Monday, December 4, 2006

GAS CHAMBER ZOMBIES

A Film Idea
by Chaim Pevner
>>
GAS CHAMBER ZOMBIES
or "Revenge of the Gas Chamber Zombies"?
(or, "Deck the Halls with Boughs of Germans")

Gerhardt Schroeter is a young middle class German living in Oberursel, an upscale suburb on the outskirts of Frankfurt. He works in a bank and is in every way a German Clark Kent -- a model, upstanding citizen, hard-working, church-going, idealistic nice guy, who is well liked by everyone.
However, he is troubled by recurrent nightmares in which he sees himself every night on top of an Ausschwitz Gas Chamber injecting Zyklon-B pellets into the chamber below. He doesn't really want to do this -- in fact he is horrified by the death agonies of the Jews in the chamber below, but he has no choice -- and he always wakes up in a cold sweat murmuring -- "I was just following orders" --

Eventually he finds out that his nice German father, a war veteran with an artificial nose and ear and other scars, was actually a gas chamber operator during the war, and -- when the father, who insists that what he did was right -- and starts lecturing Gerhardt on the correctness and necessity of the Final Solution -- Gerhardt becomes obsessed with guilt and now has dreams in which he sees himself as Jesus nailed to the cross -- actually, a large grenn "hooked cross", a Giant Nazi Swastika.
In his next dream he is given a can of special pellets to throw into the gas chamber.
As the camera zooms in to an overturned Zyklon-gas cannister on top of the death chamber
we note that the can is marked in small letters following the big capital letter "Z" -- with the barely legible words "zombie gas" in small lettering.

Cut to the interior of the gas chamber where the Jews inside are turning into zombies.
When the gas chamber doors are opened to recover the dead bodies the Jewish zombies
come marching out and mechanically attack the German guards and the Kapos -- start to strangle them and eat them alive as they rip their flesh off and chomp on jugular veins. The desperate
bloody, half eaten guards shoot at the zombies but it's no use -- the zombies are Living Dead -- impervious to the bullets. Gory scenes ensue of the zombies eating all the Germans in the camp and
literally ripping them to pieces, smashing their heads against iron posts, gouging their eyeballs out and chewing them up, biting through skulls and slurping up the hot brains, biting off ears and
noses, ripping tongues out and eating them raw, wiping their bloody mouths with pieces of Nazi uniforms, trampling Nazi medals underfoot as they go ... Only his father manages to escape,
badly chewed up but alive.

When Gerhardt wakes up from this one he realizes that he must do something to atone for the immeasurable collective German guilt. On Christmas Eve he locks his whole family in the cellar of the house, his wife, their two lovely Aryan children, and his unrepentant Nazi father and mother. He has prepared special music -- the classic music played in the death camps, as a death camp documentary film is projected onto the wall, and then, he starts injecting Zyklon pellets through an opening he has specially prepared under the living room rug above -- (in fact, this is the Christmas season and the secret opening in the floor is concealed just under the X-mas tree in the living room) -- he then runs down into the cellar to join his family in death. The camera zooms in to a closeup of an overturned gas canister -- in small letters we can discern the words "zombie gas" ...

As the music wells up the cellar door opens and the red-eyed children emerge first, followed by the adults -- they have all become ghastly Gas Chamber zombies ...... and clunk there way out of the house and down the street into suburban Frankfurt where they will procered to devour anyone and everyone they can find out on the streets on Christmas night ...

Written: Riga, Latvia-- September 11, 1999
{Rosh hashana, 5760}

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