The doppelgänger plays a particularly important role in horror films. They instil fear and terror as zombies and replicants, as aliens they represent everything the human protagonists are not or do not want to be and as the undead they open up paths into the underworld that are better left closed.

Ralf Donis (Leipzig), a profound authority and horror film specialist sets off on a filmic search for doppelgänger in the spine-chiller genre and demonstrates in a lecture with selected film examples where the true abysses of this year’s festival theme lay.