This was an essentially conservative West German genre which depicted "morally unimpeachable family and community lives". She argues that Buttgereit both evokes and derides this genre, and by implication the culture which produced it. The supposedly upstanding member of society kills, hides a corpse, and then disappears from view, getting away with murder. The film includes several occasions of a dream sequence, such as Rob's visions of a woman in white in a rural landscape. She transports a severed head in a box and later plays with it. The film within a film is a slasher film. While a knife-wielding killer traces his knife across a female victim, the desensitized audience of the movie theater seems bored. They kiss or fondle each other, they eat or talk during a misogynist torture scene, a testament to their lack of empathy. The suicide scene is a depiction of extreme masochism, but it also concludes the story of the character's sexual dysfunction, existential crisis, and social isolation. Rob is not only a person with a fetish of the dead, but one who constantly fails in his relationships with the living. Release NEKRomantik defied the censorship standards of West Germany. Since 1984, all horror films released in West Germany have been edited to remove violent scenes, both in cinema release and video release (such as with the 1985 film Day of the Dead), while a total of 32 films were banned from release in any format, including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Mother's Day (1980), and The Evil Dead (1981). The creators of Nekromantik did not submit the film for review by the Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle der Filmwirtschaft and made the film available exclusively to an adult audience. Home media The film was released on Blu-ray by Cult Films on a limited run of 10,000 copies on 7 October 2014. Reception The film has had a polarised reception since the time of its release. It currently holds a 50% on Rotten Tomatoes. The film critics of Berlin were typically favourable to the film, commenting on its taboo-breaking, its artistic merit, and the quality of its special effects. A magazine article on Sex and Death in the Modern Gay Cinema perceived a film as an allegory for AIDS and the necessity of safe sex. The film initially faced no significant reprisals. It was only the scandal over the sequel Nekromantik 2 (1991) which caused the