Parapsycho - spectrum of fear
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Parapsycho - spectrum of fear |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1975 |
| length | 105 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 18 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Peter Patzak |
| script |
Géza by Radványi Peter Patzak |
| production | TIT film production, Munich |
| music |
Manuel Rigoni Richard Schönherz |
| camera | Atze Glanert |
| cut | Wolfgang Schacht |
| occupation | |
as well as other actors in all three episodes: Wolfgang Gasser , Guido Wieland , Harry Hardt | |
Parapsycho - Spectrum of Fear is a German fiction film made in 1974 that deals with parapsychology, the supernormal, in three episodes. Directed by Peter Patzak .
action
The film begins with the following question: How many people believe in supernatural phenomena, how many claim to have had such experiences before? What experiments were carried out to find out, what phenomena were observed? These seemingly inexplicable phenomena are investigated in three episodes that are unrelated to one another. However, all stories have one thing in common: the alienation or lack of relationship between their protagonists and the terrifying impossibility of love.
Episode 1: reincarnation
Harry, a middle-aged married man and father of a daughter, is on his way home. As a present for his daughter, he has a blonde doll that sits enthroned in a box with a mysterious smile and is faded in several times in the subsequent love scenes. On the way, Harry passes a funeral train, a coffin with black ribbons and a cross heralds impending disaster. However, everyone around him only seems interested in a soccer game that is being broadcast on the radio. When Harry tries to make a phone call in a post office, hardly anyone pays him any attention, and his questions about the lock shown in the phone booth disturb the officer while he is listening to the football broadcast. Harry drives on when suddenly the sounds of Beethoven's “Für Elise” can be heard. The music has a magnetizing effect on him, and he turns his vehicle into a side path that leads him to the medieval castle. Harry looks at the building and comes across an old, corpulent and mysterious-looking man in a hat who thinks he is an interested tenant of the lordly building and has obviously already expected him. Harry is at a loss, he doesn't really understand what is happening to him, who is magically attracted to the old walls. A little later a mysterious woman named Greta drives up. She is dressed entirely in 1930s fashion. She has a dead body in her back seat and speaks to Harry as if he were an accomplice in an iniquity. The dead man is her former lover, a wealthy banker. Harry, who doesn't understand anything, immediately begins to develop a deep connection to the stranger. After Greta has seductively defoliated, they spend the following night together. When Harry is about to leave the castle to return home to his wife and child, a shot sounds and Greta has disappeared with her car. Intuitively, Harry first wants to move the corpse away, then he grabs the teacup she had drunk from and drives home. He is eagerly awaited at home because they wanted to celebrate Harry's 35th birthday. Harry doesn't let the encounter rest: the mysterious stranger, the castle, the dead man. Finally he goes to the police and tells his bizarre story. The suspected murderess' fingerprints are taken from the teacup. But then Harry experiences the shock of his life: Greta not only has a long criminal record, she has been dead for 35 years ...
Episode 2: Metempsychosis
A pathology professor has started an erotic relationship with one of his students. His wife knows about this affair. One day when she picks him up in the car in the presence of his 17-year-old daughter after a lecture, she drives the car at high speed through a densely planted avenue and causes a serious accident with suicidal intent. The car rolls over, but the pathologist and his daughter are only slightly injured. The driver, however, dies at the scene of the accident. Weeks after the tragic accident, the family's life seems to be gradually returning to normal. The professor wants to take more care of his daughter in the future, who has had constant visions of her since her mother's death and had to be admitted to psychiatry. He announces to his teenage lover that he wants to end their relationship. The student doesn't seem too sad about this, but surprisingly brings up the subject of suicide, probably in the hope of being able to put pressure on her still lover. The pathologist, who was obviously dulled by the sight of corpses on his dissection table, replied with a certain indifference: "Everyone has a right to do so at any time". After the last night of love, student Mascha returns home depressed, while daughter Debbie, who had developed a special bond with Mascha since her mother's death, and her father talk. In fact, the now ex-lover decides to commit suicide, swallows an overdose of sleeping pills, then cuts her wrists in the bathtub and bleeds to death. This death now throws daughter Debbie off track for good: She experiences the death of Masha first hand. With every cut on Mascha's autopsied, dead body, Debbie also feels the corresponding inflicted pain of a living person. She eventually dies of this ordeal. Her father is stunned by her deathbed.
