by ·Comments Off on Island of Lost Souls (1932, Erle C. Kenton)

“You’re an amazingly unscientific young man.”

“Are we not men?” Fun to imagine young Devo watching this in the 70’s and inverting the mad scientist’s intentions for their de-evolution theories. There’s even Devo-specific content on the Criterion disc, which I need to rent sometime.

Based on the HG Wells novel Island of Dr. Moreau which was remade a few times, with Burt Lancaster then Marlon Brando as Moreau. Here it’s Charles Laughton (same year as The Old Dark House), reveling in his role of the kindly accomodating villain, the calm and rational “mad” scientist with a whip. Laughton may have just invented camp in cinema, beating Bride of Frankenstein by a couple years. All the fun in the movie comes from Laughton along with the creatures whom he has forced to rapidly evolve in his surgical “house of pain”: slinky, sexy Lota the Panther Woman (Kathleen Burke, who next appeared in Murders in the Zoo) and fur-faced servants including M’ling (Tetsu Komai) and the Sayer Of The Law (Bela Lugosi, the year after Dracula).

Bela!

No fun at all comes from our obligatory decent romantic couple: Richard Arlen (also the obligatory romantic lead in Thunderbolt) and Leila Hyams (also the obligatory romantic lead in Freaks). He was hitching a ride on a trading ship when he argued with the captain and got dumped at Moreau’s, and after he’d failed to show up, his fiancee Hyams teams up with some other captain named Donahue and goes searching. Donahue doesn’t make it out, nor does “doctor” Montgomery, a morally grey character who works with Moreau. And Moreau has compared himself to God – never a good idea in a movie, so we know he’s doomed as well.

The movie’s pretty good overall, with cool creatures and a perfect dose of Laughton, but it also serves up a smarter ending than expected. Laughton has built his dominance over the semi-evolved creatures through intimidation (the whip, House of Pain) and The Law, which forbids killing. But when he orders one monster to kill the captain, the others have enough of a grasp of logic to realize that “law no more,” and go on a Moreau-and-island-destroying rampage.

Kenton also made some Lon Chaney Jr. horrors in the 1940’s. Adapted from the Wells story by Philip Wylie (who’d also work on Wells’ The Invisible Man) and Waldemar Young (Love Me Tonight, Desire) and shot by Karl Struss (Sunrise).

by ·Comments Off on Onibaba (1964, Kaneto Shindo)

Brilliant movie. It’s a simple, straightforward story with just a few characters, but manages to have some of the most indelible horror scenes, the most erotic moments, best cinematography and craziest music I’ve seen/heard all year. The music has a real sense of humor, with punctuating sound effects, all drum-drumma-drum-drumma slash-YEAAAGH! drum-drumma-drum-drumma slash-YEAAAGH! a hundred times in a row. Later it uses a crackling sound, like someone walking on sticks.

The main characters are credited by their relationship to a missing man – Kichi’s Mother (Nobuko Otowa, also of Shindo’s Naked Island) and Kichi’s Wife (Jitsuko Yoshimura of Pigs and Battleships). Kichi never appears, and we assume he’s dead because his friend and neighbor Hachi (Kei Sato, the warden in Death By Hanging, a reporter in Pitfall) returns from war (escaped, not dismissed) and tells them so. Hachi’s kind of a bastard, so mom is suspicious that he’s lying, but mostly she’s afraid that Kichi’s horny widow will abandon her for Hachi. Before he showed up, the two women had a good racket going, killing unsuspecting escaped warriors who are either hiding or lost in the tall grasses and selling their armor and weapons to local merchant Ushi (Taiji Tonoyama, who possibly got naked in In the Realm of the Senses, was also in Vengeance Is Mine).

The two killers:

Ushi:

The young widow begins waiting for mom to fall asleep then sneaking away, racing through the grasses to Hachi’s hut. When I mentioned erotic scenes above, I meant the running itself, not their embrace after she arrives. The camera flies with her through the grass as she flails ahead at full tilt, mouth open, ecstatic with anticipation.

