He is currently in crowdfunding on Kickstarter Ronni Thomas' project entitled No Place for the Living: The Mad Story of Carl Von Cosel. This is a documentary about Carl Tanzler (known as "Count" Carl Von Cosel), the German immigrant who, in 1930s Florida, fell in love with the young Cuban girl Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos. Suffering from tuberculosis, the girl contacted him for treatment but died a year later and the doctor, obsessed with her, dug up her corpse.
The Count was convinced he could succeed in bringing his "bride" back to life, so he took Hoyos' body to his home. He attempted to revive her for seven years during which he preserved her corpse from decaying decomposition. He tied the bones together with hooks and wires; inserted glass eyes into the eyeballs; replaced rotten skin with silk cloth soaked in wax and plaster; created a wig using the young woman's own hair; and filled the abdomen and chest with rags to preserve the body's silhouette. He also devised a way to be able to have sexual intercourse with it.
Ronni Thomas's project aims not only to bring to light an old and fascinating story about the necrophilic mad doctor but also to shed light on it, among other things with the contributions of writers, historians, anthropologists and thanatologists who have given their professional opinions on the incident.
The film, described by the director himself as a gothic/horror documentary, will feature the voice of Von Cosel himself, extrapolated from real recordings. In No Place for the Living: The Mad Story of Carl Von Cosel there will be no live actors but puppets made by artist and director Robin Frohardt.
Ronni Thomas decided to use puppets in order to pay homage to the Count perhaps because, in reality, this monster was a kind of puppet master for his patient.
