ferbs54 Last night I refamiliarized myself with an Ingmar Bergman film that might be the closest this great director ever came to doing a horror picture (other than, perhaps, "Through a Glass Darkly," and of course, "Scenes From a Marriage." LOL!). The film in question is "Hour of the Wolf," from 1968 (original Swedish title: "Vargtimmen"), starring Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullmann. In this B&W stunner, a couple comes to a very isolated island. The husband is a famous painter, and his wife of some five years is now pregnant. The artist, we soon gather, is very close to going mad, as he keeps seeing visions that may or may not be real, including bird people, a woman whose face comes off, and other monstrosities. He also thinks back to the time when he killed a young boy, although whether this ever truly happened or not is unclear. Liv, at one point, asks if two people who live together will soon start to resemble one another and think like the other, and I suppose that Bergman feels that that is indeed the case, as she too starts to see visions. There is no way in the film to ever tell what is real, what is memory, what is hallucination, what is symbolic and so on. Bergman achieves a creepy atmosphere almost effortlessly from the very first scene, in which Liv talks to the camera and tells her story in flashback. Ingrid Thulin, another Bergman regular, appears as Von Sydow's former flame in a surprisingly topless sequence. This is a beautiful film to look at, with outstanding cinematography by another Bergman regular, Sven Nykvist, and the acting by the two leads, need I even say, is world class. It is a picture that will surely be seen differently by everyone who experiences it, and is most certainly very open to interpretation. It is NOT a film for the lazy viewer, and is surely not an easy film. But it is a fascinating one, to be sure....

Cyniphile This film plays on all the tensioned strings of love as the most powerful emotion--the most direct segue to insanity. Love is something we want to happen selfishly, but by its very nature requires a mutual, balanced, and undivided emotion. The madness that ensues in these characters is clearly tied to the various imbalances that occur: unrequited love, partial love, projections of the desired state of of the loved one upon the loved one, incompatibility torturing those who lust for love, sexual lust, and most of all...the permanent scar left upon those who loved truly, and lost. The sheer all-encompassing nature of this film, the fact that it touches on the madness behind so many forms of love is a testament to its concise power. Interestingly--unlike most films and art films which attempt only to share a story of the human experience or to evoke with us an emotion--Hour of the Wolf is also very much a practical film, because above all, it is a warning.

Jim McCormick This one is for you Lynch fanatics out there! I always thought that Stanley Kubrick had a major influence on David Lynch, but after watching "Hour of the Wolf," from renowned director Ingmar Bergman, I feel that David Lynch had to watch this film in his formative years. This is David Lynch, before there was David Lynch! A masterpiece of surrealistic macabre! A truly groundbreaking film, filled with disturbing images, foreboding bleak atmosphere, & direction years a head of its time! If I really dig into my grey memory matter, there is an earlier low budget American film that could've of been an influence on this film & others to come, 1962's, "Carnival of Souls." Another masterpiece of alternative surrealistic realities. "Carnival of Souls" & "Hour of the Wolf," are direct precedents to the films Lynch would make later, especially his eerie black & white opus, "Erasurehead." If you can sit through the subtitles & the first half, slow but fascinating. The second half of "Hour of the Wolf," is a bad LSD trip on celluloid, confounding, compelling, brutally sadistic (the scene with the boy) & masochistic, this film will be your entrance in to alternative filmmaking of the most surrealistic kind! A film that expanded what could be done with movie making, by making a anti-movie in the conventional sense. For conventions is a thing Ingmar Bergman left light year realities behind him, when he made "Hour of the Wolf!"

Steve Pulaski Hour of the Wolf is an intriguing horror film, difficult to comprehend, complex in the best possible way, and exceptionally creepy and deep. It tells the story of a painter who confides in his pregnant wife that he believes that the people he encounters are demons of all different sorts. He has a chillingly persistent case of insomnia, and stays awake all hours of the night with his wife, especially during the "vargtimmen," also known as "the hour of the wolf," where, he states, is when the most births and deaths occur.Johan Borg (Max von Sydow) is the painter, and his wife is Alma (Liv Ullmann). The movie follows them sort of sympathetically, as we get a brutally horrifying narrative on how the thought of demons have almost corrupted Johan as a whole, and the sad fact that he may even have a difficult time functioning on his own. He seems to always need some careful, human support.Ingmar Bergman, a director known for his aesthetically deep pictures, such as his involving character studies, and intellectually challenging portrayal of life, dabs into the horror genre for the first (and maybe only) time with beautifully suspenseful material. This is a surrealist fantasy, equipped with a marvelous performance by von Sydow, a Bergman regular, who was one of the sources to The Seventh Seal's greatness.The character I felt the most sympathy for was not Johan, but Alma, who is forced to watch her husband be eaten alive by his own fear and insanity. This is the second Bergman film that has intimately covered, what one expert calls, "personality disintegration." In Wild Strawberries, we saw how one man's shallowness and pompous attitude, which refused long time friends and relatives access to his mind, lead him down the road of an unhappy, unfulfilled lifestyle he begins to loathe at the end of his life. However, he was more in control of his life than Johan, who seems to fighting a battle that simply doesn't want to lose here.Bergman's Gothic horror film is elegantly shot and eerily photographed, with long shots of bleak landscapes and intimate closeups in the dead of night. Hour of the Wolf is infinitely smarter and more appealing than much of the horror films we are met with today, and it deserves to be seen more than one of those cheap, low budget monster films that rerun week after week on Svengoolie.Starring: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, and Gertrud Fridh. Directed by: Ingmar Bergman.