Hachi:

One night a demon-masked man appears at the hut when mom is alone and orders her to show him the way out of the grasses. He claims the mask protects his extremely handsome face and intimidates the enemy, and refuses to remove it when she asks. She leads him straight into the deep hole where they dispose of the soldiers they kill, then she drops down on a rope the next day and removes his mask, using it at night to scare her daughter-in-law into returning home, after a setup lecture about sin and punishment. But after one rainy night, the mask gets stuck, and after much pulling and prying, finally comes tearing off, disfiguring the mother’s face in the process. Incidentally, Hachi is killed the same night, but neither of the women find this out before the movie ends. The daughter flees, “a real demon!” and the mother follows, falling headlong into the hole shouting “I’m a human being!”

Criterion:

Released in Japan in 1964, the same year as Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman of the Dunes (a film to which it bears a number of striking resemblances), Onibaba is based on a Buddhist parable meant to encourage women’s attendance at religious convocations. But in Shindo’s hands the parable is gleefully deformed into a cautionary tale about sexual jealousy and unrequited passion, reaffirming his propensity for superimposing the modern and the ancient, not to mention God and the devil. Not only was Onibaba the director’s first period film, set in the sixteenth century during a time of constant war and ceaseless famine, it was also his first (of several to come) to place an overt focus — in shot after shot of the topless torsos of its central characters — on the ways that sexual desire, while essential to human survival, can also have cataclysmic consequences.

by ·Comments Off on Santa Sangre (1989, Alejandro Jodorowsky)

This was pretty incredible. Nude man in asylum thinks he’s a monkey. Flashback to when he was a young boy in a false mustache in the circus, watching a tattooed hottie force a deaf-mute girl to walk a burning tightrope. The boy’s mom is chief priestess at the santa sangre temple, which is torn down after being disavowed by the church, claiming the armless woman they worship is not a saint. Later she catches her awful drunken husband with the tattooed lady, and he cuts off her arms then kills himself, and the young mime tightrope walker is driven away from the traumatized boy.

Then after that first 45 minutes, the unthinkable happens: the movie got boring. Later I changed my mind about this, figure it just changed mood and speed and I wasn’t able to follow along, because retracing the story through the million screenshots I took, it sure doesn’t look boring. Anyway, now the boy and his armless mom have a stage act where he hides behind her, being her arms, imagining himself invisible. A bunch of people, including the tattooed woman and a cross-dressing wrestler, get brutally murdered – mother commanding son to kill with his/her hands. He hooks up with his midget best friend from the circus, who may have never existed. Only when he finds the mime girl does he stand up to his mother (and stab her to death), then he and the girl walk outside to start a new life together. No just kidding – they walk outside to find themselves surrounded by police.

Too old to play the young lead himself, Alejandro has his son Axel play the lead, with younger son Adan as young Axel, Blanca Guerra (also in Walker) as his mother and Guy “Dean’s brother” Stockwell as his father. It’s possibly the most coherent Jodorowsky movie I’ve seen, a true horror bursting with ideas and excellently filmed. I hope all the dead or dying animals were just special-effects this time.

D. Lim (who also makes a howler mistake, calling La Cravate a lost film years after it was rediscovered and issued on DVD):

Psycho is hardly the only cinematic influence on Santa Sangre. The circus grotesquerie suggests Fellini, though Tod Browning’s big-top movies Freaks and The Unknown are perhaps even more relevant. James Whale’s The Invisible Man is glimpsed on the television at one point. Also apparent is the lurid imprint of the film’s producer and co-writer Claudio Argento, brother of schlock-horror maestro Dario. But for all its sundry inspirations, Santa Sangre never seems derivative. Jodorowsky’s anything-goes alchemy has a cumulative power, as does the documentary energy of his location photography. It’s a movie bursting with life — interrupted frequently by processions and pageants, shot in actual slums and red-light districts.

