Killing Heinz
1996 · Germany
Directed by Stefan Eling
Genres: animation, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
This wordless animated film follows a tall, solitary adult as he walks from the video store, where he's rented the heavily-advertised "Killing Heinz," to his flat.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1996 stop-motion reckoning with a condiment mascot that somehow becomes genuinely unsettling—the kind of premise that sounds ridiculous until you're watching it and realizing the film has no interest in being cute about it. Most scouts would see 'dark comedy about Heinz ketchup' and move on; that's exactly why this lands.
Eling's control of tone and visual language places this squarely in the lineage of subversive European animation, where formal precision serves deeply uncomfortable subject matter with complete seriousness. The discipline of the animation itself—its refusal to wink—is what makes the darkness legible.
The decision to shoot this with absolute straightforwardness, treating an animated mascot assassination with the gravity of a thriller, is what transforms what could be a gag into something that actually haunts you. It's the restraint that does it.