Robert Herzl is one of those Austrian artists who seem constitutionally unable to pick one lane and politely stay in it. He belongs to a late-analog, early-digital Gen X cohort that still remembers when images, bodies, voices, and machines did not arrive pre-filtered through platforms, metrics, and personal brands. First trained as a graphic designer, which is to say, someone once paid to care deeply about things other people would later ruin in PowerPoint, he went on to study acting at what is now the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna. From there, he moved across the German-speaking theatre world, working as an actor, speaker, host, presenter, and performer before pushing further into film as a writer, producer, and director.

Genre audiences may now encounter him through Bernadette Wants to Kill, the international title of Bernadette will töten, his first feature-length film as screenwriter and co-director, made together with Oliver Paulus. The horror comedy wears a nasty little grin on its face: part internet satire, part splatter-tinged social-media nightmare, part darkly comic study of what happens when performance, attention, and violence start feeding on each other. It takes aim at contemporary internet culture without falling into tired “old man yelling at clouds” territory. Herzl and Paulus know this logic from the inside: the compulsion to perform, the algorithmic hunger for escalation, the way humiliation mutates into content, and the way content mutates back into violence. Bernadette will töten turns that whole feedback loop into a farce with blood under its fingernails.

Best not to say too much more. It is the kind of film that works better when it gets to tighten the noose itself.

That the film should come from Herzl makes a certain crooked sense. Before Bernadette Wants to Kill, his path had already taken several detours through stage and screen. His theatre work included appearances at the Altonaer Theater in Hamburg, the Shakespeare Festival at Rosenburg, and Bühne Baden, while his early directing work included the short films Böses im Wasser and Der verlorene Atem. That zigzag matters. Herzl’s feature debut grows out of a long practice of moving between acting, staging, voice, timing, and visual composition.

The name may ring a bell in Austrian theatre circles: Herzl is the son of the late Robert Herzl, the opera and operetta director. The shared name creates a neat theatrical mirror. The elder Herzl came from music theatre; the younger moved through acting, graphic design, performance, media art, and horror comedy. Same name, different fever. And I mean that in the best possible way.

Herzl’s work also connects to Austria’s underground media-art scene, including collaborations with monochrom, the long-running collective known for hacking pop culture, technology, politics, and bad taste into strange new forms. His move into genre feels like a natural extension of a sensibility drawn to masks, performance, embarrassment, violence, and modern grotesquerie.

The interesting thing about Herzl is the way these different practices speak to each other. Austria has no shortage of people with three job descriptions and a tote bag full of grant applications, but Herzl’s range feels unusually coherent. Graphic design gives him an eye for surfaces. Acting gives him rhythm and bodily unease. Theatre gives him timing. Speaking and hosting give him direct address. Film gives him the knife. And I, personally, enjoy watching him twist it round and round.

Before directing your first feature, you worked as an actor and screenwriter. How did those different perspectives shape the way you approached Bernadette will töten? Did acting, in particular, make you think differently about Bernadette as a character rather than just as a concept?

For me, everything begins with a strong role. If you want to attract great actresses, you have to offer them characters with real depth, complexity, and emotional substance – characters they can truly engage with and explore. That is why, even when I am working as a writer, I always approach the material from the perspective of an actor.

Every character has to be written so well that I would want to play the role myself. A figure should feel alive, with their own inner truth, motivations, contradictions, and unique way of seeing the world. Only then does a character become believable and compelling.

Naturally, the story itself is shaped by the kinds of characters I create. The plot does not exist independently from them; it grows out of their decisions, desires, conflicts, and emotional logic.

And that is precisely what helps avoid many common storytelling clichés. When characters are allowed to follow their own internal logic instead of simply serving dramatic conventions, the narrative develops in a more organic, surprising, and authentic way.

You have written and performed in very different contexts before this film. Was there a moment where you felt that Bernadette will töten had to be something you directed yourself, not just wrote or acted in?

