| Jackson Stern |
Hour of the Wolf plays at the Trylon Cinema on Sunday, October 5 to Tuesday, October 7. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
For all of its philosophical wonderings, questions of morality, madness, and arthouse sensibilities, there’s something very different about Ingmar Bergman’s follow-up to the monolithic Persona. Sure, it contains all of the aforementioned heft of his previous films, labored performances from his usual company, and a deep-seated sense of existential angst, but considering the whole of it, its essence feels much more foreign. One can almost imagine him sitting in a rocking chair beside a stone fireplace, contemplating deep Ingmar Bergman thoughts, mulling over what his next project will be.
“Perhaps another film about God’s silence,” he thinks. “Or perhaps I’ll direct an opera.”
Then, as if struck by a brilliant bolt of orange lightning, which traveled all across the endless cosmos right to his little flat on Fårö, he stands up and exclaims:
“I have got it!”
And with a crazed look in his eyes he skips to the bedroom to wake Liv Ullman to tell her the exciting news. He whispers in his deep-toned Ingmar Bergman voice (or maybe the English impression off of Sparks’ wonderful rock opera, The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman):
“I must make…. A Universal monster picture.”
And that’s exactly what he did!
Well, sort of. It’s surprisingly unsurprising that for his umpteenth feature film, Bergman would turn to the graveyards and shadows of Universal Studios’ famous horror movie cycle from the early 1930s into the mid-50s. But it is a little surprising how much he committed to the bit.
Individual mileage may vary, but Ingmar Bergman has always made horror films. Consider the horrific assault and subsequent revenge tale in The Virgin Spring (which was remade by the great Wes Craven in 1972 as the cult/sleaze classic, The Last House on the Left), the macabre energy of The Magician, or the ghosts (there or not) in Cries and Whispers or Fanny and Alexander. Broadening a little, what about the existential terror of God’s silence and/or complete absence in Winter Light and Through a Glass Darkly. What about the emotional warfare of Autumn Sonata or the literal manifestation of death in The Seventh Seal? You can go on and on. But of course, what makes The Hour of the Wolf singular is the way it wears its classical Hollywood influences on its shoulders. You can find a trace or two of The Phantom Carriage in arguably every Bergman film up to 1969, but there’s not much of James Whale’s Frankenstein in Summer with Monika. That unique influence is part of what makes this one so special.
While there is a major interior threat in the hearts of our characters, just like all of Bergman’s other films, this one actually has something of an opposing physical force in the von Merkens family. They’re these decadent, vampyric bureaucrats who seem to pop out of any which way at whatever moment is least convenient to our two protagonists(?), Johan (Max von Sydow) and Alma (Liv Ullman). Despite contradicting commonly known vampire lore (such as an inability to come into contact with direct sunlight), the members of this family have often been interpreted as vampires for several reasons, not least of which is that they are feeding off of Johan’s artistic genius and attempting to seduce him into joining their clan. There are moments where he seems to be in a sort of trance which, try as he may to resist it, results in him becoming delirious or even inflicting harm upon those he holds closest. It’s a great subversion of common vampire tropes where the viewer never explicitly sees any sort of ritual or incantation put onto the possessed, rather just the aftermath of it, which leads us to question if these people are really ghouls at all or if Johan is merely just going insane, his artistic genius and traumas working together to drive him towards full-stop madness. These suspicions are certainly exacerbated by the appearance of the various members of the von Merkens clan. One of them is a heavily wrinkled old woman who may or may not be two-hundred-and-six-years-old, another has the same slicked back black hair and angular features that made Bela Lugosi into the most iconic version of Dracula. It’s these features, along with an insatiable hunger (for money, for power, etc.), that make them one of the more singular depictions of vampires ever put to screen, if that’s even what they are at all.
Yet despite the von Merkens being the most obvious villainous forces in the film, Johan himself isn’t exactly a lamb in a lion’s den. Instead, his increasingly agitated cadence gives him a near Jekyll and Hyde persona at times. As his past is revealed more and more to the audience (as well as to Alma) throughout the film, the more we see how his present is a compensation and repression for the sins he committed in a previous life, only in brief moments coming up to the surface to wreak havoc like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. On the one hand, he is a kind, even romantic man who obviously cares very deeply for his wife and is a brilliant artist who finds beauty in the most minute features on the human face. Yet on the other, he is tormented by regret and carries with him a great instability on top of a repressed lust for a woman he can no longer be with. He has in him a great sickness which emphasizes his duality that the film itself even identifies with its slight shift in style whenever we are seeing his own point of view. Much of the film is from Alma’s perspective, and shot in that thoughtfully strict Bergman way, but when we are with Johan alone, it gets a lot wilder. His memories are overexposed just enough to alarm, and in the present scenes, the camera often whips or zooms in ways which are much more radical than you’d expect from a film of Bergman’s. This quantifiable shift in style, this visual vulgarity, is the perfect Hyde to the rest of the film’s restrained Dr. Jekyll.
Above all, despite the expertly tautened first two-thirds, The Hour of the Wolf is arguably most widely known for its final twenty-five or so minutes, which fully commits and crosses over into straight-up surrealist territory. Johan’s delirium reaches the top of its metaphorical mountain, and he returns to the von Merkens’ manor only to find it to be a house of horrors. He’s led into an empty room by one of the members who doesn’t stop walking when he reaches the wall and walks all the way up until he’s upside down on the ceiling, he’s confronted by a man whom he may or may not be cucking, and, most infamously at all, an old lady casually, um, removes her “makeup.” This is when Bergman bets the house and fully embraces all of his influences in the most gonzo way he ever could have. It’s a marvel of a sequence which evokes the very best of Lang, Christensen, and Murnau. It’s really when it cements itself as a true horror classic, inspiring similar sequences in films from Suspiria (either version) to The Lighthouse. Instead of capturing the human tragedy in the heartachingly stern way he typically does, he goes fully abstract and presents the climax of Johan’s despair as a nightmare for the ages.
Whether or not these von Merken “man-eaters” were truly real-life monsters or manifestations of Johan’s sorrows is left more or less up to interpretation, but the pain he feels is real. When the film cuts back to the frame story that opened up the film, it’s sobering. It’s here where we, the audience, are brought back to a cold reality and left alone with Alma to reckon with all that has just transpired. All the madness of the previous hour is left unexplained. It’s this final scene where Bergman’s genre experiment ceases and he brings us back down to the earth to remind us that horror isn’t just entertainment but for catharsis. Unlike Frankenstein or The Wolf Man, the monster, the real monster at the heart of darkness, isn’t subdued or killed; it’s left out there to lurk in the twilight. At its final moment, we see within Alma that it’s not the monster or that madness that terrorizes us in the dead of night, but the implication of it. The implication that our deepest, realest anxieties have a habit of manifesting in the strangest, most unpredictable of ways, and there’s really no explaining it. We may put white sheets over them or put plastic fangs in their mouths as a way to make them less scary, but the things they represent will still be hovering over us while we sleep, at our most vulnerable.
Edited by Finn Odum