When I was seven years old, I saw Ingmar Bergman's Hour Of The Wolf (1968) on TV. I'd talked my parents into letting me stay up late for it, under the mistaken impression that it was an old werewolf movie.
Instead, I got 90 long minutes of weird Nordic gloom, enlivened by my first major screen sighting of nude female flesh - a long, mobile close-up that followed Max von Sydow's hand as it felt its way down Ingrid Thulin's naked, white, dead body. That shot, the texture of Ingrid's seemingly inert flesh, not to mention the fact that she sat up a moment later and began laughing hysterically, haunted me for years afterward, having, I'm sure, a major impact on my relationships with women. But, hey, enough of me and the contents of my cellar.
Vargtimmen (to give it its Swedish title) is one of the strangest films in Bergman's canon, in that it is essentially a horror movie. Painter Johan Borg (Max von Sydow) and his wife Alma (Liv Ullman) are living on a windswept and lonely island with only each other for company. Of course, this being Bergman, the couple's relationship is already rocked by sexual dysfunction and old jealousies, but when Johan begins to develop a terror of sleeping and starts meeting strange, possibly hallucinatory characters derived from his own art, you know things are looking bad for them. Events become increasingly chilling and surreal when Johan and Alma are invited for dinner by an aristocratic family of vampire-like beings living in a crumbling gothic castle...
Many of Bergman's usual themes and motifs are here - the line between creativity and madness, the relationship between artist and audience, the blurring of individuality and the device of isolating a tiny cast on an island and watching them go bonkers will be familiar to Bergman fans. If Hour Of The Wolf isn't in quite the same league as Bergman masterpieces like Through A Glass Darkly, it's still essential viewing, full of disturbing and surreal imagery and a growing sense of dread. Always the most rarely screened of the gloom-meister's films, the fact that it's now available on DVD is one reason to be cheerful in a bleak, scary and probably meaningless world.
Of course, mad artists have stalked through plenty of other European horror movies, but only Italy, land of fascism and absurdly expensive handbags, could have given us a film about a psychopathic fashion designer. Mario Bava's Hatchet For The Honeymoon (1969) is a wonderfully over-the-top giallo concerning John Harrington (Stephen Forsyth), a bridalwear couturier who just can't resist murdering his models. Although Harrington is a preening, narcissistic and impotent mummy's boy, you can't help identifying with him to some extent. With Oedipal anxieties flowing like blood from a jugular vein, accompanied by Sante Maria Romatelli's splendidly cheesy score, Hatchet For The Honeymoon is a treat from start to finish.
Hour Of The Wolf, MGM, £15.99
Hatchet For The Honeymoon, Anchor Bay, £14.99
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