Episode 3: Telepathy
A great misfortune happens in Vienna: A woman steps out of the balcony attachment of her window, stares ahead blankly and plunges into the depths, where her lifeless body remains shattered. While the police cordon off the sidewalk, a wedding party drives by. People joke and congratulate the groom on his bride. After the newlyweds have reached their destination, Barbara, the bride, goes to the bathroom to freshen up. Suddenly she has an inexplicable urge to leave everything behind. The virgin Barbara leaves the house before the wedding night, stops a car and drives in it to the next train station, where she gets on the train to Milan. Her desperate husband looks for her everywhere and turns to the police. He tells his father-in-law about meeting a stranger who gave Barbara his address in Milan. Even then she was absent and absent-minded. The stranger is a physically handicapped painter named Mario, who soon gains power over the cheerful and at the same time easy-going Barbara. She is not his first "victim". “I have to have them all, because I can't have any,” says the painter, because this is the only way he can, whose crippling makes him not exactly desirable for most women, impose his will on women. Mario, who in turn is afraid of being too close and thus not only appears crippled outwardly, is in his absoluteness and the compulsive urge to want to subjugate the female gender, the complete opposite of the middle-class groom, and thus radiates a special magic and fascination the newlyweds, whose husband embodies bourgeois boredom. Mario's power is based on telepathic powers that influence Barbara from a great distance. As soon as she arrives at Mario's apartment, he triggers lust and ecstasy in Barbara just by laying on his hand. He will never let go of this power, not even when Barbara returns to her husband, home and hearth. Only death will bring redemption to the young woman.
Production notes and trivia
Parapsycho - Spectrum of Fear was created in Austria on September 30, 1974 and opened in German cinemas on May 2, 1975. The idea for this material, which reflects the great interest of numerous Germans in the subject of the supernatural at the time, came from Geza von Radvanyi's long-time production manager Georg M. Reuther . Shortly before, on January 17, 1974, Uri Geller caused a sensation with his appearance on the Wim Thoelke show Drei Mal Neun , in which he allegedly bent spoons with sheer willpower and brought clocks to a standstill in many a TV viewer's living room . The high age rating of 18 is not only explained by countless nude and sex scenes, but also by a scene in which an autopsy on a (allegedly) real corpse is shown (second episode).
Conrad von Molo was responsible for the dubbing, Peter von Manhardt for the film construction.
Reception and reviews
“Three episodes about parapsychological phenomena of reincarnation, transmigration of souls and telepathy: a young man ends up in the bed of a woman who has been dead for 35 years; the ghost of a student takes revenge on her professor by driving into his daughter; a perverted painter uses hypnosis to make pretty girls docile. Hair-raising sex clothes that have anything but scientific education in mind. "
“In three episodes the viewer is to be brought closer to that strange borderline science" parapsychology ", of which one does not know whether it is a pipe dream or a serious nature. To answer these questions, this film cannot be a decision-making aid, because the loosely strung together stories, scientifically disguised with alleged survey results, soon reveal themselves to be a nonsensical spectacle. It tells of a reincarnation (rebirth), through which a good family father is not spared a nocturnal adventure with a long-faded demi-world lady. Then a suicidal woman takes murderous possession of her boyfriend's daughter. In the last episode, a young woman on her honeymoon leaves her husband to be a dodgy artist who lures girls into his studio with telepathy and hypnosis. The outrageous stories are knitted according to the same pattern. The shuffling of an overweight castellan, the rigid gaze of an impotent youth and the screeching of a young girl are supposed to spread horror. Since horror is also evoked by disgust, one sees an oversized opening of a human abdominal wall during an autopsy and the suicide of a young woman. The actresses also have ample opportunity to display their physical stimuli, and one of them is allowed to experience a telepathic orgasm. After this film, one thing is clear: the fools are among us, and some are even allowed to make films. "
Individual evidence
- ↑ that is rebirth
- ↑ that is transmigration of souls
- ↑ that is thought transference
- ^ Parapsycho - Spectrum of Fear in the Lexicon of International Films