Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik (1987) and its sequel Nekromantik 2 (1991) stand as two of the most provocative works in extreme cinema. These low-budget German films confront audiences with unflinching depictions of necrophilia, blending horror, eroticism, and existential despair in ways that defy conventional morality and narrative expectations. At their core, both films explore the intersection of death and desire, presenting necrophilia not merely as a grotesque fetish but as a radical challenge to normative sexuality. From a queer perspective, the dilogy offers a rich terrain for analysis: necrophilic desire operates as a profoundly queer force, one that disrupts heteronormative imperatives of reproduction, vitality, and relational reciprocity. It embraces the inanimate, the decaying, and the taboo, rejecting the living, breathing partnerships that anchor mainstream conceptions of love and intimacy. Queer theory has long concerned itself with desires and identities that fall outside hegemonic norms. Necrophilia, as depicted in these films, exemplifies a desire that is utterly non-reproductive, non-recuperative, and anti-futuristic. It is a sexuality oriented toward death rather than life, toward dissolution rather than union. In a cultural landscape that privileges vibrant, consensual, living partnerships—often framed within heterosexual or even sanitized homosexual norms—Buttgereit’s protagonists pursue an eroticism that is cold, silent, and absolute. This pursuit queers the very notion of sexuality by detaching it from mutuality, emotion, and even humanity. The corpse becomes the ultimate queer object: it cannot consent, cannot reject, cannot age or change. It exists in perfect stasis, offering a fantasy of total control and total surrender simultaneously. Moreover, the dilogy’s treatment of gender and power adds layers to this queer reading. The first film centers on a heterosexual couple whose shared necrophilia ultimately fractures along lines of agency and possession, while the second reverses the gender dynamic, placing a woman in the position of necrophilic subject. Together, they expose the fragility of normative romantic structures when confronted with desires that refuse to conform. Necrophilia here functions as a metaphor for queer alienation: the sense of being drawn to something society deems unlivable, unlovable, or unthinkable. Buttgereit’s films do not moralize or pathologize this desire; instead, they immerse the viewer in its texture, forcing confrontation with the possibility that such transgression might reveal deeper truths about human longing. Nekromantik opens with a series of mundane yet ominous vignettes: a couple urinates by the roadside, a rabbit is skinned in graphic detail, and roadkill is collected by a cleanup crew. These images establish a world where death is banal, bodies are disposable, and intimacy is fleeting. The protagonist, Robert (Rob), works for Joe’s Streetcleaning Agency, a job that grants him access to corpses. He is a quiet, unassuming man, socially awkward and emotionally stunted. His girlfriend, Betty, is bolder, more overtly sensual. Their relationship is defined by a shared fascination with death: they collect jars of organs, watch snuff-like videos, and fantasize about mortality. The film’s central transgression occurs when Rob brings home a fully intact male corpse recovered from a swampy accident site. What begins as a macabre curiosity evolves into a full ménage à trois. In one of the most infamous scenes in underground cinema, Rob and Betty bathe the corpse, dress it, and engage in explicit sexual acts with it. A prosthetic penis is attached to the body, allowing penetration that involves all three "participants." This sequence is shot with a mixture of clinical detachment and eerie tenderness: soft lighting, slow motion, and a haunting score transform the grotesque into something almost romantic. From a queer perspective, this threesome is profoundly destabilizing. On the surface, Rob and Betty form a heterosexual couple, but the introduction of the male corpse complicates any straightforward reading. The corpse is male, decaying, and passive—yet it becomes the focal point of desire for both partners. Rob’s interactions with the body carry latent homoerotic charge: he cleans it, caresses it, and participates in acts that position him in proximity to male flesh in ways that normative heterosexuality typically forecloses. Betty, meanwhile, takes an increasingly dominant role, directing the encounters and eventually claiming exclusive possession of the corpse. When the body begins to rot irreparably—emitting fluids, attracting flies—Betty absconds with it, leaving Rob devastated. Rob’s subsequent descent amplifies the queer dimensions of his loss. Bereft of both his human partner and his necrophilic object, he spirals into violence and isolation. He strangles a cat, murders a prostitute in a fit of rage, and visits a cemetery where he masturbates over graves. The film’s climax finds him in an abandoned house, where he has sex with a female corpse before stabbing himself in the stomach. As he bleeds out, he achieves orgasm, his semen mixing with blood in a final, ecstatic release. The closing shot shows a woman digging up his grave, her shovel striking his erect penis—a promise of continuation. This ending crystallizes the film’s queer necrophilic logic. Rob’s suicide is not merely despair but a consummation: he becomes the corpse he desires, achieving union through self-annihilation. In queer theoretical terms, this embraces the death drive over the pleasures of living relationality. Normative sexuality demands futurity—partnerships that might lead to family, legacy, continuity. Rob’s arc rejects this entirely. His desire is oriented toward stasis and endings, a queer refusal of life’s imperatives. The homoerotic undertones in his attachment to the male corpse further queer his ostensibly heterosexual identity; the corpse allows a form of intimacy with maleness that living