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The apartment block as a gateway to another dark world: "Hausen" scene with Alexander Scheer
Photo: Reiner Bajo / Sky
The block of houses rises up 18 stories from the flat landscape around Berlin.
When it was built in GDR times, the prefabricated building may have been considered a prestige project for modern living in a green environment, today people live there in gray holes.
On one floor, neglected residents burn the furniture in a fireplace, on another, Nazis harass the neighbors.
A new caretaker is supposed to calm the situation down.
The widower Jaschek (Charly Hübner) takes over the job;
With his 16-year-old son Juri (Tristan Göbel) he moves into one of the apartments in which the taps are spitting out putrid broth.
Jaschek rolls up his sleeves and gets down to business.
It cleans air ducts that rattle like the breath of a patient with pneumonia.
He screwed on heating pipes, from which a substance bubbles that looks like dark wound water.
He removes the fungus from the walls of the stairwell, which is growing like a cancerous tumor.
Jaschek's Job Facility Manager is called in modern German, in fact his job profile is more reminiscent of that of a nurse in the palliative care unit.
He takes care of an organism that is dying.
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Please do not touch any walls!
In "Hausen" the apartment block leads a frightening life of its own.
Photo: Reiner Bajo / Sky
It is the power of the horror series "Hausen" that the block of flats appears as a waning creature - and in its agony carries away those who live in it.
As Jaschek's son Juri puts it: "Something is sitting in the walls, it is watching us, it sees our every step."
German series television has discovered the horror genre.
With "Dark", Netflix produced a nuclear power plant shocker with a time travel plot that celebrated international success.
ZDF entertained its audience in the Corona summer with the epidemic fear-maker "Sløborn".
Now Sky is following suit with a production in which all the stops of haunted house horror are pulled out.
The star of "Hausen" is (despite the inspired shirt-sleeved playing of Hübner) not an actor, but the block of flats that has been effectively brought to life.
With horror against Netflix and Co.
The series is part of a comprehensive strategy with which Sky is trying to compete with streamers in the German market.
In return, the long-established pay-TV channel lets itself be carried away with extremely high investments: The series "Babylon Berlin", created in cooperation with ARD, and the new edition of the war epic "Das Boot", which was created by itself, are the most expensive TV productions ever shot in Germany.
Sky also went to great lengths for "Hausen".
An abandoned building complex on the eastern edge of Berlin, which once housed a government hospital for high SED functionaries, served as the setting.
Today the blocks are Lost Spaces, removed from the German present.
Those responsible for the series transformed the area with great attention to detail into a kind of ghost train in rust brown and mold green.
The series creates a self-contained world, 18 floors of the GDR, which the reunification seems to have passed by.
Everything is yellowed - the family photos from better days on the walls of the apartments as well as your own memories of the time when people still held together in the house.
The tenants vegetate in a lack of empathy.
When a baby disappears without a trace, nobody cares at first.
Does the house feed on the suffering of its residents?
It evidently absorbs its negative energy through shafts, pipes and cabling, and so effectively that at some point even Jaschek's thirst for action no longer counteracts it.
The prefabricated building as its own character
Director Thomas Stuber had previously shot "Tatort" with Ulrich Tukur, in which he reissued Howard Hawks' western classic "Rio Bravo" as a police thriller.
For "Hausen" too, he orients himself on great models.
The way Stuber drives down the stairwells is reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's horror classic "Shining", the paranormal hustle and bustle in neon tube lighting is reminiscent of Lars von Trier's hospital series "Hospital of the Spirits", in which doctors and patients are haunted.
It is not the people who design the houses, but the houses that shape the people - this maxim of the haunted house horror is perfectly implemented in "Hausen".
In the meantime, the story slips into ready-made genre hocus-pocus, the incessant flickering of light is more annoying than eerie.
But how the creators of the series (book: Till Kleinert, Anna Stoeva) succeed time and again in staging the prefabricated building as a separate character with an agenda is deeply disturbed.
This is also thanks to the furious camera work and above all the equipment.
The silted up house walls are staged as throbbing membranes that pull the house residents through their growths into a parallel cosmos.
Sometimes it's just arms and legs, sometimes whole people disappear.
Anyone who complains about mold in their own apartment will look at them differently after 500 minutes of this interior decoration horror.
Are the black spots on the bathroom wall really gateways to another, dark world?
"Hausen",
on Sky
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