Ideally, I would direct everything I write myself. With Bernadette, however, everything somehow fell into place at exactly the right moment. A crucial factor was my co-director Oliver Paulus, with whom I share not only a long-standing friendship, but also an incredibly inspiring and deeply professional creative partnership. The moment Oliver agreed to do the project with me, the gears suddenly started turning. From then on, everything moved remarkably fast, and before we knew it, we suddenly had a film.

Beyond that, Bernadette is also a story that feels extremely personal to me. The combination of horror and comedy, the bizarre world of internet murderers and false prophets, who despite their monstrosity still possess something strangely operatic – all of that fascinated me from the very beginning. And then there are the characters themselves: people consumed by despair and emotional insecurity, expressing their inner turmoil through grotesquely heightened, almost performative emotional outbursts.

I could already identify with all of that very strongly while writing it – did I mention that I’m an actor?

Bernadette is not simply a killer figure, but someone who seems exhausted by the demand to be socially and digitally “functional.” Was the starting point for you more horror, more comedy, or more a feeling of disgust with the performance culture of the internet?

One thing grew very organically out of the other. My own complete helplessness when it comes to anything digital regularly takes me from despair to murderous fantasies and finally to hysterical laughter.

But seriously: at its core, the film began with a very classic horror premise – a group of people gathering in a remote house, only to find themselves under attack by a monster, with the internet serving as their only connection to the outside world. From there, the story gradually unfolded almost on its own during the writing process, especially as the characters became more alive and their dynamics began shaping the narrative. At the same time, Oliver kept encouraging me to expand the world beyond the isolated house itself, allowing the story to grow into something larger, stranger, and more emotionally overwhelming.

And that brings me back to what I mentioned earlier: because these characters emerged directly from my own conflicted relationship with the internet, those feelings of alienation, rage, and emotional overload gradually manifested themselves within the characters and the world they inhabit. What initially began as a story confined to a lonely country house kept expanding further and further beyond it.

At the same time, it became clear to me very early on that this kind of despair is only truly bearable through humor. That is why the combination of horror and comedy never felt contradictory to me, but rather like the only honest way of telling this story.

The film takes an extremely contemporary fear (the idea that even murder can become content) and treats it as black comedy. How did you decide where the satire stops and where the horror should become physically unpleasant?

Once you start looking a little more closely at what is actually happening on the internet, it becomes almost impossible to avoid two things: comedy and disgust. So much of it is grotesque, absurd, and at the same time disturbingly cruel in ways that are often hard to believe – and I’m still only talking about TikTok here. Once you venture into the darknet, things become truly unhinged.

The question of whether all of this might eventually become physically uncomfortable or difficult to endure for the audience never really concerned us. From the very beginning, it felt clear that there was simply no other honest way to approach this material. Often, you only need to present these things plainly and without much commentary for them to become deeply disturbing on their own. Reality already carries the horror within it.

In a strange way, that actually worked in our favor. We never had to artificially push for shock value or provoke the audience in order to achieve the desired effect. The world of the internet – with its constant sensory overload and deeply voyeuristic nature – creates that feeling of discomfort all by itself. The closer we stayed to the emotional truth of that world, the more unsettling, fascinating, and ultimately funny it became.

Bernadette enters the murder plot through the internet, but the story seems less interested in “evil technology” than in lonely, needy, performative people using technology badly. Is that fair?

In my opinion, there is no such thing as “evil technology.” Technology itself possesses neither morality nor ideology – it is, first and foremost, simply a tool. Good and evil are human categories, abstract concepts that we project onto things, whereas technology is something concrete and functional. An algorithm has no ethics, a smartphone no empathy, and the internet no conscience. Morality only begins at the point where human beings make decisions.

What technology does reveal very clearly, however, is the gradual collapse of a shared moral reality in the digital age. In the past, there was at least the idea of a more or less common social understanding of what was acceptable or reprehensible. Today, we exist in countless parallel digital worlds, each operating according to completely different rules, truths, and systems of values. Every online bubble develops its own morality, its own enemies, and its own version of reality. The internet does not merely amplify this fragmentation – it constantly exposes it.

