cleans up after grisly accidents brings home a corpse for him and his girlfriend to enjoy sexually, but is dismayed to see that she prefers the corpse over him.

Dr. Bock, the chief of medicine at a Manhattan hospital, is suicidal after the collapse of his personal life. When an intern is found dead in a hospital bed, it appears to Bock to be a case of unforgivable malpractice. Hours later, another doctor, who happens to be responsible for another case of malpractice, is found dead. Despondent, Bock finds himself drawn to Barbara, the daughter of a comatose missionary.

Monika lives with Rob, a corpse she loves. Her dilemma intensifies when she meets Mark and considers a normal life with him. She must choose between her affection for Rob and a new relationship.

Tragedy meets comedy in seven stories about how our entire world can collapse at any given moment.

Like many happy people, Bruno Hamel is leading an uneventful life until one afternoon, when his daughter is raped and murdered. When the murderer is arrested, a terrible project germinates in Bruno's darkened mind. He plans to capture the "monster" and make him pay for his crime.

After the death of their grandfather, two sisters inherit their family castle, which is said to be haunted by the Red Queen, whom legend says claims seven lives every hundred years. When a mysterious woman in a red cloak starts targeting their circle of friends, the sisters begin to suspect there might be some truth to the legend.

Abel Grey is sent to investigate the death of a boy from an exclusive local school, who is found floating in the river. Fearing scandal, the school insists it was suicide. But after discovering from the boy's girlfriend, Carlin, that he was being badly bullied, Abel suspects that a dangerous schoolboy initiation has gone horribly wrong and he secretly solicits the help of a sympathetic teacher, Betsy. He is warned off the investigation by his boss, as the school is a generous benefactor to the Police benevolent fund. Abel, however, cannot let the case go, not only because his own brother committed suicide years before, but also it seems that the spirit of the dead boy is leaving them clues as to what really happened that night.

The film tells different stories in a kind of parallel Germany about love, affection and hatred.

Four episodes – Christmas, May 1st (Labour Day), August 15th (Ferragosto), Halloween – to tell four stories that delve into the human soul.

Ana is confronted with body and desire at three key moments of her life. As a young girl, she brings her dead grandpa back to life. In her puberty, she discovers the power of decay and sexuality. Finally, she wrestles with loss and loneliness when she returns to her parental home, now derelict.

Upon learning that his days are numbered, a man and an old friend return to an old house that connects them by a dark secret. Along with three women and a mysterious old man, the group journeys into a horrifying abyss of debauchery and moral mayhem, leading to a fatal turn of events, during which the darkest human depths are revealed.

A killer is released from prison and breaks into a remote home to kill a woman, her handicapped son and her pretty daughter.

While vacationing on a remote German island with his younger pregnant wife, an artist has an emotional breakdown while confronting his repressed desires.

In 1930s Prague, a Czech cremator who firmly believes cremation relieves one from earthly suffering is drawn inexorably to Nazism.

At The Kingdom, Denmark's most technologically advanced hospital, a number of strange and otherworldly events begin occurring, much to the dismay of its doctors and patients. A ghostly ambulance appears and disappears, the voice of a little girl calls to a patient in an elevator shaft, and a doctor's fetus begins growing at an alarming rate.

In a future world where the disease has been finally defeated and everything can be sold, even the crude spectacle of death, the rare case of a dying woman becomes the morbid theme of a revolutionary reality show, broadcast through the curious eyes of a peculiar camera.

After losing his job, his car and his money, Phuchit, races against time to complete 13 tasks ordered by an anonymous caller who promised 100 million Baht upon completion.

An ambitious anthology film featuring segments directed by over two dozen of the world's leading talents in contemporary genre film. Inspired by children's educational ABC books, the film comprises 26 individual chapters, each helmed by a different director assigned a letter of the alphabet. The directors were then given free reign in choosing a word to create a story involving death.

A reflection on human life in all its beauty and cruelty, its splendor and banality, guided by a Scheherazade-esque narrator. Inconsequential moments have the same significance as historical events. Simultaneously an ode and a lament, presents a kaleidoscope of all that is eternally human, an infinite story of the vulnerability of existence.

After a frantic suicide attempt, Veronika awakens inside a mysterious mental asylum. Under the supervision of an unorthodox psychiatrist who specializes in controversial treatment, Veronika learns that she has only weeks to live.

20 volunteers agree to take part in a seemingly well-paid experiment advertised by the university. It is supposed to be about aggressive behavior in an artificial prison situation. A journalist senses a story behind the ad and smuggles himself in among the test subjects. They are randomly divided into prisoners and guards. What seems like a game at the beginning soon turns into bloody seriousness.

