One of European cinema’s most distinctive, fearless and tireless narrative and documentary filmmakers, Eckhart Schmidt, died of natural causes at his home in Munich on Oct. 25, only a few days before his 86th birthday.
His best-known film, the psychological horror thriller, “The Fan,” was graphic and shocking when it premiered in 1982, and its stomach-churning tale of a cannibalistic groupie was influential on a generation of horror filmmakers, but the film didn’t achieve mass commercial success upon its initial release.
Banned in several territories for its jarring, bloody portrait of a rock star-obsessed teenager, in the past decade the film has undergone a global rediscovery, popping up
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