In his “creepiest performances” video, Michael Emerson (Ben Linus on LOST) gives a nod to Max von Sydow and Ingmar Bergman:
Another great one is, if you watch Ingmar Bergman movies… Max von Sydow did a movie for Bergman called The Hour of the Wolf, where he plays a sort of standard tortured Swedish artist who just can’t stop killing young people. It’s kind of awful. —Michael Emerson
Most people don’t go looking to Ingmar Bergman for their “creepy fix.” But obviously they should—and Michael Emerson (almost apologetically) does. It would be hard to come up with a better pick. Hour of the Wolf, Bergman’s lone”horror” movie, practically defines “creepy.”
The film shows the disintegration of an artist’s mind as strange phenomena occur on the remote and isolated island he inhabits with his wife. We never know quite whether the phenomena are objective supernatural disturbances or subjective mental ones. (sound familiar?) But demonic figures (alternately referred to as “cannibals” and “ghosts”) do interact with the couple either objectively or subjectively, and seek to “claim” the man as their own—driving him toward murder and madness, and most likely to his own death.
Stephen King, obviously, ran with this concept in The Shining. But Stanley Kubrick’s film version of that novel relies on a visual style nearly opposite Bergman’s. Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel is full of light and color, a stunning contrast to the dark drama surrounding Jack Torrence.
Hour of the Wolf (shot by legendary cinematographer Sven Nykvist in black and white) uses chiaroscuro techniques to bring the faces of the characters out of the surrounding darkness (and to darken their faces when surrounded by light).
Not to belabor the point (such lighting has become so commonplace), but compare the shadows on Von Sydow’s face with the shadows often used to frame Emerson’s character, Ben Linus:
It’s easy, of course, to make superficial comparisons with LOST. After all, Bergman’s film is set on a remote island where we don’t always know what’s real and what’s not, while Von Sydow’s artist, Johan Borg, is almost always shot in partial shadow. But Hour of the Wolf is really more like what would happen if the unutterable humiliations found in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf were visited upon an insomniac already on the verge of a mental breakdown… and visited upon him by supernatural monsters. All I can say is that, psychologically, Bergman must have been having a pretty bad year.
As a filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman dealt with his personal anxieties and demons by turning them into movies. So Hour of the Wolf is not merely a brooding meditation on the theme of madness. It is actually a very personal film. Von Sydow is largely standing in for Bergman, who had himself suffered (and been hospitalized for) a significant mental breakdown only couple of years earlier. While Bergman grappled with the darkness, Von Sydow (a frequent Bergman actor) had been playing Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told, one of the last all-star biblical epics.
Okay, so now I’ll ‘fess up before I bore you with an endless stream of Bergman and Von Sydow trivia. I “found” Bergman during the requisite “post mortem” viewing of what I assumed would be a medicinal dose of just one or two of the director’s films. I’d been avoiding his work my entire adult life because of the whole “tortured Swedish artist” thing that Emerson mentions. But with his death, I decided it was time to see at least one Bergman film.
And so I saw The Seventh Seal. And then I watched Virgin Spring. And then I watched Wild Strawberries… and Persona… and Through a Glass Darkly... and Winter Light… and The Silence… and Shame… and Hour of the Wolf. I just couldn’t get enough. Bergman was nothing like what I expected. Yes, he was full-on arthouse and full-on tortured, but man was he compelling!
For me, finding Bergman was like a huge relief. Here was somebody making well-crafted movies that asked the big questions, and asked them honestly—not as a chance to pontificate but as an opportunity to explore. It was exciting to see films this courageous and probing—a cinema of ideas. And oddly, Bergman’s exploration of the darkness was not nihilistic, but often strangely hopeful.
But there’s not much hopefulness in Hour of the Wolf. The darkness of the title (the hour between night and dawn) permeates the fabric of the film. Von Sydow delivers a magnificently tormented performance as the doomed artist, and Liv Ullmann is spectacular in her part of the grief-stricken wife. You could say that this is a “creepy” favorite of mine. And I’m delighted to find that it’s also a favorite of Michael Emerson’s.
wargames 25th anniversary event
It was the coolest movie trailer in the summer of 1983. A robotic synthetic voice asked “SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?” as the words themselves spooled out across a computer screen. And a nearly unknown Matthew Broderick (character name: David Lightman) answered back: “How about ‘GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR’?”… unleashing a phantom Soviet missile attack and chaos inside of NORAD.
