Herz resists the notion that his work fundamentally belongs to the horror genre, but he explains to Ivana Košuličová that his two blackly comic films about the Holocaust are "real horror."
The Slovak-born director Juraj Herz has a career in film and television that spans more than 35 years, working mainly in Prague but also in Slovakia, Germany and France. Although he first came to prominence in the 1960s, his work stands apart from that of other Czech and Slovak New Wave directors, and Herz has been far more willing to work in—or, perhaps, it is better to say around—set genres.
Despite the stylistic range of films he has worked on, horror motifs and use of the grotesque have been a recurrent feature of his work, and particularly in his most widely known films: Spalovač mrtvol (The Cremator, 1968), a black comedy about the Final Solution; Morgiana (1971), which blends art noveau and the Gothic; and Pasáž (Passage, 1996), a Kafkaesque film that has invited favourable comparisons with Otto e mezzo (Fellini's 8 1/2, 1963).
Herz's eccentric vision is now attracting increasing critical attention, and several small retrospectives of his work have have been held. Most recently, the director was the special focus of a season of Czech horror films organised by the London Czech Centre.
