How Gerald Kargl’s Angst Pushed the Boundaries of the Home Invasion Movie

At a certain point toward the beginning of 1983’s Angst, you’d be forgiven for assuming that you were watching just another ersatz, lightweight version of Psycho. Echoing the perfunctory psychological profile of Norman Bates that concludes Alfred Hitchcock’s totemic masterpiece, Angst grinds to a standstill following a visually assaultive opening salvo to convey an extended account of how an unnamed serial killer’s anchorless childhood and formative traumas fomented his matricidal impulses. It’s a jarring change of pace from the movie’s almost wordless opening sequence, in which the killer (Erwin Leder) walks trancelike down a street, picks out a house seemingly at random, knocks on the door, and shoots the woman who greets him dead.

That sensation of whiplash becomes all too familiar the deeper you plummet into Angst, a movie that spits blood and bile in the face of orthodoxy. The movie that follows isn’t much like Psycho at all, nor is it much like any other movie for that matter. Hitchcock’s movie is a virtuoso display of precision puppetry. Angst, by contract, is all bludgeoning blunt force trauma, all wild, full-blooded swings, to the point that some of its more aggressive aesthetic flourishes can feel almost amateurish—hardly surprising given its director, Gerald Kargl, was in uncharted territory, spearheading his very first feature-length film.

On the surface that might sound derogatory, but in reality it’s quite the opposite. If Angst were more varnished, more technically conventional, its vampiric bite would feel somehow neutered, and it would certainly be less successful in entangling us within its maze of psychopathic grey matter. It’s the movie’s salmonella-rawness that really draws us into the nauseating mental state of its killer, who despite his substantial criminal career, is as inefficient and inelegant as murderers come, and part of movie’s intrigue is in watching him struggle, flounder, and capitulate under the pressure of committing transgressions that, in the context of the movie, should really be quite routine. Early in the movie, we watch as he fails spectacularly to strangle a female taxi driver with his shoelaces, and what’s striking isn’t so much the woman’s paralytic terror, but rather how thuddingly unsubtle he is in his approach, how easily he succumbs to nerves, how every sinew in his body seizes up at being caught, and how prolonged his ensuing state of hysteria is as he flees from the scene.

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Angst is hardly the first movie to be preoccupied with forcing us to identify with evil, but it’s a testament to Kargl and his experimental impulses that he manages to make the idea feel joltingly inventive. His most inspired stroke of formal bravado is to literally strap the camera to Leder’s body, so that almost at all times we find ourselves inextricably yoked to the killer’s perspective, orbiting in unnerving proximity as he embarks on his erratic rampage. It’s a radical stylistic choice, and the effect is uncanny. It keeps the killer in sharp focus as he swerves and lunges through his spree, and everything around him trembles and oscillates in the wake of his violence. It makes the killer’s headspace feel utterly inescapable, and indeed whenever the camera does manage to disentangle itself from his physical presence, it remains fastly fettered to his psyche, perennially tapped into his anxieties and appetites. Moments that seem like reprieves prove to be anything but, like an interlude in a restaurant in which the killer suggestively consumes a sausage while ogling two women, whom the camera devours in sickeningly ravenous close-ups. We’re physically removed from the killer, but only so that we can leer at and anatomize his potential victims that much more intensely.

As difficult as it is to pin down, Angst is ultimately a home invasion movie at its putrescent heart. The lion’s share of the action is confined to a house occupied by a mother (Edith Rosset), her daughter (Karin Springer), and her intellectually disabled son (Rudolf Götz), whom the killer torments and picks off one by one in singularly slipshod, grisly fashion. Angst belongs uneasily within that generic categorization, though. Juxtaposed against something like The Strangers—the popular series of home invasion movies currently having its time in the stygian sun—Angst appears mutated and disfigured beyond recognition. There’s a formulaic simplicity baked into the DNA of these movies that makes them almost effortless to plumb for scares and profit: we expect our elemental fear of having our safe space torn asunder to be exploited; we expect the perpetrator to be chillingly bereft of motive outside of the satisfaction of base urges; we expect the thrill of the game of hide-and-seek, the duel between the brute force of the pursuer and the ingenuity of the pursued.

