User:Nikau/Night of the Long Knives

The Night of the Long Knives was a 1934 German horror film that established many of the cinematic techniques one associates with the thriller genre, from gratuitous shower scenes that invariably end in some kind of mass murder, to piles of blonde, blue eyed characters who are truly thick as shit.

While supernatural horrors had been put to film earlier, in both Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (is full of fucking Ghosts!), the 1934 feature instead focused upon an otherwise unassuming Austrian painter and aspiring writer as antagonist. The former soldier turned serial killer stalks a group of randy members from the local Sturmabteilung team, and their nubile lovers, as they indulge in wholesome activities familiar to most 1930s youth; making out in large, suspiciously abandoned mansions and attacking minorities on the street.

While the film was a commercial success in both the English and German speaking markets, successive sequels would depart from the vibe of a cautionary campfire tale for bisexuals and those with a fondness for brown shirts, culminating in a single scene in which the serial killer is able to murder almost an entire race with the flick of the gas switch, simply because he is some form of not particularly well thought out "super human."

Plot

The film opens to a group of citizens sitting outside a Berlin pub, discussing the mysterious disappearence of almost all German political parties.

A middle aged woman shakes her head. She last saw the Communist Party of Germany going to investigate a strange noise armed only with a flickering torch - such are the failings of state run torch factories, she shrugs. A businessman of similar vintage points to an article in the daily paper, the Social Democratic Party has inherited a castle on the French- German border and must spend the night there with a group of slutty French as part of the will. Reasonable enough explaination, however the capitalist questions when all the tabloids started being printed in human blood.

Suddenly a wrinkled man with wild hair interjects, wondering whether this is connected to the suspicious fire down at the Reichstag home. Old man Hindenburg had been acting strangely recently, suspending civil liberties at the behest of a mysterious "friend" he met in the Reichstag Chancellery and scaling the Brandenburg Gate while contorting his body and shouting obscenities against the Jewish Christ. The wild eyed vagrant suggests that a being may emerge from the fire to haunt their dreams of a powerful Germany and pick off an ethnically diverse group of high school friends one by one, emphasis on the ethnically diverse.

A mother rolls her eyes, pointing out that the Fuhrer hates shitty sweaters. As a parent, she knows these kind of things are always the wind, or a cat or a cat with wind and nothing to go to any kind of competent authority about. The housewife concludes:

"For the record, I enjoy the creepy omnipresent chorus of small children that started singing when they passed the Enabling Act."

Rohm couldn't see the writing on the wall. Strange, given his experience writing on the walls of Jewish owned businesses.