What happens when a person’s psychopathy isn’t exactly definable as typical mental illness? What do we, as a society, do for and with these people? Between healthcare systems and the justice system, we expect them to find help— somewhere along the line. In reality, we all know this is not what happens, and all too often there are people caught between their mental illness and the prison system instead of getting the help they actually need.
Such is the chilling case of Austrian murderer Werner Kniesek. First, Werner stabbed his mother. She didn’t die, but he was charged, locked up, and then released two years later. Following his release in 1973, he left prison, got himself a pistol, then shot a seventy-three-year-old woman in her porch. She also didn’t die, though again Werner was locked up— this time for eight and a half years. He was deemed insane, however, because the definition of insanity at the time only extended so far, Kniesek was not sent to a psychiatric facility to get treatment. Instead he was thrown back in a regular prison cell. What occurred after those eight and a half years is an indictment of the Austrian justice system’s failures. It’s also the series of events depicted in the Austrian shocker from 1983, Angst, which stands as one of the most disturbingly realistic serial killer stories in the vast landscape of horror movies.
In January of 1980, Werner was out of prison. He used money he made inside selling illegal schnapps to buy a gas pistol – a non-lethal replica of a real pistol used for self-defence. Afterwards, he made his way across various Austrian villages until he found a large villa, in which lived a widow, her daughter, and her wheelchair-bound son. Once he made it inside the villa he terrorized the family.
By the time Werner’s fictionalized counterpart – listed as K, the Psychopath in the credits and played to nauseating perfection by Erwin Leder – arrives at the villa, we know where things are headed. What’s most unsettling is how the screenplay, co-written by director Gerald Kargl and Zbigniew Rybczynski, tells the story of the killer by being wholly honest about the killer’s mental state. One of the scariest parts about Kniesek was that he admittedly killed for the simple pleasure of it. Just as the fictional K tells the audience via narration, Kniesek once told a judge his compulsion to kill and torture would never stop, and that it was akin to an addiction like any other. The cognitive recognition of Kniesek is part of his terror, which Kargl and Rybczynski use to drive the character of K. The moment K steps outside the prison walls he admits to the audience he knows his blood lust will take over again, that it “has to.” After that he continues on his worst spree of violence yet.
Angst is not only psychologically upsetting, it is a visceral experience. This is due to the fact Kargl utilises an ultra realistic style in depicting the fictionalized story of Kniesek, from the screenplay pages themselves to the camerawork. Continually throughout the movie, K narrates to the audience, rarely if ever speaking to anybody through dialogue at all. Kargl and Rybczynski use a lack of dialogue between K and other characters to heighten the sense of his mental illness, often bordering on the effects of paranoid schizophrenia. The killer’s narration shows his thought process throughout the murders, highlighting the chaos in his random violence. At one point he tells us: “I was in a state of mind that excluded every kind of logic. I was afraid of myself.” Later on, after becoming violent at the villa, he relates to the audience how he imagined the situation going differently, but the senselessness means a loss of order. An eerie cycle is perpetuated, where he knows the wrong he’s doing yet is absolutely unable to control himself. The seemingly rational narration in stark contrast to the brutal and bloody violence is a paradox in K, serving to make him an even more hideous character than he is already.
This paradox in combination with K’s banality makes him the poster boy for inane violence. For instance, in the midst of his violent assault on the family’s villa he stops for a break and takes long gulps of tap water from the kitchen sink. This isn’t something usually depicted in horror movies, unless it’s an attempt at dark humour. Here, it’s for the effect of grounding this sequence in an everyday sense of behaviour— killing and torture, for K, is no different than having a drink of water. Even the way he moves around the villa at first – not particularly in a hurry though frantic – illustrates how unthreatening K appears to the world. He’s a microcosm of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase about the “banality of evil.” And that makes him more frightening.
To keep Angst grounded in that realism, Kargl and Rybczynski opt not to stray far from the true facts of the murders, either. The villa sequence with K depicts everything the actual Werner Kniesek did to the real family of three he murdered in 1980. The elderly widow was beaten, and at one point Kniesek stopped to feed her medicine, to make sure she would live long enough to endure his torture. The screenplay throws in a powerful image: the old woman’s false teeth shatter on the floor, like a symbol of old age and fragility, destroyed by the killer. The son in his wheelchair was strangled and drowned in the tub. Ultimately, the worst was saved for the twenty-five-year-old daughter, whom Kniesek tortured at length before killing her. This last murder is what Kargl depicts at length, in a macabre and repulsive scene where K’s rage is totally untethered. It’s certainly not for the faint of heart, sparing very few graphic details.
On top of the story’s realistic depiction of true events, the villa murder scenes are augmented by the camerawork which puts the viewer in the shoes of K. Many of these shots are achieved through the use of a SnorriCam – a camera device rigged to the body of the actor, usually facing the actor, to create the appearance of them remaining stationary while everything around them moves. Kargl fitted lead actor Leder with the SnorriCam – at times facing front, other times at the side – and this technique keeps the camera close to K, cementing the movie’s perspective as entirely through his eyes. Between the SnorriCam work and the psychologically focused narration, Angst is able to take its audience right inside the walk and the talk of a veritable psychopath.
By all accounts, Werner Kniesek was a product of the system. He got locked up and never treated, then all it took was a few lies about his own rehabilitation to get himself released and back into the world carrying the same old psychosis around on his shoulders. And so, Angst explores this as one of the many failures the justice system – whether in Austria or elsewhere – has perpetuated through a misunderstanding and disorganized approach to the treatment of mental illness and disorders in criminals. More than that, director Gerald Kargl gives the viewer a front row seat to the psychosis of Kniesek’s fictional counterpart using the SnorriCam as a visual technique to represent his chaotic perspective. When we’re not forced to walk with K and listen to his unbridled thoughts, we’re being subjected to a horrorshow of violence at his hands.
Angst is a relentless spectacle of chaos and violence with purpose at its core. By telling the story of K, using the real life crimes of Kniesek, Kargl is able to examine senseless violence and the limits of the justice system when dealing with mental illness through the excess of a bloody horror movie. K is our storyteller, narrating his life, his crimes, and his psychology. It’s the character’s presence of mind, portrayed quite literally with introspective narration juxtaposed against the vicious crimes he commits, which drives the real fear of this movie. Because, after all, Kniesek was a real person, and his crimes were barely altered in the story Angst tells. To see his cold, unflinching psychopathy depicted in such realistic terms is so visceral it’s near impossible to sever reality from fiction. Watching this movie is like having been there in the room while Kniesek visited gory terror on that family— not the horror movie experience everybody’s looking for necessarily, though a wild and revealing one.
, a German film which adapts the crimes of Werner Kniesek with visceral brutality and chaos.){kind=link}