Well, just as I’m about the start writing on Michael Emerson’s third creepy character (Max von Sydow in Hour of the Wolf), and Emerson goes and gets himself nominated for an Emmy!
His reaction to the nomination is just priceless!
Here is Ben’s reaction to Alex’s murder in “The Shape of Things To Come” (the episode that got everybody buzzing about Emerson’s Emmy chances):
Congratulations, Mr. Emerson! The nomination is well-earned!
In his EW video on the creepiest performances of all time, Michael Emerson (Ben Linus on LOST) reveals that Sidney Greenstreet creeps him out:
Another über creepy performance, I think, is Sidney Greenstreet’s in The Maltese Falcon. He’s one of those characters who’s so civilized on the surface, and yet you hope you’re never left in a room alone with him.—Michael Emerson
Well, that’s one performance I didn’t see coming! Greenstreet’s character, Kaspar Gutman (a.k.a. “The Fatman”), is probably the most affable character in The Maltese Falcon. But of course, as Emerson points out, it’s all surface. Below the surface, Gutman has no compunction about having his henchman bump off people who get in the way of his objective—just as he has no compunction about selling out his henchman to the police only a moment after claiming that the young man is “like a son” to him.
What I find odd is that Emerson honed in on Gutman when there are really so many creepy characters in The Maltese Falcon to choose from. How about that leering lech of a partner who gets himself killed by the crafty dame? How about the effete crook who offers Bogart’s detective $5000 for the return of the bird? How about the dame herself who plays schoolgirl innocent while concocting murder?
When I see this movie, my money for creepy is on the femme fatale—the dame. She is a serial confabulationist who the second she gets caught in one lie starts creating a new one without missing a beat. By the end of the film, we’re not certain that anything she’s said is true. She seems as substantial (or insubstantial) as Keyser Söze.
Yes, Gutman is a sociopath (like so many of Emerson’s choices). But I still find it curious that Emerson finds the disjunction between civilized surface and murderous interior so über creepy. Is this one of those factors that Emerson brings to his own creation of Ben Linus—a character who appears so civilized on the outside but who helped The Hostiles annihilate the Dharma Initiative (the community he grew up in) and personally killed his father as part of that purge, seemingly without a second thought?
(This is putting aside, of course, the fact that we still don’t know the whole story of the Dharma Initiative, why they couldn’t get along with The Hostiles, how/why the purge occurred, or Ben’s complete role in that event. What we do know is that Emerson played Ben throughout Season 3 of LOST as a hyper-civilized sociopath—an interpretation that reached its pinnacle in “The Man Behind the Curtain” episode’s flashback to the purge.)
So allow me to speculate that perhaps Michael Emerson’s unease with Kaspar Gutman is one of those factors that he draws on (consciously or unconsciously) to make us uneasy with Ben Linus. After all, an actor can find inspiration in the strangest places. It’s well known that Anthony Hopkins’ characterization of Hannibal Lecter was inspired in part by HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey!
Speaking of which, let me add that the “off-the-grid” choice of Sidney Greenstreet tells you everything you need to know about why Michael Emerson is qualified to play creepy… and why I’m not. I would have gone for a perfectly obvious creepy performance and probably selected Hannibal Lecter for this slot. Emerson’s choice, on the other hand, is so unexpected that it’s inspired.
Yesterday, I published the first installment of “Michael Emerson’s 5 Creepiest Characters of All Time.” I just want everyone to know that I plan to publish the other four installments within the next couple of weeks.
Right now, I’m waiting for that little red envelope to bring Emerson’s next favorite creepy performance to my doorstep.
Since I’m taking the movies in the order Emerson lists them, you can see for yourself just what’s in that little red envelope. It’s not a performance I would have thought of. But then, I don’t ever have to look for inspiration on how to play creepy…
I’ll have the envelope tomorrow. Should be fun!