Angst breaches those constraints, exchanges that predictability for anarchy, and is all the more impossible to grapple with for it. Nothing of what we expect is here—not the suspense and anticipation, not the prolonged periods of silence and stillness ruptured by the thrust of a knife. Angst traffics not in fear factor, but in the queasiness of ricocheting within the killer’s head, bearing unwilling witness to the carnage he exacts as he lurches and careens from room to room, victim to victim. As the killer pounces on his prey, Kargl assaults us with a barrage of off-kilter compositions—shots strapped to the killer, extreme close-ups, eerie overheads, absurdly low tracking shots, and shots that are almost indescribable in which the camera rocks arrhythmically back and forth, as if unsure of where to look, or terrified of what it might see. A more refined, more calculated movie could never achieve such an uncomfortable crystallization of the killer’s internal frisson.

Everything is thrown even further off of its axis by the killer’s interminable voiceover narration, in which he bombards us with dispassionately delivered yarns about the traumas of his past that correspond a little too perfectly with the acts of violence that he inflicts upon the family. You’d think that being forced to listen to the internal monologue of a psychopath would be bloodcurdling, but the effect is more destabilizing than anything else. The killer’s pancake-flat, phlegmatic tone, chafing against the uncomfortably intimate camerawork, makes us feel at once unbearably close to and yet peculiarly disconnected from the brutality.

Angst is loosely based on the real-life crimes of mass murderer Werner Kniesek, but Kargl directs his actors in such an abnormal way that the people that occupy the movie feel more oneiric than real, more Martian than terrestrial. Leder’s performance is singularly horrifying, all inhuman contortions and fast-twitch fiber, boasting an apparently inexhaustible array of anxious expressions. He certainly has one of the most interesting faces in horror movies—greasy, diaphanous, and weirdly magnetic. But although Leder’s fretful rodent of a killer is a maelstrom of transparent emotions and wild facial mannerisms, his victims are bizarrely, inexplicably placid, yielding to the killer’s caprices without any discernible distress or resistance.

Erwin Leder in 1983's Angst

It’s strangely unnerving to see people in mortal peril react with almost total indifference, barely seeming to register the fact that there’s a homicidal psychopath rampaging around the house. There’s no sense of urgency, no will to escape, no fear of suffering or destruction. The victims feel like lifeforms beamed from some alternate dimension where violent crime and sexual violation don’t exist. Shoddily tied to a doorknob, the daughter acts almost as if she’s anaesthetized, making essentially no attempt to break free from her bondage, seemingly oblivious to or unmoved by the ongoing slaughter of her mother in the adjacent room at the hands of a lunatic. She even at times seems to evince a sort of twisted eroticism, licking the killer’s face as he drags her around the house, as if the only thing that can break through her impassive patina is the prospect of living out some sort of fantasy involving sexual atrocity. Even the family dachshund feels somehow uncanny, nibbling at the dentures that fall from the mother’s mouth as she’s being assaulted, nuzzling the killer’s genitals, yawning after witnessing the sister’s corpse being sexually desecrated, and riding along with the killer as he makes his getaway. These are alien sparkles of surreal comic relief in a movie that otherwise feels unmitigatedly sinister, but if anything the oddness of the levity only makes the movie feel even more brain-melting.

That surrealist streak feels especially difficult to parse. There’s an argument to be made that the perplexing placidity of the victims exhorts us to see the victims through the killer’s eyes, as nothing more than vacant shells, but that doesn’t quite align with what the killer himself declares about his pathology, which is that he feeds vampirically off of the heightened fear that he inspires. Maybe, then, Kargl is making some sort of statement by refusing to give the killer the satisfaction that he craves, but that too feels dubious. Ultimately, I think it feels appropriate that a movie this helter-skelter would resist any and all forms of standard analysis, just as it feels appropriate, yet tragic, that Kargl would never direct another movie, as the ballooning budget of Angst pushed him perilously close to the precipice of bankruptcy. Angst is nothing if not contradictory, equal parts newborn scream and frothing death rattle, and it’s precisely that ungovernable oddness that sets it apart from its home invasion movie brethren. While something like The Strangers recedes rapidly from memory, Angst thrums with possibility, redefines the limits of the subgenre, and persists like a hatchet lodged deep in the cerebral cortex.

Cian Tsang is a UK-based film writer, whose pieces have appeared in The Guardian, Little White Lies, Polygon, and more. You can find his work here.