 |
| Alma and Johan at the worst dinner party ever |
It's a wonderful day to start a horror film blog. Of course, by "wonderful day," I mean that it is gray and storming outside. Because the weather seems to be demanding I write about something black, white, and brooding, I'll start with one of my favorite psychological horror films: Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf (1968). It's not one to reach for if you're looking for laughs or buckets of blood, but you'd be a rare bird if it didn't stir you. Because I can, I'm going to link to other synopses and reviews of the film:
One of my favorite approaches in film analysis is to try and establish a film's geography. With psychological films, this task is complicated because, the further a character descends into psychosis, the more their physical surroundings become divorced from reality. Since we can't be sure what is real in the film, I've chosen to treat even the most fantastic settings and images as literalizations of Johan (and Alma's?) fractured mind. In other words, this is a literal mapping of a surreal text.
Alma and Johan arrive at the island on a small boat. Aside from the couple, the sailor in the boat is the only character in the film that we can be reasonably sure exists. Perhaps because of this, the camera holds on him for a long time, until the boat disappears behind a rock. This "parting shot" is important because, for the rest of the film we are trapped on the island, which functions as a psychological as opposed to physical landscape: separated from the “mainland” of rationality and reality.
 |
| Goodbye, you're screwed. |
The events of the film play out in four major settings on the island: shoreline, cottage, castle, and forest. The shoreline is rocky and inhospitable, but Johan chooses to paint and draw here. It's also where Johan literally embraces his sexual insecurities. First, he is visited by an old flame, Veronica Volger (Ingrid Thulin). She warns him that “You can't see us, but we can see you. Awful things can happen. Some dreams can be made known.” Rather than listen to her warnings, he kisses her. Later, he kills (or thinks he kills) a seductive young boy in an apparent effort to quell latent homosexual desire. As the boy lies sunning on a rock, Johan attacks him and bashes him against a rock. Kids, close your eyes. But neither apparition disappears; Veronica later resurfaces in the castle and the young boy hovers just under the surface of the water where Johan dumped him. In allowing his most primal sexual fears to play out on the shoreline, they eventually overrun the entire island.
 |
| Johan's visitors |
Alma and Johan’s cottage is located on the bluff above the shoreline. It is the picture of cozy domesticity: small, well-worn, and surrounded by a walled-in yard containing a single flowering tree. The one moment of happiness that we see them share occurs underneath this tree. Alma spends most of her time here; her influence makes the cottage a relatively stable environment. We cannot trust that she is totally sane (she wonders aloud if Johan has “infected” her and she is also able to see his demons), but we can say that she is more sane than Johan. Though they find footprints around their cottage, Johan’s demons are seemingly unable to reach him there. Initially, it serves as a refuge for Johan, but as his psychosis ripens, he shoots at Alma and flees the cottage. Neither Alma nor the domestic sphere can protect him from himself.
 |
| The cottage |
Johan’s demons convene in the von Merken castle, the exterior of which we only catch a glimpse of in the dinner party sequence. Most of the castle is obscured by trees; it is impossible to tell how large it is. Inside, it is labyrinthine. Some rooms are furnished with expensive furniture and heavy drapes, but other areas are empty, shadowy, and filled with hordes of crows. It's also an absurd space; inside, hosts are not hospitable, puppets move on their own accord, and the laws of physics get a bit...slippery.
 |
| "I can assure you, I suffer" |
The after-dinner puppet show scene is especially interesting, because Johan’s demons use it to show him that they, too, can move of their own accord. The stony beach is a space where Johan allows his demons to run wild, so I like to think that the stone castle is formed from the raw, psychic "materials" of the shoreline. Here, the demons take on a life of their own (as twisted, aristocratic shrews) and build a structure in which they thrive. Johan can control what happens at the beach but, once he enters the castle, he is at their mercy.
 |
| In case you weren't scared of puppets already... |
You can draw your own conclusions about the piece of music in this scene:
The Magic Flute
Finally, there is the forest, where last climactic scenes of the film play out. Johan (feminized, humiliated, and convinced he has murdered Alma) runs into the trees. The forest is dark and twisted, a fairly in-your-face articulation of overgrown madness. Alma manages to find Johan and calls to him. He is shown in long shot, standing in a copse of trees with branches that seem to wrap around him. As Alma watches, his demons morph from impish to wholly malicious and take turns hitting and cutting him, until they (along with Johan) disappear into thin air. Alma rushes to where Johan had just stood, in the same framing and long shot, surrounded by dead limbs and stagnant, frothing black water.
 |
| Alma alone in the tangled forest |
Unsurprisingly, the settings in the film serve a narrative rather than spatial function. Restated, the film's settings function as points on a psychological continuum. I group the four locations into two pairs: the beach and the cottage (where Johan creates and Alma nurtures), and the castle and the forest (controlled by Johan's run-amok sexual insecurities). What I find so horrifying about this film is the embodiment of personal demons that possess the capability of creating physical environments that function according to their rules. The scene I keep coming back to is the one in which Johan embraces Veronica Volger. The seems to best-articulate Bergman's warning about allowing the artistic process to overtake one's persona (Johan "embraces the dream").
I'd hate to think what my demons would look like. They'd probably be clowns. I'm fairly well-vented, psychologically, but it's the clowns that continue to haunt me. Puppets, too.
