HOUR OF THE WOLF (1968)

This is often described as Ingmar Bergman's only horror movie. That, I think, is overstating the influence of the atmosphere. More to the point, it's a psychological thriller—not a Bergman rarity—with some horror imagery. The story of the disappearance of the troubled artist Johan Borg (Max von Sydow) is told in flashback directly to the camera by his pregnant wife Alma (Liv Ullmann). The two came to a small Swedish island to spend the summer in an isolated rustic cabin. Johan is moody but still finds artistic inspiration from the seaside landscapes. But he begins to tell Alma about his strange encounters with villagers, including a birdman and a woman who takes off her face when she takes off her hat. As Johan's behavior becomes odder, an older woman in a hat visits and tell Alma to read Johan's diary which is filled with not only his fantastic characters (who may or may not be real) but also with guilty references to his former lover, an actress named Veronica Vogler (Ingrid Thulin). A baron who owns land on the island invites Johan and Alma to a dinner party which becomes a rather gloomy and Gothic affair. We see a puppet theater presentation which seems to feature an actual miniature person, and one discussion topic is the "hour of the wolf," between 3 and 5 a.m. when according to folklore, the most deaths and most births occur. The climax of the evening is when the baron shows Johan that he has the painting that Johan did of Veronica, his former lover, hanging in his bedroom. The next day, Johan shows Alma claw marks on his neck, and relates the story of how a prepubescent boy showed up on the rocky shore while Johan was painting. In what might be real or might be fantasy, we see the boy bite Johan, after which Johan kills him by smashing his head in with a rock. From here, Johan plummets into possibly psychotic behavior, shooting and wounding his wife, and returning to the castle where horrors, including the naked (and possibly dead) Veronica, await. In the end, as we've known from the beginning, Johan runs off into the woods, never to be seen again. 

I feel like if you asked an AI program to produce a script for a Bergman horror movie, this is what it would present to you. The horror is mostly in the nightmare-like imagery (a man walks up a wall, then across a ceiling; that old woman in the hat does eventually take off her hat and her face) done to show the falling apart of Johan, and it's on the level of the visual that the movie works best. In terms of narrative, however, the pickings are slim. Aside from finding out about Johan's former mistress, we know practically nothing about him or Alma, and we have to take for granted that they were a relatively settled couple before they arrived on the island. Searching for meaning here is ultimately fruitless, unless one looks on this as a personal search by Bergman—apparently much of the imagery came from his own dreams. Sydow and Ullman are, of course, quite good, and hold the screen even when the narrative does not. In the end, you can decide one of two things: either there is a lot to process here, or there's not much at all to process except the visuals. [DVD]