It's scary in the dark. We seek out darkness in the movies. Light casts a world onto the screen in which we sometimes feel creeped out, afraid, scared. After all, we are not alone, there are other people sitting around us, both familiar and mostly unfamiliar. We think we are safe. Perhaps this is why we dare to embark on a journey to our fears in the movies. The fact that we can be afraid at all in the cinema proves that we humans are social beings. “Been to the movies. Cried.” Kafka noted laconically in his diary. He could also have written: “Been to the movies, been afraid”. In the cinema, we feel with the screen heroes who are separated from us and yet so close. We cannot completely separate our fate from theirs. Like in no other art form, we are gripped, touched and frightened by their narrated lives. Sometimes we even cover our eyes in fear. Alongside this compassionate fear, however, there is also a fear that stems precisely from the separation from the events on the screen. We are gripped by this fear because the screen heroes do not understand that it is actually them who should be afraid.

Fear is the feeling of our time, formative and omnipresent. Climate change, wars, technical transformations such as artificial intelligence, the crisis of Western democracies and the geopolitical reorganization of the world - all of this is reflected and condensed in our fear. The film landscape is not unaffected by this either, on the contrary: topics such as ecology, politics and AI directly affect its production. While the ecological crisis is calling current production practices into question, right-wing populist tendencies are endangering both social minorities and the freedom of art.

Quite a few filmmakers fear that their creative work will either be restricted or even replaced by AI. There is also growing concern that their works could be infringed by AI-generated content. Furthermore, artistic filmmaking is characterized by uncertainties and dependencies on funding policy. “Your fear is killing our creativity, our ideas, our desire to create.” This is how more than 300 young filmmakers addressed the public in the form of an appeal at the 3rd Future of German Film Congress, taking particular aim at the industry's financing and thinking logic.

However, film culture is not only haunted by fear. From the very beginning, it has traced this basic human emotion and given our phobias a multifaceted expression. In the course of its history, cinema has also developed its own fear genres, such as the horror film or psychological thriller, in order to deliberately induce fear. Like a training camp for fear, the cinema is able to scare its audience in the flesh – in the best case, in order to confront this feeling with relish and grow from it. Strengthened (or weakened?) by this form of behavioral therapy, we leave the cinema auditorium differently than when we entered it.

In the context of fear as a genre, material, state of mind, adversary and expression of a turning point, the 5th Congress Future of German Film will take place in Frankfurt am Main from April 22 to 25, 2025. This brochure is intended to set the mood for the congress and accompany it, and of course also serve as a valuable source of inspiration beyond the congress itself. Incidentally, the Fassbinder reference “Angst essen Film auf”, which gives the congress and brochure their title, was coined back in 2018 for the first congress - as part of a successful communication campaign at the time.

“There are new forces at work that are reviving the old fears,” writes Georg Seeßlen in the introduction he wrote for us, which we have prefixed to the ‘Fear chapter’ from his 1980 classic Cinema of Fear. These new forces that Seeßlen writes about were not only unforeseeable in the year his book was published, but even in 2018. In addition to Seeßlen's contribution, the publication contains essays on the hopes and fears of young filmmakers, the madness of bureaucracy in the German film industry, German Angst and horror films. Other articles deal with fear in film, the contemporary diagnosis of fear and cinema as a safe place against fear and as a place of the future. Elsewhere you will find controversial theses on fear as well as thoughts on Robert Kramer and cinema in the age of fear.

We wish you a good read.

Kenneth Hujer, Johanna Süß and Gregor Maria Schubert