OMG!!! IT WAS AWESOME!!
Okay, so ordinary people didn’t scream Internet (or even mundane) slang in all-caps back then. Actually, nobody I knew had ever even been online… except maybe those guys who kept round-the-clock vigil inside the university computer lab and spoke amongst themselves in Elvish. But for the rest of us, David Lightman’s hack in to the ARPANET was our first entry into the world of hacking, personal computers, dial-up connections and extremely large floppy disks.
Young America packed the theaters, Roger Ebert gave the film a rousing thumbs-up, and computer science majors must have tripled that Fall after the summer movie Geekathon! Even a decade later, I got a special WarGames rush when I opened the back of a new PC, installed a 14.4 Kbps dial-up modem, and then dialed my first number, heard the handshake and logged in.
The movie rocked my world. So what did I think when I heard there would be a special 25th Anniversary big screen presentation? I was: 1)Thrilled. 2)Worried.
Worried? Yes. What if it didn’t hold up after all these years? I really hadn’t seen the film since Matthew Broderick (like us) was still a fresh-faced kid. And the technology involved could—you know—be called a little… old. I mean, the first Mac didn’t even come out until a year later. And now? In a single day, I can confront two unique virus threats to my work PC, conduct business by email with prospective magazine contributors located anywhere inside the English-speaking world, send an article typed from a prone position on my laptop to an online magazine that could be housed literally anywhere in close enough proximity to Earth, and practice lightsaber technique, Backgammon and advanced Sudoku on my iPhone. If you’re reading this, you are already online and can add your own litany of everyday computer marvels.
So how did this seminal and award-winning film hold up after all these years? Astoundingly well—and definitely worth a shout-out on its Silver Anniversary.
To celebrate the landmark, MGM Studios teamed up with Fathom Events to create a satellite broadcast airing Thursday, July 24 at 7:30 pm local time in select theaters nationwide. The theater selection, though, was fairly broad—at least in major markets. Virtually all of the multiplexes on the Virginia side of the Washington DC Metro Area offered tickets, including my local theater, where I had just seen this summer’s blockbuster, Dark Knight, a few days before.
The short feature preceding the main event contained standard made-for-DVD feature fare (film footage, on-the-set stills, interviews with major cast and crew) plus a look inside the real NORAD (the military command center featured in the film).
Did you ever see that Star Trek documentary in which LeVar Burton got folks at NASA and the scientific community to talk about the aspirational impact Star Trek had on their professional lives? That’s what the interviews with NORAD personnel were like. The interviewees adored WarGames, but were quick to point out the fantasy elements of the film in light of NORAD realities. For example, they didn’t even have full-color displays back in 1983. WarGames gave the folks at NORAD technology they could aspire to—though not (and never!) technology that could go around crucial human decision making.
After the short documentary (which I will just bet is on the 25th Anniversary DVD!), they rolled out the trailer for War Games: The Dead Code, set for straight-to-DVD release on Tuesday, July 29. The new movie does not continue the adventures of David Lightman (though the character list does include a “Dr. Stephen Falken,” the scientist who programmed the WOPR computer that wanted Lightman to play a game). Rather, the film is a cyberterror update, featuring a new fresh face wanting to play games with a seemingly benign piece of particularly pernicious code.
The warm-up over, WarGames itself finally hit the big screen for one special show. It was kind of like catching up with an old friend from 20 years ago. I couldn’t always see what was coming, but I remembered it when I saw it. Among the pleasant semi-surprises:
Instead:
Yes, of course, the movie also has elements that appear incredibly silly today. Network security is almost non-existent. A world-class computer scientist has a backdoor password into NORAD’s WOPR war-strategy computer that anybody who’s read his bio could hack. It’s easy today to laugh at such nonsense, but as far as I can tell present-day network security (and password) standards resulted from hacker exploits. It didn’t precede them.
One other point of amusement: all those great shifting lights on the WOPR computer? Those were controlled by a guy sitting inside the box, hooked up to the interface with an Apple II (that’s pre-Mac, for you young folks!).
All in all, the WarGames 25th Anniversary Event was well-executed and a great deal of fun. Too bad it wasn’t better advertised.
And just remember the next time you see some cinematic hacker unleash a bit of cyber-havoc… David Lightman may not have been the first-ever hacker on screen, but WarGames‘ breakout success did make “the hacker” a standard movie character type.