The German Vampire Serial Killer
Peter Kurten inspired a Fritz Lang movie, “M”
“Tell me, after my head is chopped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck? That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures,” Peter Kurten said in his last words.
In the thriller film, M, directed by famous Austrian-German-American filmmaker, Fritz Lang, a serial killer named Hans Beckert kills numerous children. Lang’s film’s protagonist, Beckert, bore striking resemblance to a man named Peter Kurten, a real-life serial killer in Germany during the Weimar period. At the time, the memory of Kurten was still fresh in the country when Lang made the movie.
Peter Kürten was known as the “Vampire of Düsseldorf” and committed a series of sexual assaults between February to November of 1929. He was eventually given nine death sentences for nine charges of murder, and executed through a guillotine. Kurten was a sadist who derived sexual pleasure out of the pain and suffering of others. Right before getting executed, Kurten asked if he would be able to hear the sound of blood coming from his neck, as one of the “pleasure[s] to end all pleasures.”
While researching the film, Lang spent eight days inside a mental institution in Germany and met child murderers, including…