You can’t tell from the dim screenshot that this is a white bird rising from an open grave:

by ·Comments Off on Tourneur Triple-Feature

I’ve enjoyed Jacques Tourneur’s SHOCKtober-worthy Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie, so I planned on watching Night of the Demon and The Leopard Man this year. But wait – just discovered that his father Maurice was also a filmmaker, also made horror movies, and their careers overlapped. So I watched movies by father and son from 1943, along with an early silent short.

–
The Devil’s Hand (1943, Maurice Tourneur)

“An avalanche, a madman, and prunes! The evening is completely spoiled.”

High-quality studio picture that plays like an expensive Twilight Zone episode until it gets bonkers towards the end. Very nice light and shadows, some Cocteauian fast-motion and reverse photography providing subtly supernatural effects.

Failed painter Roland (Pierre Fresnay of Le Corbeau and Grand Illusion) buys the titular hand from a great chef (who immediately loses his own right hand and his kitchen skills – this doesn’t seem to faze Roland) despite warnings from the chef’s assistant Ange (heh) and then sees his painterly fortunes soar. But he begins to be stalked by a short, cheerful man in a bowler hat claiming to be the devil and taunting Roland – offering to take back the hand in exchange for tons of cash.

The fatal purchase:

Jolly old devil:

His girl Irene (Josseline Gael of Raymond Bernard’s Les Miserables, whose career ended the following year, imprisoned for sleeping with the Gestapo) was the impetus for Roland’s devil-hand purchase, dumping him at dinner in front of the chef, calling his artworks trash. After his success, they’re married and the devil tries to trade her soul for Roland’s, calling her “a beautiful sinner.” Later she phones Roland from the hotel where she used to live offering him enough money to unload the hand, but when he arrives she has been murdered. I’m missing something – why her old hotel? How’d she get the money? By doing something immoral, no doubt, but she made more money in two days than the most celebrated painter in town could dig up?

Irene with Orpheus lighting, worn out from making all that money:

Anyway, after losing everything at a casino, Roland stumbles into the best part of the movie, a dining hall full of ghosts of the men who formerly possessed the hand, telling their stories via shadow-plays, culminating in the appearance of Maximus Leo, whose hand they’ve all been fooling with. So Roland goes off to the mountains trying to locate Leo’s grave so he can return the hand and break the curse.

Framing device: he’s been narrating all this to the patrons of a snowed-in lodge (who provide most of the film’s sense of humor), despondent because the devil just staged a power outage and nabbed the hand. The devil seems alternately powerful and feeble, serious and pranksterish in this movie. Suddenly Roland runs outside, chases down the devil and wrestles free the hand before falling to his death – upon Leo’s grave. So the curse is broken, I guess. Anyway, the movie is very enjoyable despite my story confusions. Based on an 1832 short story, no relation to The Hands of Orlac or The Monkey’s Paw.

F. Lafond:

Even if some sequences make use of expressionistic lighting, Tourneur manages to instill a sense of fear by emphasising the concrete consequences of the Faustian pact rather than the supernatural powers of the Devil … Above all, the pact functions as a commercial transaction … As with other films made during World War II, there are no direct references to the military and political context of the time. But Roland’s wild-eyed looks upon entering the inn at the outset of the film express a feeling of pervading paranoia that one can fully comprehend only by taking into account the extra-diegetic reality. The horror elements of Tourneur’s La Main du diable may well express an anxiety experienced by every Frenchman opposed to the German invasion, in their souls if not through action.

–
The Leopard Man (1943, Jacques Tourneur)

Another in the Val Lewton series that also produced I Walked With a Zombie, The Seventh Victim and The Ghost Ship – all in the same year! This one seemed more slight than the others I’ve seen (Curse of the Cat People excepted). A leopard gets loose in New Mexico after a publicity stunt goes wrong, kills a bunch of young women, and the singer and publicity man responsible for its escape try to help out (though they’re low-key about it, because it’s not cool to act responsible for terrorizing a town).