That is why I see technology itself as fundamentally value-neutral. The moral dimension only emerges through the ways people choose to use it – whether for manipulation, self-performance, violence, entertainment, or perhaps even the search for connection and meaning. That is where it becomes interesting to me as a storyteller.

Because storytelling, for me, is always rooted in emotion, I can only really tell stories about technology through the people who use it. What interests me are not machines themselves, but the fears, desires, projections, and emotional voids that human beings pour into these systems. The moment technology itself becomes the emotional center of a narrative – the moment we begin attributing feelings, consciousness, or intention to the machine – we inevitably enter the realm of science fiction.

The film has been described as too bloody for pure satire fans and too talky for pure splatter fans. Was that in-between position intentional, this refusal to become either a clean social satire or a straightforward genre machine?

From the very beginning, our goal was to remain completely unpredictable. That is why we deliberately break with conventional narrative structures and familiar storytelling expectations. We were never interested in making a film where the audience already knows after ten minutes exactly where the story is heading or what function each character serves within the plot. On the contrary, we wanted to create an experience that constantly shifts, surprises, unsettles, and resists easy categorization. The fact that people may leave the film unable to clearly define whether they have just watched horror, satire, tragicomedy, or complete madness is, to us, the greatest compliment possible.

We wanted to take the audience on a journey whose destination remains unclear even while watching it. Too many films today operate according to such familiar formulas that viewers can still follow the plot while checking their phones or doing something else at the same time. That kind of passive predictability was exactly what we wanted to push against. For me, cinema should demand attention – not through constant noise or overstimulation, but through uncertainty, tension, and emotional instability. The audience should never feel entirely safe or comfortable.

It was also important to us that both the humor and the violence serve a genuine purpose within the story. Satire has to hurt; otherwise it loses its power. And splatter only works when it is more than empty spectacle. That is why both the graphic moments and the dialogue are used very deliberately. Beneath the endless verbal outbursts of these characters lies an overwhelming inability to truly communicate. They keep talking because they are desperately trying to reassure themselves that they still exist. Language becomes a form of self-confirmation: as long as they are speaking, they can still feel visible, alive, somehow present.

And that is precisely why some of these characters eventually resort to extreme or cruel acts. Not necessarily out of pure malice, but out of a desperate need to feel something at all. Violence becomes a final attempt to reconnect with their own physical existence in a world that feels increasingly detached, artificial, and digitally mediated.

You wrote the screenplay and co-directed with Oliver Paulus. How did that collaboration work in practice? Was there a division between performance, tone, editing, visual gags, splatter mechanics, or did you both work across everything?

When it came to directing, we truly worked on everything together. There was never a rigid division of responsibilities or the sense that one of us was only in charge of a specific area. The entire process was built around constant exchange – continuously developing ideas together, reacting to one another, and shaping the film collaboratively from moment to moment.

The reason this worked so well probably has a lot to do with the fact that we are not only creative partners, but also close friends. That creates a level of mutual understanding that goes far beyond purely professional collaboration. Often, a glance or half a sentence is enough for the other person to immediately understand what is meant. In many ways, we naturally think alike anyway: we share the same sense of humor, a similar rhythm, and a comparable instinct for when something feels right and when it does not.

And even in the moments where we disagreed, it was never about proving who was “right.” What mattered was always the emotional or narrative effect a particular decision was supposed to achieve. Once you clearly articulate the intention behind an idea, it usually becomes surprisingly easy to find a shared solution that serves the film best.

What are your next plans, Robert?

As the saying goes, “I prefer not to count my chickens before they hatch.” That said, there are already a few projects in development. Once one of them becomes truly concrete and ready to be discussed in earnest, I would very much look forward to speaking with you about it.

You can currently get Bernadette will töten in Germany/Austria as DVD/Blu-ray or digital rental/purchase.

Peter Blok grew up in Maastricht, the Netherlands, and studied graphic design. How he ended up in Denver, Colorado, working for a defense contractor is a long story. Let’s just say it all ended well, and now he lives happily in Vienna, Austria, with a cat and a parrot, working for the United Nations as a cinephile.