No Place for the Living: The Mad Story of Carl Von Cosel - Real Life Florida Dr. Frankenstein!

This was last night’s Halloween show and lemme tell you one of the freakiest shows I’ve ever done at The Church Of Mabus radio show. Click here to listen to the archive straight from Podbean or go to the main site to listen from the archives and to keep up with future shows here. The interview is with Ronni Thomas on these bizarro events of Frankenstein like proportions.

About No Place For The Living via Rue-Morgue.com

I know you’ve done some weird stuff, Rue Morgue reader, but you’ve probably never brought home a dead lady and slept beside her corpse for seven years. (And if you have, let us know! That should be good for a Coroner’s Report entry at the very least.)

 Karl Tanzler, better known as Count Carl von Cosel, did that very thing, though, and New York-based filmmaker Ronni Thomas is making a movie about it. With puppets.

 Ronni, whose creepy documentary shorts were featured in RM#156, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund NO PLACE FOR THE LIVING: THE MAD STORY OF CARL VON COSEL. He’s assembled a terrific team to help him make the feature-length film, including puppeteer Robin Frohardt and VFX artist Shane Morton. Acclaimed filmmaker Richard Stanley (Hardware, The Otherworld) will serve as narrator, reading from von Cosel’s journals.

 Ronni describes the project as “part documentary and part gothic horror.” Von Cosel was an X-ray technician who fell madly in love with one of his patients, a young Cuban immigrant named Elena Hoyos. When Hoyos succumbed to tuberculosis in 1931, von Cosel’s obsession did not subside. Believing himself to be acting on instructions from the dead woman’s spirit, von Cosel removed the corpse from the mausoleum in which it was interred, carried it to his Key West home in a toy wagon, and spent the next seven years trying to preserve and even resurrect it.

 “This chapter of von Cosel’s life seems ripped out of a gothic novel,” Ronni says on the campaign page, “including psychic communications from beyond, ghostly apparitions in an old German castle, a creepy old cemetery, a Frankenstein-like obsession with using science to conquer death, a homemade airship, and even a massive explosion!”

About Ronni Thomas

Ronni Thomas is an Award Winning filmmaker and editor from Brooklyn, NY.  Throughout his career, his worked has gained him credit in both the underground and the mainstream.  His career began when he was offered a job at the legendary Troma Films with no prior experience.  He quickly learned to work good and work fast under pressure.  From there he produced Hey Is Dee Dee Home and several other short films that would travel the world’s festival circuit to critical acclaim.  He worked for a while as maverick advertising icon, Bob Giraldi’s personal producer and editor for a few years before being encouraged to begin directing by Giraldi.  In 2007 he took the senior editor seat at IKA Collective.  There he created the award winning Midnight Archive series.  In addition to film, he frequently composes and writes regularly for Huffington Post and the Raindance Film Festival in London. He is currently the Filmaker-In-Residence at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, NY.  His latest film Walter Potter: The Man Who Married Kittens, has received a mass amount of press in anticipation of its release.  He lives a blissfully surreal life with his small family and their exotic cat.

Check out more contributions by Jeffery Pritchett ranging from UFO to Bigfoot to Paranormal to Prophecy