men might not. Betty’s abandonment, meanwhile, exposes the instability of coupling when desire fixates on the inanimate. She chooses the silent, undemanding corpse over the needy, living Rob—a choice that queers traditional romantic loyalty. The film’s aesthetic reinforces this reading. Buttgereit’s use of Super 8 grain, muted colors, and fragmented montage creates a dreamlike detachment. Scenes of everyday banality—Rob at work, couples arguing—intercut with extreme imagery, blurring boundaries between normal and aberrant. Sexuality itself is presented as mechanical, object-oriented: even living sex scenes feel cold. The rabbit-skinning sequence early on parallels human dissection, suggesting that all flesh is ultimately meat. In this worldview, necrophilia is not an aberration but an extreme manifestation of desires already latent in normative life: objectification, control, the eroticization of vulnerability. Nekromantik 2 shifts the gender dynamic while retaining the core obsession. The film opens with Monika, a young nurse, attending the burial of Rob from the first film. In a bold act of continuity, she exhumes his corpse that night, smuggling it back to her apartment. Like Betty, Monika cleans and preserves the body, engaging in tender, explicit sexual acts with it. She mounts Rob’s decaying form, caresses his rotting flesh, and even preserves his severed penis in formaldehyde as a keepsake. Unlike the first film, however, Nekromantik 2 introduces a living romantic rival. Monika meets Mark, a cheerful dubbing artist for pornographic films. Their relationship begins conventionally: dates at the cinema, walks in the park, tentative sex. Mark represents normative masculinity—vital, communicative, sexually competent. Yet Monika struggles to reconcile this with her necrophilic attachment. She hides Rob’s body in her apartment, continuing her encounters with it even as her relationship with Mark progresses. Tension builds as decay advances: flies infest the flat, odors become unbearable. The film’s most striking sequence involves Monika’s internal conflict made visual. Intercut with her dates with Mark are scenes of her with the corpse, often in parallel framing. Living sex with Mark is passionate but ultimately unsatisfying for her; necrophilic acts are slower, more ritualistic, accompanied by classical music. In one extraordinary moment, Monika decapitates Rob’s corpse, replacing the head with that of a seal killed at the aquarium (a bizarre subplot involving animal rights protesters). Later, when Mark proposes marriage, Monika’s response is violent: she drugs him, ties him up, and saws off his head during intercourse, attaching it to Rob’s body for a final, grotesque union. This reversal of gender roles invites a distinctly queer feminist reading. In the first film, Betty’s agency leads her to abandon Rob; here, Monika’s dominance is absolute and lethal. She refuses the compromises of normative heterosexuality—marriage, compromise, living partnership—in favor of total control over her object of desire. Mark’s profession as a porn dubber underscores the artificiality of living sexuality: his moans are performative, his body commodified. The corpse, by contrast, offers authenticity in its silence and permanence. Queerly, Monika’s necrophilia queers female desire itself. Traditional narratives position women as objects of male gaze and possession; here, Monika possesses utterly. Her acts subvert phallic power: she preserves and uses Rob’s penis independently, eventually grafting Mark’s living head onto the dead body in a monstrous reconfiguration. This Frankensteinian gesture queers embodiment, suggesting that desire can reassemble bodies beyond natural limits. The seal head interlude further disrupts anthropocentric norms, hinting at bestial or post-human erotics. The film’s ending mirrors yet inverts the first: Monika, now pregnant (from Mark?), walks through a cemetery as Rob’s grave erects a phallic shovel. Ambiguity reigns—has she achieved some fusion of life and death? From a queer viewpoint, her pregnancy complicates the anti-futuristic thrust of necrophilia. Yet it can be read as ironic: life emerging from death-obsessed transgression, queering reproduction itself. Together, the dilogy forms a cohesive exploration of necrophilic desire as queer paradigm. Both protagonists—Rob and Monika—experience profound alienation from living intimacy. Their attachments to corpses reflect a refusal of societal scripts: Rob cannot sustain partnership with Betty, Monika cannot commit to Mark. Necrophilia becomes a haven for desires too extreme for the social world. Gender reversal across the films highlights the non-specificity of this transgression—it afflicts men and women alike, undermining essentialist notions of sexuality. Symbolically, decay itself is queer. The rotting corpse resists preservation, mirroring how queer desires often face cultural attempts at erasure or normalization. Fluids, odors, maggots—all signify uncontrollable excess, much like queer sexuality has been framed as excessive or contaminating. Yet Buttgereit aestheticizes this decay, finding beauty in putrefaction. Close-ups of liquefying eyes or oozing wounds are shot with the same care as erotic caresses, queering the boundary between horror and allure. The films also queer horror conventions. Traditional horror punishes transgression; here, necrophiles are protagonists, their desires centralized rather than vilified. Audiences are implicated—forced to witness, perhaps even empathize. This mirrors queer strategies of visibility: making the marginalized visible, however discomforting. Ultimately, Buttgereit’s dilogy posits necrophilia as the queerest desire imaginable—one that embraces death over life, object over subject, taboo over acceptance. In a world that demands vibrant, productive sexuality, these films whisper a darker truth: some longings lead not to connection but to dissolution. Rob and Monika find ecstasy in the grave, queering love into something eternal, silent, and absolute.