Crawlspace

Crawlspace is a 1986 American horror thriller film starring Klaus Kinski as Karl Guenther, the crazed son of a Nazi doctor obsessed with trapping young women and slowly torturing them to death, alongside Talia Balsam, Barbara Whinnery, and Tané McClure. It is written and directed by David Schmoeller, and later became infamous due to the on-set conflicts between Schmoeller and Kinski, with claims that producer Roberto Bessi attempted to have Kinski murdered due to his continued hostility towards the crew. Plot Having recently moved, twenty-seven-year-old Lori Bancroft inquires at a small urban apartment building about an advertised vacancy. The landlord and building superintendent Karl Gunther, an older German man, hospitably gives her a tour of the apartment, telling her that its last tenant was a young woman who disappeared without paying rent. During the tour, Gunther secretly performs a masochistic rite, holding his hand over an open stove-top flame. Outwardly normal, Gunther leads a double-life as a sadistic, self-loathing psychopath, abducting and torturing his young female tenants and locking them in attic cages, where he removes their tongues and leaves them alive so that he can "have someone to talk to." Once a respectable doctor, he made his living performing euthanasia ("mercy killing") and being ashamed when he learned that his father, a Dachau concentration camp doctor, used the same justification when killing Jewish prisoners in human experiments. Besides regular self-harm, Gunther plays Russian roulette with a loaded handgun, hoping to one day kill himself and end his killing spree with what little morality he has left. After murdering one of his tenants and removing their eyes, Gunther is visited by Josef Steiner, who has been searching for him for three years. Steiner tells Gunther that in the five years he was chief resident at Buenos Aires hospital, sixty-seven people in his care all died, including Steiner's own brother. He confronts him about his familial history among Nazis, including how his father was executed for crimes against humanity and a photograph of young Karl in a Hitler Youth uniform.