Grotesquely surreal offering charting three male generations of the same bizarre family, including a pervert who constantly seeks for new kinds of satisfaction, an obese speed eater, and a passionate embalmer.

A fine day in the life of a fly presented completely from the fly's point of view. A fine day until something dreary happens, that is.

An absurdist, surrealistic and shocking pitch-black comedy, which moves freely from nightmare to fantasy to hilariously deadpan humour as it muses on man’s perpetual inhumanity to man.

A young couple is pushed to the limits of sanity as they attempt to be reunited amid the chaos of a pandemic outbreak. The streets erupt into violence and depravity, as those infected are driven to enact the most cruel and ghastly things imaginable.

A posthumous look at the last days of Guenther's life as he, his best friend, and his sister let loose on a four-day binge of alcohol, drugs, and sex.

A group of boys and girls, twelve in total, gather at an abandoned hospital to die for various different reasons. There, they find the body of a dead boy. The group of twelve attempt to find the person who killed the boy. During their search, the reasons why they want to die are revealed.

Called to court on obscenity charges, a theatre troupe are forced to expose their neuroses and inner psychological torments.

When disillusioned Swedish knight Antonius Block returns home from the Crusades to find his country in the grips of the Black Death, he challenges Death to a chess match for his life. Tormented by the belief that God does not exist, Block sets off on a journey, meeting up with traveling players Jof and his wife, Mia, and becoming determined to evade Death long enough to commit one redemptive act while he still lives.

Advent – a time of joyful anticipation. You will surely remember the feeling you had as a child, waking up on the first December morning. Rising early, ready to open a new door for 24 consecutive days.

Across different eras, a poor family, an anxious developer and a fed-up landlady become tied to the same mysterious house in this animated dark comedy.

Itinerant projection-equipment repairman Bruno Winter and depressed hitchhiker Robert Lander - a doctor who has just been through a break-up with his wife and a half-hearted suicide attempt - travel along the Western side of the East-German border in a repair truck, visiting worn-out movie theaters, learning to communicate across their differences.

Poet/lecturer Charles Serking awakens from his alcoholic haze long enough to take a bus back to L.A. and plunge into an orgy of drink and sexual depravity.

Medical student Paula wins a place at an exclusive Heidelberg medical school. When the body of a young man she met on the train turns up on her dissection table, she begins to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death.

When ancient dark magic falls into sinister hands and unleashes ages of suffering onto mankind, a group of heroes from different eras and cultures must band together in order to defeat it at all costs.

A man sees the dark side of the time-manipulating biotech company he works for when a crushing debt forces his wife to give up 40 years of her own life.

A mysterious serial killer is shocking the underworld. Scotland Yard is investigating the case. Clues lead the detectives to Blackwhite Castle.

A wife, overwhelmed with hatred for her husband, inflicts an unspeakable wound on their son, as the family heads towards horrific destruction.

A mother and her teenage daughter must confront Death when it arrives in the form of an astonishing talking bird.

Dr. Marcus, a renowned psychiatrist, has selected 6 severe mentally ill and dangerous patients from the Spring Valley Mental Hospital to interview as part of research for his new book. As Dr. Marcus interviews each patient, one by one the horrors they have committed begin to unfold. However, Dr. Marcus soon learns that there is one patient who ties them all together - Patient Seven.

Who is Jesus, and why does he impact all he meets? He is respected and reviled, emulated and accused, beloved, betrayed, and finally crucified. Yet that terrible fate would not be the end of the story.

A serial killer whose mother was a prostitute starts killing streetwalkers as a way of paying back his mother for her abuse.

Charles drifts through politics, religion and psychoanalysis, rejecting them all. Once he realises the depth of his disgust with the moral and physical decline of the society he lives in, he decides that suicide is the only option...

A maniac on the loose is committing savage acts of slaughter, and one survivor may be the only key to unmasking the serial slayer known as the Half-Moon Killer. The mysterious half-moon lockets he leaves with his victims could be the only key to unraveling his sinister motives, but will that be enough before he completes his ice-cold plot to claim his intended seven victims?

Marc Schrader, a rookie cop caught red-handed with drugs in a police raid of an illegal rave, joins a homicide investigation conducted by Chief Inspector Minks. The victim is a naked young woman with the skin stripped off her back, killed as she staggered into traffic. As Schrader and Minks investigate the murder, the case is complicated by a finger found in the stomach of the victim. Forensic examination proves the finger belongs to Nobert Günzel, who was previously convicted of rape and assault. The police raid Günzel’s residence, and discover a blood-stained table with restraints and bits of human flesh in his basement. They also find video equipment and preserved, tattooed skin from the victim’s back. Soon, they found dead bodies buried in the garden. Günzel then goes missing.

