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Phantom Carriage (1921)
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This episode welcomes Kelly back to the podcast to discuss one of the earliest horror movies, 1921’s The Phantom Carriage. We discuss what makes this movie so impressive for its own time, and why we think it still holds up today. Kelly lays out some of the influence this movie has on later films, especially by her favorite director Ingmar Bergman. We particularly focus on Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, two Bergman films with obvious roots in The Phantom Carriage. Join us for a conversation about how facing death makes us reflect on life, on our actions, and on the people we want to be.
You can find Kelly on letterboxd at Kellyvk
**CORRECTION: When discussing the motif of playing chess with Death, Kelly attributes this to Britain, but meant to refer to the region of Brittany.
Intro Music: Body in the trunk by Victor_Natas -- https://freesound.org/s/717975/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
Outro Music: drum loop x5 by theoctopus559 -- https://freesound.org/s/622897/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
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Transcript
Introduction to 'What Haunts You'
00:00:00
Speaker
Somehow, i still find myself empathizing with this Sky. it does a great job of of creating that. And if someone's listening who hasn't seen the movie, that would be hard to imagine after everything that we just described.
00:00:14
Speaker
Oh.
00:00:38
Speaker
Welcome to What Haunts You, a podcast about the stories that haunt our dreams. I'm Carly, you can find me over on Instagram at whathauntsyoupod. And talking to me today, we have my friend Kelly, who's probably my biggest cinephile friend, I would say So welcome back.
00:00:55
Speaker
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk about another movie. If anyone is interested in more of my opinions on film, they can find me on Letterboxd.
00:01:06
Speaker
My username is Kelly VK, K-E-L-L-Y, as in Victor, K.
Deep Dive into 'The Phantom Carriage'
00:01:12
Speaker
ah We covered it follows last time. So if you haven't listened to that episode already,
00:01:17
Speaker
ah good one too and It was a really good one. you really you really like came to play with that one, which I really...
00:01:25
Speaker
but I love movies, so easy to talk about something you love. Fair enough, and hopefully that'll be kind of the same vibe today. So today, I'm so excited that you proposed this because this might have been a movie that I forgot about and never watched again. um Today we're going to be talking about the silent film The Phantom Carriage, which is maybe the first horror movie, kind of, right?
00:01:47
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. It's interesting if you think about the timing, right? So it came out in 1921. It's a Swedish film. It came out technically after the cabinet of Dr. Caligari, although at the time, Caligari wasn't able to be screened outside of Germany by a lot of countries because there were a lot of post-World War I restrictions on those. And so this may have been the first horror film that people saw outside you know outside of Germany. and it definitely has a lot of the tropes or help helped set up a lot of the tropes that you see in other films around the same time, right? I think close to the Phantom Carriage coming out, Håkson came out a year later, that's also Swedish.
00:02:33
Speaker
And Nosferatu came out a year later. So right around that advent of of silent horror. It's funny, I think that those are the only three silent films that I've watched, actually.
00:02:45
Speaker
Oh, man. Have you seen The Phantom of the Opera? The original? No, I haven't. I should. you should. Okay, I have to put that on my list. Yeah, yeah. and That was a few like a few years after this one, too.
00:02:57
Speaker
Okay, so before we get into, like, the nitty-gritty of it all, an experience that I had, I think when I was watching, I think it was when I saw Nosferatu the first time, was that I ended up watching, i like, found it online, whatever,
00:03:09
Speaker
And I ended up watching one that had the wrong score. And I like don't even really remember how I found that I've seen. I've since, you know, seen the seen the right one. But so I was looking up online to make sure that I was watching it with the original score.
00:03:22
Speaker
And I saw that in the Criterion collection, um like DVD and Blu-ray, they actually have two scores. They do. So as someone who loves this movie as much as you, I'm kind of curious, have you watched it with both? Like, do you have strong feelings about that?
00:03:38
Speaker
I have not watched the second one that's like an experimental score that's a little bit newer. So I do want to give that a watch at some point. I think that the score that the main criterion collection has, I think it was recorded in the 90s maybe. It's just really, really good.
00:03:57
Speaker
So, you know, I'll give the other one a chance at
Technical Innovations and Filmmaking Techniques
00:04:00
Speaker
some point, but I love the way that the strings um work in the in the score that's on that version. So... I don't know. Is that the version that you watched as well?
00:04:11
Speaker
Yeah, I watched the original one too. And I agree with you that like the score was phenomenal. I think that it was really... and music felt like very impactful for the scenes, I think. So it's hard to imagine...
00:04:23
Speaker
i guess I heard like a couple of clips of the other one, and it's hard it's hard to imagine an entire, particularly a silent movie, with that kind of a score, but I'm probably going to have to check it out at some point because I'm curious enough.
00:04:38
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. I'm curious too. So the big question, i think, is... why do you love this movie so much and why are we talking about it? like You know, I said, we want to do this again.
