Green Scream laboriously and didactically drags out environmental messages from recent (and not-so-recent) horror films, and is a regular feature on the Precipitate blog.
Although they might not feature chest-rupturing aliens, or puzzle boxes that open a portal to Hell, or poltergeists juggling eggs in your kitchen, why not think of Ingmar Bergman’s films as horror?
True, the dour Swede’s nothing if not the twentieth century auteur, and it’s impossible to overemphasize his singular vision and acute influence on generations of filmmakers, from Singapore to Copenhagen to Hollywood. But to some extent that legacy has discouraged alternative ways of thinking about his masterpieces: the brooding and sensual chiaroscuro of The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Through a Glass Darkly, Persona, and The Virgin Spring. Here’s my contention: for all their haute seriousness and apparent snobbery, Bergman’s films trace the same thematic terrain as even the cheesiest grindhouse fare: madness, desire, the place of religion in an increasingly secularized society, and our primordial fear of mortality.
Case in point: Hour of the Wolf, Bergman’s engrossing Gothic fantasia from the late sixties.
Hour of the Wolf follows an artist, Johan (Max von Sydow), and his pregnant wife, Alma (Liv Ullmann), who live along bleak, windy shore of a rock-strewn island in a small cottage. Johan is creatively blocked: his painting has flatlined after early praise, his most recent efforts totally lackluster and derivative. Even worse, his sanity is slowly unspooling. He can’t sleep. A ghoulish, possibly supernatural set of aristocrats live in a crumbling castle across the island, and are seemingly intent on making playthings out of the couple. Johan tells Alma that the castle-dwellers are hallucinations brought on by his insomnia—until Alma starts to see them, too.
Given these spooky proceedings, it’s not surprise that much of the film’s action is slow-burning and nocturnal. The movie’s most riveting scenes are set in the “hour of the wolf,” that liminal space between night and dawn, when, as Johan tells Alma, “most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are more real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear, when ghosts and demons are most powerful. The Hour of the Wolf is also the hour when most children are born.”
While there are some genuinely terrifying moments in the film—convinced he’s being tempted by a demon, Johan dashes the life out of a small boy on the island’s rocks in one scene, and one of the castle’s old hags pulls off her face as if it were made of paraffin in another—the real horror of Hour of the Wolf is the familiar, expertly crafted metaphysical dread and anxiety that runs through many of Bergman’s other films (especially those with obvious spiritual concerns, like Winter Light). Ghost-Camus, eat your heart out.
Unsurprisingly, then, much of the film’s action is a ragged waltz through the fantastic: the audience, like the characters themselves, is unable to discern the difference between dream and waking, performance and unscripted reality, nightmare and repressed desire, sacred and profane.
Bergman uses setting to his advantage here, as the most surreal, lurid scenes in the film are filled with chaotic nature imagery: a cacophonous, bird-infested hallway just outside of the room where Johan prepares to meet a past lover and the dank, petroleum-black woods of the film’s conclusion, among others.
Against this consuming and chaotic vision, Bergman sets the redemptive and transcendent possibility of art. The emotional core of the film is a marionette show at a dinner party at the castle (the first puppet show I’ve seen in a horror film that doesn’t give me the hibbily-wibbilies). The puppetmaster dims the lamps in the library and the guests—Johan, Alma, and the ghastly procession of aristocrats—become immediately engrossed in the show. It’s the scene from Mozart’s The Magic Flute in which the opera’s hero, Tamino, is reassured by the chorus that his beloved Pamina is still alive.
Bergman would later adapt The Magic Flute for Swedish television in 1975, and recounted in an interview that this scene was among his favorites from the opera:
“Does Pamina still live?” The music translates the little question of the text into a big and eternal question; Does love live? Is Love real? The answer comes quivering and hopeful: “Pa-mi-na still lives!” Love exists. Love is real in the world of man.
Things quickly fall apart after the puppet show ends. Johann’s had too much wine. His fractured mental state becomes apparent. The ghouls began to prey on his conscience and his desire for success as an artist. At his side is Alma, who desperately tries to deflect their mockery, and I can’t help but imagine that it’s her perspective—her almost pathological devotion to Johann, and her desire to know him and his art completely—from which Bergman wants us to see this scene. It’s also impossible not to think of Bergman himself as the puppeteer, his face half-obscured by the scaffolding of the magic screen as he transports his audience into a different reality. When Bergman died in 2007, his obituary in the New York Times recounted how the Swedish filmmaker sought solace in acts of creation even as a boy, tormented by a draconian and authoritarian father:
As with Bergman himself, Johann’s attempts to ward off his demons—both real and imagined—meet with limited success. As Alma makes clear at the film’s beginning, Johan’s disappearance is unclear. But by bookending the film with her testimony, Bergman encourages us to see the entire narrative from her vantage point: her conviction that two people in love become indistinguishable from one another as they age, like two tree trunks with wedded bark. The dark, unstated promise of this intimacy is the implicit subject of the film, as Johann’s madness leaks into Alma and she, like us, is left uncertain about what is real and what’s dreamed-up. Accordingly, in Hour of the Wolf, Bergman hesitantly hints at transcendence through embracing the dark otherness of the ones we love, with all their perils and promises, in the hour just before the dawn.
Cameron Turner, Editor