No Place for the Living: The Mad Story of Carl Von Cosel Tells One Very Disturbing True Story
David Gelmini
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Sometimes real life can be so much more horrible than fiction. Sure, we’re all used to the fictional horror that writers conjure up, but damn, real life has some even more disgusting things on offer.
The new documentary No Place for the Living: The Mad Story of Carl Von Cosel, which is now on Kickstarter, examines the true account of “Count” Carl Von Cosel, a guy who… well… just let the official synopsis do the talking.
“The idea is not only to tell this bizarre story, but to understand it as well,” said filmmaker Ronni Thomas. “I want to make a film that challenges viewers to accept and even like Von Cosel, the way the world did when they first heard his story.”
About This Project:
A feature-length documentary exploring a fascinating true story of delusion, necrophilia, celebrity, and mad science.
“Ours was no place for the living, here, on this blackest of all nights…” — Count Carl Von Cosel
No Place for the Living will tell the strange, once-famous but now forgotten story of Count Carl von Cosel – a German immigrant in 1930s Key West, Florida, who believed he could use scientific and supernatural methods to bring the woman he loved back from the dead. As filmmaker in residence at Brooklyn’s acclaimed Morbid Anatomy Museum, I have become obsessed with this unusual story. Now I’m asking for your help to bring it to life, as part documentary and part Gothic horror.
You will hear the story in Von Cosel’s own words, as recorded in his actual journal, and brought to life using innovative techniques. The recreations will be done with puppets created by award-winning artist/puppeteer/filmmaker Robin Frohardt. The use of puppets is, beyond being a fun way to express the plot, a fitting symbol for a story about a man who was in himself a puppet master.
In his published journals, Von Cosel spared no detail describing years spent cleaning and repairing the body of a woman in a state of decay. Shane Morton and his Silver Scream FX lab will help us bring those gruesome visuals to life, with music from Stephen Coates (The Real Tuesday Weld) setting the mood. Visionary filmmaker Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil) will narrate the tale.
The idea is not only to tell this bizarre story, but to understand it as well. For explanation and insight, we’ll seek out the views historians, writers, experts on death and dying, cultural anthropologists, psychiatrists and others. Some notable interviewees include:
— True crime author Harold Schechter
— Occult author and historian Mitch Horowitz
— Oddities star Evan Michaelson
— Author and after-life expert Ptolemy Tompkins
— Bath Center for Death and Society director John Troyer
— Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein
When complete, we intend to have a film that merges genres and takes the viewer on a surrealistic journey through the mind of Carl Von Cosel: mystic, mad scientist, romantic… and notorious necrophile.
Synopsis:
In the 1930s, in Key West, Florida, German immigrant Karl Tanzler – who would call himself “Count Carl Von Cosel” – fell madly in love with a young Cuban immigrant named Elena Hoyos, a love that would evolve into an all-consuming obsession.
Hoyos suffered from tuberculosis, incurable at the time. She came to Von Cosel, an X-ray technician, seeking treatment. Despite his many attempts to cure her (and to win her heart), she died of the disease in 1931.
Even after her death, Von Cosel continued to be obsessed. Believing he was receiving instructions from her still-living spirit, he conspired to have her body taken from the graveyard and brought to a house where they could live together as husband and wife. For years, Von Cosel used what he considered to be groundbreaking scientific methods, mixed with ancient alchemy and mysticism, in an attempt to resurrect the body of the woman he loved, while relying on simpler methods to preserve her rapidly decaying body.
This lasted seven years until the Hoyos family and the world learned the truth and their macabre “relationship” became a media sensation. The public reception of the case and its unexpected support for Von Cosel is just one of many very strange details which we will reveal in the film.
This chapter of Von Cosel’s life seems ripped out of a Gothic novel, including psychic communications from beyond, ghostly apparitions in an old German castle, a creepy old cemetery, a Frankenstein-like obsession with using science to conquer death, a homemade airship, and even a massive explosion!
After 70 years, the Von Cosel story has become a mostly forgotten historical oddity. We hope to change that…
Categorized:News
