Directed by Werner Herzog • 1981 • West Germany

Werner Herzog’s portrait of all-American demagoguery focuses on Gene Scott, a televangelist whose fiery on-air tirades—against everything from the FCC to his own viewers—are contrasted with a behind-the-scenes portrait of an isolated, self-obsessed man lost in his own delusions. What emerges is a by turns fascinating and unsettling vision of paranoid charlatanism in the guise of religious zealotry.