Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.
Today’s theme: Made for TV
It’s graduation night at a German high school that looks more like a 19th-century gothic castle than an educational facility. A group of seniors breaks off from the main party to play pranks on their teachers—scattering live tarantulas and filling an English classroom with creepy Harlequin costumes. Unfortunately for them, an escaped lunatic in a red rubber jester mask and black leather glove grabs a giant pair of sharp tailor scissors and decides to crash the festivities. Soon, the bodies start piling up, and the teens are forced to fight their way through graduation just to survive.
If you grew up obsessed with late-90s horror, you remember the golden post-Scream rush. Every network, studio and international distributor was scrambling to find attractive young actors, wrap them in self-referential dialogue and throw them at a killer in a mask. Germany jumped right into the sweepstakes, bringing us films like Anatomy, Flashback and The Pool. But right on the front lines in 1999 was RTL’s made-for-TV slasher School’s Out (originally broadcast in Germany with the brilliantly shameless title Schrei – denn ich werde dich töten! or Scream — Because I Will Kill You!).
Rarely for a European TV movie of the era, this actually scored a North American English-dubbed VHS release from Fangoria Video in late 2000. And while it undeniably rides the coattails of Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven, School’s Out secretly harbors a krimi/gialli heart and a deep affection for 1980s slashers.
Director Robert Sigl—who previously made the atmospheric, award-winning 1989 gothic horror film Laurin—and screenwriter Kai Meyer (a self-confessed junkie of 70s and 80s horror) craft a story that opens like a giant megamix of the aforementioned Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
We open on Jessica (Sandra S. Leonhard) driving her father’s taxi during a raging thunderstorm. She spots a broken-down car and a sinister guy in a rain slicker standing in the dark. Spooked, she speeds off, only for the mysterious creep to call her taxi’s mobile phone and drop the classic line: “You like horror flicks?” Despite his obvious serial killer vibes, she agrees to pick him up when he offers to take her to dinner. Meanwhile, over at the school, TV and radio news reports warn that an escaped psychopath—who slaughtered four women with a pair of giant scissors 11 years ago—is back on the loose.
At the party, Nina (Katharina Wackernagel) laments that life will never be the same after graduation while moping over her ex, Tom (Nils Nelleßen). Wackernagel—a big German TV star at the time—was instantly dubbed the German Neve Campbell or Teutonic Jennifer Love Hewitt by press and fans, and she plays the Final Girl role to perfection: dogged, suspicious and ready to figure out what’s going on long before the useless police force takes notice.
Filmed around Cologne with Schaumburg Castle serving as the backdrop, this school comes complete with a room full of taxidermied animals and an endless supply of dolls. The killer’s look—a bright red rubber mask, black leather gloves and a harlequin outfit—feels like a genius mashup of Carlo Vanzina’s Nothing Underneath and classic krimi adaptations of Edgar Wallace stories (Zimmer 13, The Phantom of Soho). Meyer even called the film a teen giallo, embracing the black gloves, red-herring characters and bizarre murder weapons (including a taxidermied swordfish!).
Sigl and Meyer cleverly subvert expectations by structuring the film into two distinct acts. Just when you think the nightmare is over, the remaining survivors—bizarrely enough—decide to hold another party at the school mere days after their classmates were slaughtered to hunt for clues.
Being a TV movie budgeted at $1.3 million and shot on 16mm film, network censors forced around two minutes of gore cuts for its prime-time debut on RTL (though Sigl shot an uncut version for foreign markets). Despite being broadcast on television, the film stirred up massive real-world controversy: on the morning of its airdate, a student in Germany tragically murdered his teacher. Although the crime happened hours before the film aired, pearl-clutchers tried to pin the blame on the movie. Naturally, it became one of the year’s highest-rated TV events and spawned a 2001 direct sequel involving a killer nun (Schrei – denn ich werde dich töten! 2 / The Girls’ Boarding School — No One Will Hear Your Screams).
While it has a few mid-tempo pacing snags in the first half—and foolishly misses the opportunity to give us a full-fledged chase scene between the killer and a character on rollerblades!—School’s Out is a highly atmospheric piece of late-90s nostalgia. It fuses American postmodern slasher tropes with practical German storytelling and classic Italian giallo aesthetics.
You can watch this on YouTube.
