The complex story of Otto Rahn (18 February 1904 – 13 March 1939), who grew up amidst the ruins of Germany following its defeat in World War One. His parents awoke an interest in nature, myth and legend in him. At the time in Europe, the narratives of Christianity were being challenged and changed. He took up the legend of the Holy Grail and the heretical Christian sects that lasted up until the Inquisition from the 12th to the 15th centuries. The nature cults of the early 20th century that developed in northern Europe also no doubt fed into his thinking. Rahn wrote books about the Grail and the Cathars, one of the last mass manifestations of
Gnosticism in Europe.
It seems Rahn was an outsider queer poet who was given a blank cheque by the Nazis to do his research. Of course, the Nazis wanted a particular result from the research; Aryan primacy and the negation of the dominant Christian morality. Himmler was vehemently opposed to Christian sexual morality and the "principle of Christian mercy", both of which he saw as dangerous obstacles to his planned battle with "subhumans". Rahn's work proved to be more complex and ephemeral than that. Rahn was also expected to participate in the theatre of horror that was developed by the Nazis. Rahn was a poet who dwelt in myth, a product of people like James Frazer and Robert Graves (who's book The White Goddess would not be published until 1948). But at the same time Rahn was within the inner circle of the SS, he participated in the establishment of the vast death machine that is now called the Holocaust and in the Nazi eugenics breeding program. But his mother was Jewish.
Rahn's homosexuality had been known to Himmler but, in 1937, it became the subject of difficulties with other SS officers, who had long contrasted their conduct with the open homosexuality common in Ernst Röhm's Sturmabteilung. Following a "drunken homosexual scrape", Rahn was assigned guard duty at the Dachau concentration camp in order to "toughen him up".
Deeply concerned by what he had witnessed in Dachau, Rahn offered his resignation from the SS in February 1939. This was accepted by Himmler. On 13 March, Rahn's body was found by local children in the forest near Söll (Kufstein, Tyrol), in Austria. Sixty years later, in an interview, one of those who found Rahn's body described finding "two empty bottles" next to it. He had frozen to death while under the influence of the sleeping pills. Rahn's death was privately ruled a suicide but was presented by Himmler to the SS as having occurred following a "mountaineering accident".
The film is made by Richard Stanley, a South African filmmaker, known for his work in the horror genre. He began his career making short films and music videos, and subsequently directed the feature films Hardware (1990) and Dust Devil (1992), both of which are considered cult classics. He was the original director of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), but was fired early into principal photography due to creative differences, an episode recounted in the 2014 documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau. In 2019, he returned to feature films after more than 20 years, directing the H. P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space.
