Andreas Schnaas

Andreas Schnaas, born in Hamburg on April Fool’s Day in 1968 (yep, that’s real), got his horror education early on. His hometown theaters didn’t care if a kid wandered into a blood-soaked martial arts flick or some zombie carnage, and honestly, it shows. Schnaas basically grew up on a steady diet of splatter movies, which—no surprise—morphed him into the face of Germany’s ultra-violent horror scene. His parents were pretty skeptical about their son’s obsession with all things gory, but they couldn’t ignore his knack for creativity. By twelve, he was already making movies—his first one, Hunted, had him and a buddy “killing” his grandpa (who, by the way, played along). Dad handled camera duties, and the family just kind of rolled with it. No money? No problem. Schnaas made it work with whatever he could scrape together. Fast forward to 1989, and he finally scrapes up five thousand marks to crank out his first real feature. Violent Shit (and yeah, that’s really the title) was shot with friends over four marathon weekends. It became Germany’s first direct-to-video horror movie and, weirdly enough, blew up fast—video stores from the US to Europe snatched it up. The name came from a brutally honest pen pal, and it just stuck. The success kept him going. Zombie 90 – Extreme Pestilence followed, famous for its absolutely bonkers English dubbing. He kept the Karl the Butcher saga rolling with Violent Shit 2 and, later, a third film that took years to see the light of day. Schnaas always played the killer himself. He kept cranking out homages, remakes, and wild horror projects, eventually shooting his first American movie, Nikos, and even dabbling in zombie action with Don’t Wake the Dead. These days, he’s still in Germany, living with his family—probably still dreaming up new ways to make people squirm.