Florian Frerichs Interview: Dream Story, Kubrick’s Shadow, and “They Will Claim That I Was Dead” – The Fright Club Podcast
The camera holds on a doorway steeped in history, not just of German cinema, but of world cinema itself. The walls here have absorbed the echoes of Fritz Lang’s expressionist shadows, the whispered confessions of Fassbinder’s anti-heroes, and the quiet revolutions of Wenders’ wandering souls.
The Fright Club Podcast is standing inside one of Germany’s most legendary film studios, a place where celluloid dreams have been manufactured for nearly a century. And today, the podcast sits down with a filmmaker who feels right at home in this cathedral of shadows.
Florian Frerichs. If his name isn’t yet on the tip of your tongue, it soon will be. Frerichs is a polymath of the modern German cinematic renaissance, a director, screenwriter, and novelist whose work refuses to sit comfortably in any single genre or medium. He is a storyteller who moves between the visceral and the philosophical, the erotic and the existential, with the ease of a sleepwalker navigating a lucid dream.
And it is precisely that terrain, the landscape of dreams, that brings The Fright Club Podcast here today. Frerichs joins the show to discuss his latest feature film, Dream Story. For those familiar with the literary canon, that title will immediately resonate. Yes, it is an audacious and deeply personal reimagining of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle, the very same source material that inspired Stanley Kubrick’s final masterpiece, Eyes Wide Shut.
But where Kubrick filtered Schnitzler through the frosty, ritualistic lens of New York’s elite, Frerichs drags the story back to its Viennese origins and then plunges it into a distinctly contemporary German sensibility. Dream Story is not a remake. It is a possession. It is a feverish, sensual, and unnerving exploration of marriage, fidelity, jealousy, and the secret lives people lead in the hours when their conscious minds surrender to the night. Audiences at its festival screenings have described it as hypnotic, dangerous, and deeply moving, a film that asks not what you would do in the dark, but what you have already dreamed of doing.
But Dream Story is only the latest chapter in Frerichs’s remarkable creative odyssey. Before this, he gave audiences films that defied easy categorisation, works that burrowed under the skin of modern Germany and examined its hidden desires, its collective guilt, and its fragile hopes. His earlier features have been described as “neo-noir for the soul,” blending the gritty realism of the Berlin School with the psychological intensity of Bergman. The Fright Club Podcast will trace that evolution today, from his raw, early experiments in narrative to the polished, haunting craftsmanship of his current work.
Yet, Frerichs is not content to simply command the moving image. He is also a novelist of considerable power. His book, They Will Claim that I Was Dead, stands as a kind of dark twin to his filmography. If Dream Story navigates the unconscious, the novel confronts the final frontier of consciousness itself. It is a work that grapples with erasure, legacy, and the terrifying question of how a person will be remembered—or misremembered—after they are gone. The title alone carries the weight of a prophecy.
It is a book about political persecution, about the fragility of truth, and about the stories that survive us despite the best efforts of those who would bury them. In many ways, They Will Claim that I Was Dead is the philosophical bedrock upon which all of Frerichs’s cinematic explorations are built. His film dream. His novel remembers.
So, to sit here, surrounded by the ghosts of German cinematic history, and speak with an artist who so fearlessly bridges the gap between high literature and visceral cinema, between the classic and the avant-garde, it is a rare privilege. The Fright Club Podcast is honoured to be in that legendary studio, microphones open, ready to listen.
Today, Florian Frerichs will take listeners inside the making of Dream Story, the challenges of adapting an untouchable classic, the hidden connections between his films and his fiction, and the personal obsessions that drive him to keep creating in an industry that often rewards the safe over the sublime.
Prepare to enter the labyrinth. Prepare to question what is real, what is dreamed, and what is simply too terrible to be anything but the truth.
Welcome, Florian Frerichs, to The Fright Club Podcast.