“Creepy” is the first word viewers use to describe Ben Linus, former leader of The Others on LOST. Some time back, Entertainment Weekly got Michael Emerson, the actor who plays Ben, to reveal who he credits with giving the 5 creepiest performance in film and television history. EW later posted the video on YouTube.
So who creeps Michael Emerson out? First up is Max Schreck in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.
I don’t think that anyone that’s even seen a still from that movie can argue with him being something really horrifying.
—Michael Emerson
I saw Nosferatu for the first time when I was in college. It was during a fundraiser for the Dallas PBS station, KERA—the same station that first brought Monty Python to the U.S. (as they were fond of telling us whenever they wanted us to open up our wallets).
On that Saturday night, KERA played a double vampire feature, starting with the 1974 BBC Dracula starring Louis Jourdan. It floored me. Jourdan’s Dracula was so handsome, so sexy, yet so dangerous. Not to mention that the production, unlike all the others I’d seen, was largely faithful to the Bram Stoker novel.
But the Jourdan Dracula was not to be the evening’s big event. KERA was saving its “special” vampire feature for the wee hours: the 1922 German silent movie that kicked off the whole cinematic vampire trend. Nosferatu. At that time, 30 years ago, it was largely unavailable and infrequently seen.
Directed by F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu adapted Bram Stoker’s Dracula, playing up the creepy and eerie qualities of the tale. Alfred Hitchcock, who learned about storyboarding from Murnau during a 1924 assignment in Berlin, regarded Murnau as the master of “pure cinema”—i.e. visual, rather than strictly narrative, storytelling.
But regardless of Murnau’s credentials or Nosferatu’s place in vampire movie history, I frankly didn’t know what to make of it. It wasn’t really what I would call a “scary” film. It didn’t have any sudden shocks or screams, no blood or gore. Instead, it slowly unfolded its eerie atmosphere and mounting sense of doom.
I had no framework for it. Most vampire movies since the 1930s played up the vampire’s romantic, or at least sexual, angle. Bela Lugosi’s Dracula seduced victims with physical beauty, magnetism, and charm. Christopher Lee’s Dracula overpowered them with a hypnotic quality coupled with a sexually charged animalistic ferocity. But this?
Nosferatu’s Count Orlok was animalistic all right… but in a repulsive, rodentlike way. He had long claws for fingernails, pointed ears, a bald head, sunken eyes, and fangs replacing his incisors rather than his canine teeth. He looked like a giant rat—and not surprisingly, rats accompanied his coffin. Here there was no romance, no sexuality. Just an instinct-driven thirst for blood.
This was hardly my first silent movie—or even my first German expressionist one. In fact, I already regarded The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as one of my favorite films. I think the confusion I experienced that night over Nosferatu came from the sheer shock of it. I had loved cinematic vampires since I was a kid, and this movie subverted everything I thought I knew about them. It was a little much to handle at the time.
It did leave an impression though. Once the initial shock wore off, the brilliance of Murnau’s “Symphony of Horror” became clearer. For years afterward, I remembered the repulsiveness of the vampire. But most of all, I remembered the shadow his long fingernails cast on the wall as he crept slowly through the house towards his victim. Nearly 65 years later, long ripping nails would become a staple of the hopping Chinese vampire movies.
All in all, Michael Emerson’s choice of Max Schreck in Nosferatu is an excellent place to begin any discussion of creepy characters. The role is so legendarily creepy that it inspired the Oscar-nominated movie Shadow of the Vampire to postulate that only an actual vampire could have pulled it off. Ergo, Max Schreck could be nothing other than a real vampire playing the cinematic role of vampire!
michael emerson’s 5 creepiest characters of all time:
hour of the wolf
In his “creepiest performances” video, Michael Emerson (Ben Linus on LOST) gives a nod to Max von Sydow and Ingmar Bergman:
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.
This article first appeard on Blogcritics.
It has also appeared on the LOST site Room 23.
BTW, if you want to get a sense of the film, you can find the American trailer here. It does contain partial upper nudity.