A woman is roused from her bed by a strange noise in the night. Her husband suggests it is just the frogs outside and goes back to sleep. Going downstairs to investigate, she is shocked to see a man in a frog mask wielding a blow torch to her safe. Before she can scream, a man sneaks up behind her, clamps his gloved hand over her face, and hauls her off-screen. Such is the bizarre pre-credit sequence of Der Frosch Mit Der Maske (1959), a film which inaugurated what would become a landmark series of movies that we now call "Krimi"—German films based around the works of British author Edgar Wallace. Born in 1875, Wallace was an incredibly prolific author, penning over 170 novels, 18 plays, and nearly 1000 stories before his death in 1932 at age 56 while he was writing the script to King Kong (figures according to Wikipedia).Deliriously pulpy, the Krimi films dusted off old mysteries and modernized them, infusing archaic tales of arch villainy and old dark houses with heightened depictions of violence and an atmosphere of surreal, uncanny terror set to swinging, hot jazz scores. The adaptations were mainly produced by Rialto studios. Samm Deighan points out in her essay "Smooth Kriminal: An Introduction to the German Krimi Film," these films combined aspects of multiple genres, including "horror, crime, mystery, and police procedural, with moments of fantasy, science fiction, or surrealism." They reinvented notions of the cinematic crime thriller, paving the way for even more graphic murder mysteries the following decade in Italy known as "giallos."