Kiki (serial player Jean Brooks, with a nice Myrna Loy-like voice) is the singer and Manning (Dennis O’Keefe, in Hangmen Also Die the same year, also star of the original Brewster’s Millions and Anthony Mann’s Raw Deal and T-Men) the publicity man – and the guy who lent them his leopard is named Charlie How-Come, a good-natured guy, but he’d like his leopard back, please, or the $225 it’ll cost to get a new one. I don’t remember if Charlie ever gets paid.

Young Teresa is the first and saddest victim, having to cross town at night to buy cornmeal, then pounding at her door to be let in as the leopard approached. Next up is Consuelo (a Finnish actress playing Mexican – hey, any foreigner will do), accidentally locked into a cemetery while awaiting her boyfriend. And finally Clo-Clo the maraca girl (“Margo” of Lost Horizon – too bad they couldn’t get The Panther Woman from Island of Lost Souls) who kinda had it coming, since she purposely frightened the leopard at the beginning, leading to its escape.

One victim – Teresa, I think – and her finches:

Turns out a local professor (James Bell, who also played the doctor in I Walked with a Zombie) found the dead leopard (or did he kill it?) and has used the leopard-on-the-loose headline as license to kill girls himself, leaving leopard-like evidence at the scenes. What a weirdo. I like how first he tries to convince Charlie How-Come (the “leopard man”) that Charlie is becoming a leopard while drunk, so that Charlie asks to be locked up, werewolf-style.

–
The Man With Wax Faces (1914, Maurice Tourneur)

A silent trifle with a good ending. The classic plot, which may not have been so classic at the time, of a man who bets he can spend the night in a spooky place (wax museum) in order to prove his bravery. But he’s not brave at all – the wind and shadows scare the hell out of him, and when his prankster friend sneaks in, he gets stabbed to death by his crazed buddy.

Adding to the sense of strangeness is some wicked, Decasia-worthy film damage, coincidentally appearing right after the title “Deeper into the night, the wax figures become more terrifying.” If you saw your world melting and tearing apart like this, you’d go mad, too.

Battle of the Tourneurs – advantage: Maurice

by ·Comments Off on Eat Drink Man Woman (1994, Ang Lee)

A fairly good drama centered more around family problems than food preparation. Katy and I want more food in our food movies, not just women with 80’s hair having romantic entanglements. Don’t get me wrong – the food scenes were very nice, but there could have been at least 15 more minutes’ worth.

Master chef Chu has lost his wife and his sense of taste, and now the coworker who acts as Chu’s taster has died of a heart attack. Chu’s repressed daughter Jia-Jen is a schoolteacher with a crush on a co-worker, tempermental daughter Jia-Chien is an executive, also with a crush on a co-worker but one whom she wrongly suspects of being her sister’s ex, and youngest daughter is still in school. Plus the daughters have a quiet friend with an obnoxious mom.

Now, it would seem that the two older daughters would sort out their relationship issues and end up happily together with their guys, and that happens for at least one, but the movie throws a couple love-interest curveballs when the youngest daughter gets pregnant and moves in with her boy, and the father announces that he’s marrying the young friend, not her mother. And when he cooks for his young bride he regains his sense of taste. Remade in California with Mexican-American cuisine, Nikolai Kinski and The State’s Ken Marino.

by ·1 Comment

Some nice TV mystery music right from the start. The material for a feature film (35mm) and miniseries (16mm) were shot at the same time, Franju and writer Jacques Champreux [EDIT: just learned this is Louis Feuillade’s grandson] looking to make “a gentle parody” of 1940’s American serials, not so much the early French serials they referenced in Judex. Champreux says that some of the 35mm film cans were stolen while shooting in Belgrade, so some of the lesser television stuff was cut into the feature. No matter, it’s a fine, twisty picture, less dark and mysterious than Judex, more colorful and campy.

