The Vampire of Dusseldorf

A weirdly lugubrious serial-killer movie, 1965’s Le Vampire de Düsseldorf tells the story of Peter Kürten, a real-life killer who operated in the Düsseldorf area in the late 1920s before being caught, tried and executed in 1931. Look him up in Wikipedia, if have the stomach for it, and you’ll realise that director/writer/star Robert Hossein has left most of the gruesomeness out of the picture. Kürten tended to kill his female victims with a pair of scissors. Hossein leaves that in. The rest of it, the sexual kick Kürten got from watching women in their death throes, he only suggests. Better that way. Hossein finesses Kürten’s timeline a touch, to make him align … Read more