27 September 2012

hifalutin horror.

12. Hour of the Wolf (1968)

Yeah, yeah... I know. An Ingmar Bergman film is gonna be a tough sell to horror purists, and even I myself don't know if Hour of the Wolf is quite at home within the genre—but a film in which an old woman tears off her face, removes her eyeballs, and casually drops them into an etched crystal wine goblet deserves to be recognized (at least) as a not-too-distant cousin of the classic horror film. Hour of the Wolf is perhaps best described, like Roman Polanski's 1960s film Repulsion, as a psychodrama—in which the dawning insanity of a lead character is seamlessly blended with external reality, so that the audience eventually becomes disoriented and unable to distinguish which acts are imagined and which are the real but aberrant acts occasioned (in Shakespeare's turn of phrase) by a mind diseased


2 comments:

  1. I love the word 'highfalutin.'

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  2. You have been busy. I haven't checked your blog in a few days.

    How about the people on the ceiling? That creeped me the hell out.

    ReplyDelete