I want a black monocle:

Albert the butler sells information about his master Maxime de Borrego to a transparently fake “old lady” (inspired by Lon Chaney in The Unholy Three, I later learned) about the secret treasure of the Knights Templar, so the old lady becomes Shadowman (that name is never used – he’s credited as L’homme sans visage – played by the film’s writer), kills Max, and installs an underling (Max’s “nephew”) to search for the treasure.

When the real nephew arrives (Ugo Pagliai, an Alain Delon wannabe), the cops burst in on the fake, who blows a smoke bomb and flees. This is our first definite indication that the movie intends parody, if we weren’t sure of the sincerity of Shadowman’s red sock mask or old lady costume. The police all choke and stumble around – meanwhile next door, an old man grumpily makes his way over and opens the window for them, climbs slowly inside and proclaims “we’d better call the police,” set to comically energetic adventure music.

Ugo and Josephine:

Seraphin:

Meanwhile, Shadowman’s underground mad scientist has turned some guys into zombie slaves, who wander into the police station and assassinate the arrested butler. The police superintendent (Gert Frobe – Goldfinger himself, also a head policeman in Lang’s 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse) is troubled by all the murder and fake nephews and killer zombies, so nephew Paul goes off with his friends (Josephine Chaplin – Geraldine’s sister, also in Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales – and a crescent-moon-chinned “poet detective” named Seraphin) and devise a bunch of ill-fated plans.

A couple traps are set – first Seraphin is set as bait and when the chief bad girl (Gayle Hunnicutt, also in Scorpio with the real Alain Delon) gives chase, we get the inevitable Feuilladian Paris rooftop catsuit chase scene. I think two cops and an innocent bystander are killed, so the gang tries again, staging a treasure auction in association with Professor Petrie – another trap which also leads to heartbreak. In the aftermath when the treasure is revealed as fake, “I condemn Professor Petrie to death for his lack of scientific integrity” – funny that the actor playing Petrie is an actual Templar historian.

Where will Shadowman strike next? Does the Templar treasure even exist? Who was the knight who stood up in a secret ceremony to take the murdered Max’s place? Can we get some examples of Seraphin’s “poet detective” skills, please? Hopefully these questions will all be answered in the TV series version.

At first I was disappointed that it’s not Judex, just a color rehash, but I started to warm up to this movie’s own particular magic. Actors strike and hold poses. The music in the rooftop chase is dreamy and sublime, and the color has more 60’s charm than gritty 70’s fade. It has the dreamlike narrative incoherence of a Feuillade film, then snaps into what seems like an comic-book movie for ten-year-olds, then displays alarming violence at times. And the baddies seem to have hidden cameras everywhere a la Dr. Claw, yet the movie also displays the height of actual then-current technology – a Pong game.

by ·Comments Off on The Shout (1978, Jerzy Skolimowski)

Excited by Essential Killing, I thought I’d check out Skolimowski’s only horror film for SHOCKtober. But calling it horror is like calling Essential Killing a political drama, inadequately simple labels for such weird and complex movies. The bulk of this one is a flashback/story told by Alan Bates to Tim Curry while scorekeeping a cricket game at some kind of asylum. Bates admits that he’s changing parts of the story to keep it interesting for himself – and we’re never sure if he’s a patient or what, so the narrator is unreliable to say the least. And as the commentary notes, “casting Tim Curry as your sanity figure suggests that the world is fairly skewed.”

Alan Bates lurks:

A cowed-looking John Hurt (the year before Alien, so the earliest film I’ve seen of his – though I must find Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs from ’74), a church organist by day and electronic composer in his spare time, is happily married to Susannah York (star of Altman’s Images). But one day Alan Bates (Chabrol’s Dr. M, Julie Christie’s illicit lover in The Go-Between) appears, tampers with Hurt’s bicycle tire, then invites himself over. He stalks the couple causing minor mischief then starts not-so-subtly taking over the family.

