Razzennest

Razzennest (2022)

History is Written by the Dead

South African enfant terrible filmmaker and artiste-cineaste Manus Oosthuizen meets with Rotten Tomatoes-approved indie film critic Babette Cruickshank in an Echo Park sound studio. With key members of Manus's crew joining, they record an audio commentary track for his new elegiac feature documentary Razzennest. But the session goes down a different path... cazzart! The ultimate elevation of arthouse horror, just not as you might expect.

Date of release
2022-09-29
TMDB
5.2 / 10 (14)
Runtime
1h 21m
Genres
Horror, Comedy, Drama, History
Director
Johannes Grenzfurthner

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Rohrwald and Schwedenhöhlen

Razzennest is a 2022 Austrian supernatural, satirical horror film written and directed by Johannes Grenzfurthner. The film was produced by art group monochrom.

Production

Grenzfurthner has described the film's form as a practical and aesthetic response to the difficulty of making a historical film about the Thirty Years' War on an independent budget. In a 2025 interview, he said that several ideas merged into the project, including his long-standing interest in the Thirty Years' War and the question of how to make such a subject feasible without producing a large-scale historical epic.

In an interview with VOD Club, Grenzfurthner connected the film to his broader interest in first-person narration in horror cinema. He stated that literary horror frequently uses the first-person perspective, while horror films often translate such material into a more conventional visual third-person mode.

Principal photography started on 2 March 2022, entirely in the Rohrwald region, with most of the shots in the villages Oberrohrbach (Leobendorf), Niederhollabrunn, Niederfellabrunn, and Leitzersdorf. Grenzfurthner stated that the film "provided an exciting chance to portray a fascinating landscape, the Rohrwald, which is only a few kilometers from where I grew up."

As the plot focuses on the so-called Schwedenhöhlen (Swedish Caves), earthen stables that were carved into the loess in the 16th and 17th centuries, the film was shot at these locations, using them as part of its visual and historical setting.

The visual layer of the film consists largely of unpopulated images of the Rohrwald and its surroundings. Reviews described the fictional documentary footage as including static shots of rural objects and landscapes, drone images of the area and nearby Burg Kreuzenstein, as well as cave-like tunnels in the forest.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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