Der Todesking

• The decomposing corpse that bookends every segment is a special-effects prop, not a real cadaver. Buttgereit's team built and time-lapsed it themselves, and the making of that rotting body is documented in the behind-the-scenes piece 'Corpse Fucking Art' (later the title of a full Buttgereit documentary).
• It's structured as seven standalone vignettes, one per day of the week, with no recurring characters. The only connective tissue is the rotting corpse, the 'Der Todesking' (Death King) figure, and a chain letter praising suicide that turns up in the Friday segment.
• The Thursday segment is just static shots of the Mangfall Bridge with names, ages, and occupations superimposed over it, evoking real jumpers who use such bridges. No staged violence, no actors, just text and the drop.
• Tuesday's killer settles in to watch a fake Nazisploitation film, 'Vera: Todesengel der Gestapo,' which Buttgereit staged himself using the 'Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS' cover art and narration lifted from the English dub of 'Love Camp 7.' Critics read the whole segment as an homage to Godard and a jab at the idea that screen violence breeds real violence.
• The Saturday camcorder-rampage segment, a woman strapping a camera to her shoulder and gunning down a concert crowd in silent POV (the band's frontman played by Die Ärzte drummer Bela B), is widely linked to the 1966 University of Texas tower massacre by sniper Charles Whitman.
• Released in West Germany on January 25, 1990, running about 74 minutes and shot on 16mm (blown up to 35mm for theaters). Despite the subject matter, it sidestepped the censorship war Nekromantik triggered. Buttgereit's own line: 'with Der Todesking nothing happened.'

The rotting corpse isn't a separate image, it's the film's true protagonist. By cutting back to the same body decaying across all seven days, Buttgereit frames every human death in the vignettes as the same death, the same meat, the Death King reducing all of it to one continuous act of decomposition. The people are interchangeable on purpose.

The chain letter is the only thing that 'moves' through the picture, which makes it the closest thing to a villain. Read that way, the film is less about individual despair than about contagion, the idea that the urge to die is transmitted, passed hand to hand like a virus, with the Death King as the myth people invent to explain a pull they can't otherwise name.

The Saturday shoulder-cam and the Tuesday Nazisploitation tape turn the camera itself into the murder weapon. Buttgereit is implicating the act of watching: the audience strapped into POV, made complicit in the killing, the same way the on-screen viewer consumes atrocity as entertainment. The whole film quietly accuses the eye that's enjoying it.

Seven days, seven strangers, one shared pull toward oblivion. Jörg Buttgereit's death film abandons plot entirely: a chain letter praising suicide turns up in one of the lives, and each weekday brings a different unconnected soul. A man poisons himself in the tub beside his dying fish. A woman mounts a camera on her shoulder and opens fire at a concert. A face slams a wall until it stops. Between each day, a corpse rots in black limbo, swarming with maggots. There's no hero, no rescue, no moral. Just the Death King, working his way through the week.