The New Thriller Movie The Red Head and The Bravery of Hannie Schaft to The Very End

Timothy Hines’ upcoming WWII drama The Red Head, coming 2027. Filming begins this Fall in the UK. Pendragon Pictures.

At the conclusion of Timothy Hines’ upcoming movie, The Red Head, the dunes near Bloemendaal possess the deceptive serenity common to places where human beings have attempted to bury history beneath nature.

Tall grass bends in the North Sea wind. Sand drifts slowly across the earth in pale folds. The sky opens wide above the Dutch coastline with an almost indifferent beauty. Visitors arriving there today encounter silence first. Not the silence of peace exactly, but the heavier silence of aftermath—the kind landscapes absorb when too much human terror has passed through them.

The upcoming movie The Red Head that follows the inner life of legendary Dutch resistance fighter Hannie Schaft, the only woman on Hitler’s most wanted list, is to begin filming this Fall in Norfolk, UK and is produced by Kimberly Olsen, Susan Goforth, Lawrence Scott and Jeff Wallner.

During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, these dunes became an execution ground.

Hundreds were brought there by German authorities and collaborators: resistance members, political prisoners, saboteurs, ordinary civilians accused of aiding the underground. Many arrived after interrogation and torture. Some understood immediately where they were. Others likely understood only when they saw the disturbed earth.

Above: The Red Head, filming Fall in the UK. Pendragon Pictures.

Among those executed in the dunes was Hannie Schaft, the young resistance fighter later mythologized as “the girl with the red hair.” Captured in 1945 while transporting illegal materials, she was taken into custody, interrogated, and eventually transported to Bloemendaal, where Nazi officers marched her into the sand dunes of Overveen and shot her just weeks before the liberation of the Netherlands.

History tends to remember executions through their endings—the gunshot, the final words, the martyrdom afterward. But the psychology of state execution is far more expansive and far more disturbing than the moment of death itself.

Executions under fascist systems are not merely punishments. They are performances of domination.

The Nazis understood this intimately.

Above: The Red Head, a major motion picture to begin filming the Fall in the UK. Pendragon Pictures.

Much has been written about Nazi bureaucracy, military machinery, and industrialized genocide, but the psychology underlying public and semi-public executions reveals something essential about authoritarian power: its obsession not simply with killing opponents, but with demonstrating absolute control over human vulnerability. The execution site becomes theatrical space. The condemned body becomes political messaging.

The dunes of Overveen, near Bloemendaal functioned in precisely this way.

The dunes were isolated enough to conceal mass murder from ordinary civilian visibility, yet symbolically potent enough to instill fear throughout occupied Dutch society. Resistance members understood what the dunes meant. The occupiers understood that they understood. Terror does not require universal visibility to be effective. It requires circulation through rumor, imagination, and anticipation.

Authoritarian systems rely heavily on anticipatory fear—the psychological violence of waiting.

Above: The major motion picture, The Red Head, to be directed by TImothy Hines and produced by Kimberly Olsen, Susan Goforth, Lawrence Scott and Jeff Wallner, begins filming this Fall in the UK.

Many prisoners transported to execution sites experienced prolonged periods of uncertainty before death. This uncertainty itself formed part of the punishment. Sleep deprivation, interrogation, arbitrary scheduling, and emotional isolation destabilized prisoners psychologically long before physical execution occurred. Nazi prison systems frequently blurred the line between torture and administration. One did not know when death would arrive, only that it existed nearby, moving gradually closer through corridors and paperwork.

For resistance fighters, this psychological burden could become almost unbearable because they often possessed fuller awareness than ordinary civilians of what arrest actually meant.

The underground networks of occupied Europe lived with execution constantly present in imagination. Every bicycle ride to a safe house, every forged document, every clandestine meeting occurred beneath the possibility of torture and death. The emotional architecture of resistance was therefore shaped not only by courage, but by sustained proximity to anticipated annihilation.

And yet people continued.

This continuation remains psychologically astonishing.

Above: The Red Head. Pendragon Pictures.