A ferocious, misogynistic, and morally deprived serial killer is active in Las Vegas. Obsessed with the collapse of the Twin Towers, and with Nazi tendencies, he even targets underage girls.

An account of the events before and after a murder committed by a disturbed businessman in a strained marriage, and what led him to perform such a shocking act.

In 1923 Berlin, following the suicide of his brother, an American acrobat struggles to survive while facing unemployment, depression, alcoholism, and the social decay of Germany during the Weimar Republic.

When German police viciously quell a protest against the shah of Iran, popular journalist Ulrike Meinhof rebels against her dishonest marriage, walks away from her children and joins radical anarchist Andreas Baader. Together with Baader's girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, they form the violent Red Faction Army, and together perpetrate a slew of terrorist attacks as a way of disrupting the fabric of what they see as an increasingly fascist state.

A successful lawyer who, in order to save her daughter, is pressured into defending the innocence of a man slated to receive the death penalty.

In a moment of madness a middle-aged, married and respectable pharmacist kills a young woman who is sun-bathing by a lake. Unable to take in what he has done, he flees from the scene of the crime and behaves as if nothing has happened. Eventually her boyfriend is charged with the crime and, in a strange twist of fate, the killer finds himself serving on the jury.

A reality TV program selects six contestants to participate in a free-for-all, no holds barred deathmatch, where they must skillfully outwit and kill each other in order to be the last person alive.

One day, hospital orderlies, watching corpse in the morgue, recognize film director. Man, even though he died, he begins to remember his life. He made a career making movies, had numerous mistresses, but never realized their dreams. His life was interspersed with many setbacks that enfeebled him from the inside. Although he made a career in film, he was not happy with his life.

Julia becomes worried about her boyfriend Holt when he explores the dark urban legend of a mysterious videotape said to kill the watcher seven days after viewing. She sacrifices herself to save her boyfriend and in doing so makes a horrifying discovery: there is a "movie within the movie" that no one has ever seen before.

As a couple goes on a trip to find their way back to each other, a sideshow artist and his shady entourage emerge from the woods, terrorizing them, luring them deeper into a maelstrom of psychological terror and humiliating slapstick.

Every day at 6 pm a serial killer kills another person. Police officer Helena Rus thinks the killings are done by one man only and decides to reveal the killer's identity by getting back in 18th century history of the city.

When a notorious German serial killer is captured after committing some of the most heinous acts against humanity ever imaginable, a farmer and police officer from a sleepy rural community on the outskirts of Berlin is drawn into the case as he searches for the answers to a murder that has shaken his tight-knit community.

The overambitious pianist Andi and the more laid back Benno have one thing in common: They will both die soon. So the two of them decide to have the most awesome day before its too late.

On a hot summer day in Oslo, the dead mysteriously awaken, and three families are thrown into chaos when their deceased loved ones come back to them. Who are they, and what do they want?

Michaela, an epileptic, enrolls in college to study education. She goes off her medication and soon begins hearing voices and seeing apparitions that tell her to avoid religious objects, although she is devoutly Roman Catholic. One priest scoffs at the idea that Michaela could be possessed by demons, but a younger pastor arranges an exorcism for the young woman.

An unnamed doctor has always had everything he's ever wanted, but that has only made him develop more extreme and depraved needs. He kidnaps a young couple in the prime of their life together and forces them into a game of torment that slowly extinguishes their hopes for survival.

A hapless country doctor describes with breathless urgency a night-time summons to attend a young patient. Events soon take on a surreal aspect as "unearthly horses" transport him instantaneously to the bedside. The doctor, preoccupied with personal distractions and grievances against those he is employed to care for, fails to find what is revealed to be a vile, fatal wound. He is humiliated by the villagers, who are "always expecting the impossible from the doctor," and doomed to an endless return trip, losing everything.

In Germany, as graduate student Katie Armstrong researches cannibal killer Oliver Hagen for her thesis, she becomes obsessed with her subject and ultimately plunges into a lifestyle similar to Hagen's and the thousands of people like him.

A director and screenwriter pen a script and, in the process, blur the line between fiction and reality.

Day in, day out, Mr. Grimm is busy with his job as the Reaper, harvesting people's lives. One day, his monotonous existence is interrupted by the door bell. It's a little girl. She wants her cat back. Little does she know that she's the next life on Mr. Grimm's list.

71 scenes revolving around multiple Viennese residents who are by chance involved with a senseless gun slaughter on Christmas Eve.

A dark comedy about a murder and its consequences presented in a backwards manner, where death is actually a rebirth. The film starts with an "execution" of the main protagonist and goes back to explore his previous actions and motivations.

A dicey murder investigation. A fuming best friend. A chaotic living situation. Village police officer Franz Eberhofer has a lot on his plate right now.

