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.
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 o
f the Wolf (shot by leg
endary 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 (see below).
It's e
asy, of course, to make superficial comparisons with Lost. Afte
r 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.
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