If you watch enough horror movies, you’re bound to run into a movie like Karim Ouelhaj’s Megalomaniac sooner or later. Not for the faint of heart, Megalomaniac follows the (hopefully) fictional adult children of a real-life serial killer, the Mons Butcher, as they continue his legacy of violence. Brilliantly executed, this Belgian extreme horror film features explicit violence, nudity, and sexual assault, and belongs in film collections alongside other hallmarks of the serial killer subgenre, such as The House That Jack Built and Man Bites Dog. Bleak, intense, and often disgusting, Megalomaniac will linger in viewers’ imaginations like blood-red eyes in the dark.
Two decades following the six-month-long killing spree of the Mons Butcher, his grown-up offspring, Felix (Benjamin Ramon) and Martha (Eline Schumacher), live together in a dilapidated mansion in the middle of nowhere. Pale, haunted, and brought together by acts of unspeakable violence, they’re like a demented White Stripes with much worse secrets than being ex-spouses. Having witnessed the carnage at a young age, the disturbed Felix carries on the sadistic traditions of his father, torturing and killing multiple women before Megalomaniac even hits the twenty-minute mark. “Has the Mons Butcher returned?” the media frets as bodies pile up.
Meanwhile, Martha keeps a low profile and suffers frequent sexual assaults at her work as a factory custodian. Her boss feigns cluelessness and Martha says nothing of the violence perpetrated against her, but instead asks her brother for a sick favor. “Dad would let me have one,” she opines. After initially rejecting the request, Felix gifts Martha a victim—a woman named Julie who has been cyberstalking—to cheer her up. Julie serves as a witness to the acts that follow, much like the audience, terrified and disgusted with her circumstances.
In addition to the siblings' sadistic tendencies, Martha is clearly mentally unwell. While both Felix and Martha suffer from shared hallucinations of dead people with pitch-black skin and blood-red eyes, Martha has out-of-body experiences, watching herself interact with Felix (in ways siblings shouldn’t) or just having abusive conversations with herself. These hallucinations elevate Megalomaniac from merely a visceral, endurance exercise and blur the lines between reality and fantasy and nightmare.
The film exists in an uncanny world where the only answer to any problem is violence. Unembodied (or are they very much bodied?) voices scream and drone on the soundtrack, the timeline gets blurry, and even the actors look “off” with their sickly pallor. The film also blurs genre lines – one part rape revenge, one part serial killer movie, and one part “sins of the father” psychological thriller – but it all leads back to the inevitable cycle of violence.
The extreme horror film Megalomaniac belongs in film collections that specialize in the subgenre, as well as general horror and international films. Due to a bleak storyline and unyielding, explicit violence, the film will likely (and understandably) not appeal to general audiences. The grime of Megalomaniac lingers well after the credits roll, much like the legacy of the Mons Butcher lives on in Karim Ouelhaj’s fictional account of an inherited thirst for bloodshed.
What kind of film series would Megalomaniac fit in?
Megalomaniac would fit into a series about the serial killer movie subgenre, with films like The Poughkeepsie Tapes or American Psycho. It could also fit in a double feature with another film based on real-life “butchers,” Fritz Lang’s masterpiece, M!
What kind of film collection would Megalomaniac be suitable for?
Megalomaniac is suitable for film collections that specialize in the horror genre, especially rape revenge or serial killer subgenres.
What type of college/university professors would find Megalomaniac valuable?
Film professors teaching about horror history and its significant movements, specifically the French Extremity, might find Megalomaniac useful as an example of how the values and aesthetics of that movement live on into the 2020s and onward.