Razzennest is a 2022 Austrian supernatural, satirical horror film written and directed by Johannes Grenzfurthner. The film was produced by art group monochrom. Grenzfurthner has described Razzennest as part of a loose trilogy with Masking Threshold (2021) and Solvent (2024), connected by their emphasis on horror and sound.
Plot South African filmmaker and enfant terrible Manus Oosthuizen meets with film critic Babette Cruickshank in a Los Angeles sound studio. With key members of Manus's crew joining, they record an audio commentary track for his new "elegiac feature documentary Razzennest" that cryptically deals with the legacy of the Thirty Years' War. Strange incidents occur during the recording session; one by one, the film crew members are possessed by the ghosts of soldiers and peasants from 1645, and history repeats itself.
Cast
Themes Razzennest combines elements of satire, tragicomedy, drama, horror, and ghost story, and has been described as a self-reflexive film about filmmaking. In a statement for Daily Dead, Grenzfurthner said that the film allowed him to write both "a love letter to genre films" and a satire of "pretentious arthouse films", while also mocking the conventions of genre cinema. He also described the film as a reflection on the legacy of the Thirty Years' War and on what he called the "undead legacy of murderous Christianity". Although Grenzfurthner called Razzennest "bizarre", he stated that he considered it more accessible than his previous film Masking Threshold.
Production
Development 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. This led to the idea of using a film commentary track as the narrative engine, allowing the events of the film to unfold primarily through audio rather than through conventional dramatic reconstruction. 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. He described Razzennest as an attempt to explore how the atrocities of the Thirty Years' War could be represented cinematically, using the film's metafictional structure to examine the difficulty of communicating such violence through a montage of images alone.
Filming
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. Grenzfurthner cited Nikolaus Geyrhalter's documentary Homo Sapiens as an influence on the static, depopulated visual style of the fictional documentary within the film.
Post-production and sound design Grenzfurthner edited the film himself and said in interviews that he wanted to be precise with the style and pace associated with the fictitious director/editor Oosthuizen. Sound was central to the film's production concept. In a 2023 interview with Keyframe, Grenzfurthner said that his work on Masking Threshold, especially its use of sound to represent tinnitus and psychological disintegration, led him to further explore dramatic sound in Razzennest. He worked with Daniel Hasibar and Fabian Wessely on the film's sound design. Critics frequently noted that the film's horror is conveyed primarily through voices, foley effects, and sound rather than through visible action. Film Threat described the film as an unusually claustrophobic work in which the audience never sees the main characters' actions, while the images function as tonal counterpoints to what is heard on the commentary track.
Music The soundtrack was created by German experimental electronic musician Alec Empire. Critic Richard Propes described Empire's original score as complementing the visuals without dominating them.
Release Razzennest had its world premiere on 29 September 2022 at Fantastic Fest as part of the Burnt Ends showcase. Festival curator Annick Mahnert called it "an audio commentary feature film filled with surprises and inside jokes." The European premiere took place at the B3 Biennial of the Moving Image in Frankfurt. Festivals such as Nightmares Film Festival, A Night of Horror International Film Festival, South African Horrorfest, Cucalorus Film Festival, Feratum Film Festival in Mexico, and BizarroLand Film Festival have screened the film. The Austrian premiere was at Diagonale 2023 in Graz. It was released on the US streaming service Fandor on 2 May 2023.
Reception
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