John Hurt rocks out in his home studio:

Alan Bates, head of household:

To prove his power to Hurt, they go off to the dunes and Bates demonstrates “the terror shout,” taught to him by an aboriginal magician. Somehow Hurt isn’t killed by this, but has a weird experience where he’s holding a stone, believing himself to be the town shoemaker. When he returns home, his wife is under Bates’s spell, and Hurt is the interloper. But he recalls the identity stones, goes off and smashes them to regain control of his household. Back at the house, Bates is arrested for the murder of his children (to which he confessed to Hurt and York earlier). Strange that Bates would be anxious to tell a tale which ends in his own defeat.

You can’t understand the extreme greatness of this shot without watching the whole film:

The police foolishly come for Alan Bates:

Meanwhile back in the framing story, a thunderstorm wrecks the cricket game. Jim Broadbent, in his first film role as “fielder in cowpat,” runs around half-naked smeared in mud or worse. Lightning strikes the scoring box, Bates is killed, and in another odd scene which also played over the opening credits, York comes tearing into the room where the dead lay, distraught.

Fielder in cowpat:

Reminded me of The Last Wave in its aboriginal magic and weirdly apocalyptic feel. Commentary brings up Caligari, which I should’ve thought of. The wife isn’t much of a character, just passed between the two men, but she definitely shows her acting chops in one intense sexual scene. Mostly minimal music by “the two guys from Genesis you probably have forgotten.”

by ·Comments Off on Detour (1945, Edgar G. Ulmer)

A true low-budget “b movie” classic. Made by an indie studio with no-name stars, a rough, dirty-looking film print with short jumps and gaps, shown as part of Emory’s noir series. First Ulmer movie I’ve seen (unless watching The Amazing Transparent Man on Mystery Science Theater counts).

Tom Neal is kind of a pathetic character, a wannabe concert pianist playing a crappy New York restaurant with his sweetheart Sue singing – but she won’t marry him until one of them makes good, so she sets out for Hollywood. Later, Tom has failed to make his fortune, but decides to hitch-hike to L.A. to see his girl. He’s picked up by a slightly dangerous-seeming guy named Charlie, who lets Tom drive while he naps, apparently dying in his sleep. Or maybe he dies when Tom opens the door to see if he’s alright, and Charlie falls out of the car, knocking his head into a rock. Or maybe he’s not dead at all – either way, Tom panics, takes the man’s clothes, wallet and car, and carries on.

But Tom, the dummy, picks up a hitch-hiker who turns out to be severe control freak Ann Savage. She’s onto him, since Charlie had given her a ride in the same car, so she threatens to turn him in, gets him to rent them an apartment and buy her clothes and booze. In perhaps my favorite 40’s-noir death scene so far, one night he grabs the phone cord (I think it was to keep her from calling the cops) leading under her closed bedroom door and pulls with all his might, not knowing that the cord was looped around her neck. Now Tom is a two-time murderer, doesn’t want to bring his fugitive past into sweetie Sue’s life, so he hits the highway, stopping irritably in a diner (where Sturges regular Esther Howard is the waitress) to pause and recount his tale to us via voice-over.

Which leads to The Last Shot of Detour, the subject of a ten-page article by Morgan Fisher in Cinema Scope, which soon lost me when I realized it was a “close reading” of a one-minute piece of film, but after skimming a few pages I got interested again, in his discussion of strangely self-conscious moments in the movie that could only have been inserted on purpose. When watching the movie, the final shot made me laugh – Tom’s narrator voice tells us that one day on the road he’ll catch his final, fateful ride, and at that very moment the state patrol pulls up and takes him away. I hadn’t thought to consider it as a subjective shot, a flash-forward illustrating his thought, but without any cuts or visual cues that we’ve left the present.