An unsettling look at reality television, where a disturbing game show has its contestants ending their lives for the public's enjoyment.

In several unrelated stories, the consequences of putting one's foot down – or failing to do so – are explored.

Carlo, a former mobster, is abducted by five privileged young men desperate to raise a $2 million ransom to save the sister of a friend. As Carlo plays mind games, however, his captors splinter -- each wondering whether one of their own had a hand in the crime.

In a small Scottish village, horribly murdered bodies keep turning up. Suspicion falls upon the residents of a nearby castle that is haunted by a curse involving a killer cat.

A spree of grisly murders is perpetrated in Frankfurt by a group of Satan worshippers. A lonely schoolteacher almost runs over an elderly man and takes him in, unbeknown to her the man has plans for her – plans that involve a permanent future with the Satanic cult.

Successful writer and scholar Jonathan Merrick falls under the spell of the irresistible, bewitchingly beautiful Ligeia. She's fighting a fatal illness and she will stop at nothing to defeat death, her one true enemy.

Relations between the students and the new teacher of German are extremely tense. When one female student commits suicide, her schoolmates blame the teacher for her death. An awareness that things are not quite so black and white comes too late.

A naive young man witnesses an escalation of violence in his small hometown following the arrival of a mysterious circus attraction.

A man takes up residence with a mysterious marquis and is soon persuaded to enter into an asylum for preventative therapy. Things are not what they seem, and the marquis may be even more sinister than what the young man might have predicted.

When 54 high school girls throw themselves in front of a subway train it appears to be only the beginning of a string of suicides around the country. Detective Kuroda tries to find the answer to this mystery, which isn't as simple as he had hoped.

Through his work at a morgue, an incarcerated young man trying to build a new life starts to come to terms with the crime he committed.

When a cynical journalist accepts a wager that he won't survive the night in a haunted castle, it unlocks an odyssey of sexual torment, undead vengeance, and a dark seductress who surrenders the gravest of pleasures.

An outwardly normal schoolteacher preys on suicidal women to slake his overwhelming thirst for human blood.

A figure known as "The Assassin" descends from the heavens into a nightmarish pit full of monsters, titans, and cruelty.

Planet Earth, 9177. The remains of humankind live in a post-apocalyptic environment divided into only two social classes: the ruling king and the oligarchs who inhabit the Representative Building and the poor of the world who hardly survive in the slums built around it.

In the wake of King Edward's death, Uhtred of Bebbanburg and his comrades adventure across a fractured kingdom in the hopes of uniting England at last.

Shortly before her wedding, art gallery director Nora travels from Paris to Grenoble to visit her preteen son, Elias, who is spending time with her aging professor father, Louis, recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. During her stay, she reaches out to her former lover, Ismaël, a viola player and father figure to Elias who has been committed against his will to a mental hospital. Ismaël, however, has his own problems to sort out.

Jacek climbs into the taxi driven by Waldemar, tells him to drive to a remote location, then brutally strangles him, seemingly without motive.

Seven candidates to a high executive position on a multinational company show up for a selection test in a skyscraper at the financial district. Among them, the most disparate personalities: the winner, the aggressive, the insecure, the critic, the indecisive…

Vowing revenge on the detective who apprehended him, serial killer "Meat Cleaver" Max Jenke returns from beyond the grave to launch a whole new reign of terror.

A dockworker seeking revenge on the killer of his sister finds himself the object of desire for two women.

In different parts of Tokyo, four young and seemingly healthy people suddenly die of heart failure at exactly the same moment. Reporter Kazuyuki Asakawa decides to investigate the deaths, and discovers that the four had stayed at a rural inn together just a week earlier. At the inn, he comes across a strange video that ends with a message saying that anyone who watches it will die exactly seven days later. Now the clock is ticking for Asakawa. Can he break the curse in time?

Two friends, Jung Jong-suk and Hwang Kyung-min, meet after several years and talk about their time in school, which left them scarred.

When a mysterious "John Doe" wakes up in a morgue and wanders into a psychiatric ward, a devoted doctor and curious medical examiner must slowly uncover dark and sinister secrets about the man that reveal a more horrifying truth than they could have ever imagined.

Alexander, a journalist, philosopher and retired actor, celebrates a birthday with friends and family when it is announced that nuclear war has begun.

A woman employs a gay man to spend four nights at her house to watch her when she's "unwatchable".

Having fathered an illegitimate child with his lover, Marie, feckless soldier Franz Woyzeck takes odd jobs around his small town to provide some extra money for them. One job is volunteering for experiments conducted by a local doctor, who puts Woyzeck on a diet of peas. This serves to drive him close to madness, and the discovery that Marie is involved in an affair with the local drum major exacerbates the situation. Pushed too far, Woyzeck resorts to violence.


