Nazisploitation

Nazisploitation (also spelled naziploitation) is the cycle of exploitation films that use Nazi camps and occupation as a setting for sexual violence and torture, concentrated almost entirely in 1975 to 1977.

The Italian pulp ancestry

The imagery did not start with the films. Italy had a thriving adult comics market through the 1960s and 70s, the fumetti neri and the subgenre called sadiconasta, which used exactly this material: SS uniforms, camp settings, sadism. The films inherited a visual vocabulary that was already commercially proven in print.

The Night Porter

Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974) is the pivot, and it is a serious film. Dirk Bogarde is a former SS officer working as a hotel porter in 1957 Vienna; Charlotte Rampling is a survivor who recognises him, and their relationship resumes. It was attacked on release, defended by others, and remains difficult to argue about. Cavani had made documentaries about the Resistance and the camps before it.

Producers watched it succeed and extracted a formula from it.

Ilsa

Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS (1975) is the notorious entry, and its production history explains a lot about how this cycle worked. It was shot in Los Angeles in nine days on the standing set of Hogan's Heroes, the American sitcom, immediately after that show was cancelled. Dyanne Thorne played the title role in three more films, relocating to a harem and then a South American prison as the market moved.

The Italian run

SS Experiment Camp (1976), The Beast in Heat (1977), Gestapo's Last Orgy (1977), Salon Kitty (1976). Tinto Brass made Salon Kitty with a real budget and a Nino Rota score, which puts it in a different bracket technically without changing what it is.

Why it stopped

The cycle burned out inside two years. Italian producers moved to the cannibal boom, which was cheaper to shoot and had no equivalent political problem. Several of these titles later appeared on the British DPP list, and Germany banned most of them outright, where many remain unavailable.

What it documents

The speed. European censorship collapsed around 1968, and within seven years there was an industry willing to shoot this for a two-week schedule and a poster. The cycle is a clean measurement of how fast a deregulated film market will move toward whatever is most forbidden, and it is studied for that reason more than for any individual film.

Start here

The Night Porter is the only one with a serious argument in it. The rest are of interest as industrial history rather than as films.

1. The Night Porter (1974): the arthouse film the producers misread as a template.
2. Love Camp 7 (1969): the American prototype, six years early.
3. Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS (1975): the one that made it a cycle, shot on a sitcom's leftover set.
4. Salon Kitty (1976): Tinto Brass with a real budget.
5. The Gestapo's Last Orgy (1977): the Italian run at its most extreme.

Where the cycle ended up, on the British video nasties list and other banned rosters: Banned, cut and confiscated.