Tom Neal, the non-brute lead of The Brute Man, was best known for beating the hell out of Franchot Tone in 1951 and killing his wife in 1965. Ann Savage memorably reappeared sixty-three years later in the great My Winnipeg. Detour was remade in the 1990’s with Tom Neal Jr.

D. Coursen:

Ulmer is actually taking several American fantasies (“going west,” looking to Hollywood for success and happiness, finding freedom and happiness on the open road) and performing unnatural acts on them, with devastating effects … Each ridiculous plot twist narrows his alternatives, increases his victimization, further emphasizes his lack of free will. In fact, the closest thing to a moment of freedom in the movie (though the character doesn’t perceive it as such) comes in the extraordinary sequence in which, working in the nightclub he professes to despise, he plays a brilliant, disjointed piano improvisation, shown largely through closeups of his crazily moving fingers.

by ·Comments Off on The Virgin Spring (1960, Ingmar Bergman)

On a Bergman kick lately, so I meant to watch this and Hour of the Wolf for SHOCKtober, but only made it to one. The beginning of Bergman’s extensive work with cinematographer Sven Nykist, brilliant looking but with less of the extreme blacks of Smiles of a Summer Night and The Magician. Supposedly this was stylistically influenced by Akira Kurosawa, after which Sven and Ingmar created their own style.

Pure and flowery Karin with dark, suspicious Ingeri:

Karin (Birgitta Pettersson, a housemaid in The Magician) is the beautiful daughter of Tore (Max Von Sydow, The Magician himself) and Mareta (Birgitta Valberg of Port of Call), sent to church to deliver candles one Sunday wearing her nicest dress. Pregnant dark-haired servant girl Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom of Winter Light) comes along. The parents are devout Christians (especially mom, who whips herself in atonement) but the girls aren’t – Ingeri prays to Odin and Karin seems to only care about being spoiled by her parents and looking pretty for boys. Along the way Karin flirts with a boy whom Ingeri knows, and the two flee from an icky bridge keeper.

Commentary says the raven represents Odin

The raven appears right after the old man at the bridge, an Odin supporter:

While Karin is alone she comes across a grotesque gang of acrobat goat-herdsmen brothers, and shares her lunch with them, but the two older ones chase then rape and kill her, while the youngest watches, afraid.

The herdsmen:

Karin, first realizing she’s in danger:

The brothers continue on their travels, ask refuge at Tore and Mareta’s house, and in private offer to sell Mareta a beautiful dress – the one Karin was wearing when she left that morning. So the parents already know Karin is in trouble, possibly dead, when Ingeri comes along and confirms it to Tore. “Kill me first. My guilt is greater than theirs. I willed it to happen. Ever since I became with child I’ve hated her. The very day I prayed for it, he did it. It was him and me, not the herdsmen.”

Sad parents:

Tore puts himself through a purification ritual, wrestles a tree to the ground, then waits for the brothers to awaken and kills them all (knife, fire, and throwing the young boy into the wall). Ingeri walks them to their daughter’s resting place. Mareta: “I loved her too much, Tore, more than God himself. When I saw how she favored you, I began to hate you. It is me God meant to punish by this. I bear the guilt.” When Karin’s head is moved, a spring bubbles up from the ground beneath it. Tore senses God is speaking to him, knows he went too far killing the boy, and swears to devote the rest of his life to building a church on that spot.

Von Sydow, out for blood:

Earlier when Ingeri is preparing sandwiches for Karin’s lunch, she puts a live toad between slices of bread, which falls out just before the murder. The DVD commentary: “in ancient scandinavian folklore, toads were thought to be the devil in disguise.”

The movie won an oscar (against Clouzot’s La Verite), but the American and French critics who’d been Bergman’s biggest champions trashed it. Bergman later said it should be regarded as an aberration in his work, and never made another film in an historical setting.

Tree wrestling:

A decade later Wes Craven took the same story and made reprehensible trash out of it with Last House on the Left.