In Schaft’s case, there is evidence that she understood the stakes of resistance with unusual clarity. She had watched deportations, executions, disappearances, and retaliatory killings unfold around her country. Friends and comrades had already died. The occupation had stripped away any illusion that fascism represented temporary political disorder. By the final years of the war, the Nazis increasingly resembled a wounded predatory organism lashing out against collapse itself.

This transformed the psychology of executions as the war neared its end.

Earlier in the occupation, executions often carried procedural performance: formal sentencing, bureaucratic ritual, institutional choreography. But by 1944 and 1945, as German defeat became increasingly inevitable, executions acquired a more frantic emotional quality. Resistance activity intensified. Nazi reprisals became harsher, more erratic, and psychologically revealing. Violence no longer projected invincible order so much as escalating panic.

The execution dunes of Overveen near Bloemendaal therefore represented not only Nazi power, but Nazi fear.

This is an uncomfortable truth about authoritarian violence generally: beneath the spectacle of dominance often lies profound insecurity. Totalitarian systems execute resisters not merely to eliminate them physically, but because resistance threatens the psychological mythology upon which authoritarianism depends. A young woman refusing submission becomes dangerous symbolically. Her existence exposes the incompleteness of the regime’s control.

Schaft’s execution carried this symbolic anxiety intensely. She had become, by then, more than an underground operative. She represented moral defiance embodied in someone the Nazis found particularly infuriating: educated, female, intelligent, difficult to intimidate, and publicly unbroken.

The famous story that after the first shot merely wounded her, she told her executioners, “I’m a better shot than you,” persists partly because it captures something psychologically. Fascist systems crave submission at the moment of death. Defiance contaminates the ritual.

Above: Hannie Schaft was an ordinary girl who became one of the most feared resistance fighters by the Reich in WWII. The Red Head, a major motion picture directed by Timothy Hines starts filming in September in the UK.

One sees similar psychological patterns across authoritarian executions throughout history. The condemned who remain emotionally autonomous—even briefly—interrupt the emotional satisfaction tyrannies seek from public killing. The state can destroy the body; it cannot fully script the inner posture of the condemned. This explains why final words matter so much historically. They represent the last contested territory between power and personhood.

But the psychological damage of executions extended far beyond those killed.

The Nazis designed occupation systems to spread trauma socially. Families waited for missing loved ones who never returned. Communities absorbed the terror indirectly through whispers and absences. Resistance members carried survivor guilt for decades afterward. Entire populations became conditioned by uncertainty, fear, and emotional hypervigilance.

The dunes themselves became repositories of unresolved national grief.

After liberation, bodies were exhumed there. Families searched the sand for remnants of husbands, daughters, brothers, friends. Nations emerging from occupation often preferred narratives of triumph and reconstruction, yet beneath these narratives existed landscapes saturated with psychic residue. The war had not only destroyed bodies; it had permanently altered emotional reality for those who survived it.

Perhaps this is why the dunes of Overveen near Bloemendaal continues to exert such haunting symbolic force in Dutch memory.

Above: The Red Head. Pendragon Pictures.

The dunes reveal something fundamental about the psychology of fascism: its need to convert nature itself into witness. Forests, ravines, fields, quarries, riverbanks—throughout occupied Europe, ordinary landscapes were transformed into theaters of ideological murder. The violence entered geography. Even after grass regrew, memory remained embedded beneath the soil.

Modern audiences often imagine Nazi evil primarily through concentration camps because the scale was so incomprehensibly vast. But execution sites like the dunes near Bloemendaal reveal another equally chilling dimension: the intimacy of authoritarian violence. A handful of officers. A young prisoner. Wind moving through sand. Human beings standing close enough to see fear in one another’s faces.

History narrows finally to this.

The upcoming feature film The Red Head approaches Hannie Schaft’s final days not as distant wartime mythology, but through the psychological reality of occupation, capture, resistance, and execution. By grounding her story in the emotional and human textures surrounding the dunes near Bloemendaal—the fear, exhaustion, defiance, grief, and moral terror of Nazi executions—the film appears less interested in simplistic martyrdom than in examining how authoritarian systems attempt to extinguish identity itself.

And how, sometimes, they fail.

Because the strange historical irony of places like the dunes near Bloemendaal is that the dunes no longer belong psychologically to the executioners.

They belong to the dead who refused them.

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