00:04:49
Speaker
You gave me a list and this was all of the whole list was good, but this is like a standout one that I don't think anyone else would have suggested to me, which is what I'm excited about. Yeah, I thought it would be fun to like,
00:05:01
Speaker
to go way back and do an early horror movie. I mean, i'd I'd love to also later in this discussion discuss, is it a horror movie? Like what genre really is this movie?
00:05:12
Speaker
But the the way that I discovered this movie is I was a huge Ingmar Bergman fan who has done a number of great movies that
Themes and Adaptation of 'The Phantom Carriage'
00:05:20
Speaker
we'll talk about a couple of them later. But Ingmar Bergman was significantly influenced by this film and by the director, Victor Sostrom.
00:05:30
Speaker
So Victor Sostrom was a very early Swedish director. By the time Bergman started making movies in the 40s, Sostrom was already a legend, had decades of filmmaking under his belt.
00:05:44
Speaker
Bergman said that he, by the time he died, he had watched this movie over 100 times. He was obsessed with it inspired his love of filmmaking, and he is constantly nodding it in his movies.
00:05:57
Speaker
And so that alone just got me curious about it. So i I watched it for the first time and I was really blown away. I think that silent films can be challenging to watch for modern viewers. And I think this does a really good job of keeping you engaged and telling the story visually rather than overly relying on title cards.
00:06:19
Speaker
So this movie has 132 title cards in total, um which is not very many for its runtime compared to others. um And only nine of those are expository. All of the rest are dialogue.
00:06:32
Speaker
So it really relies on... the visuals and the and the conversations between the characters to tell the story rather than telling you what's happening in text, which, like, I don't know if you've seen Vampyr that came out 11 years after this movie, but that movie is well-loved because of its mood and and its visuals, but I found parts of it almost unwatchable because it goes back and forth between telling you in text what is happening and then showing it to you and you're like oh my god like just show it to me don't need this and I think this film has much more more restraint and then uses visuals really powerfully um and it also just does some really amazing things with the filmmaking just really really cool visuals and
00:07:23
Speaker
Yeah, the effects are just like haunting and beautiful and really good, like good. Yeah. I mean, obviously we're sitting here, i was about to say 2024, that's not true. We're sitting here in 2025, right? You can look at it and be like, oh, that's literally just like double exposure, very simple, whatever.
00:07:43
Speaker
But it's first of all done really, really well. It's done convincingly and... In some moments, it kind of gives me the same feeling I get on like the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland. yeah But in a way that I, um and then at other times, I'm like, wow, this is really, really beautiful. And like almost maybe more beautiful than it would be if it looked quote unquote real as it probably would if someone made it today. Yeah.
00:08:08
Speaker
And I think, you know, it seems like there just are so many things overlaid over each other because there are so many different like ghostly figures and so many different levels of interaction happening.
00:08:19
Speaker
which I think is also one of the things that makes it so watchable compared to other, some other silent movies. And I think that another thing about it that works so well is it's so layered. Like it's flashbacks and flashbacks and flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks. And it's,
00:08:34
Speaker
it's you have to pay attention because if you look away for, like it's not a tight, like you can't have your phone out during this movie, you know what i mean? You look for 100 and you're like, what the fuck is happening? yeah the storytelling structure is really, really innovative. And then and and yeah, the ah multiple exposures on the film. I just want to quickly describe how they they had to do that because it's so mind blowing, right?
00:08:57
Speaker
um So they would first film the background scene. And then they would run that film back through the camera and have the ghostly characters usually on a black background, right, walking.
00:09:11
Speaker
And maybe they would need to use a black mask on top of the the lens, right? to block out certain parts, then they could overlay another layer. And every single time, they're literally feeding the film back through the camera again.
00:09:25
Speaker
like Optical printers weren't invented until I think the 30s or forty s which is where you know they could actually print layers on top of each other. So every every different layer here had to actually be filmed.
00:09:39
Speaker
and yeah And you're
Character Analysis and Impact
00:09:40
Speaker
risking like ruining that film and doing it wrong right like it it's there's little room for error and also it's the camera at this point is hand cranked so the person filming it right has to be very careful to get the speed the same way that they did on the um the original footage like it's it's amazing to think about and then you think about the fact they filmed this movie in three months Oh my gosh.
00:10:05
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. well um For the effects, right? Like highly precarious almost is like the word that comes to mind. But three months, I mean, i think about like old Hollywood and how that was often something that tried to be rushed through and like people would be shuffling from like one set to another on the same day.
00:10:22
Speaker
Yeah, they didn't have like as robust of a studio system in Sweden, but they did have have a studio. but This studio at the time was trying to shift from making more pictures to making higher prestige pictures and investing a little more time in them.
00:10:40
Speaker
But I think you know three months might have been normal at the time, but most movies weren't doing these kinds of effects and and this complex filmmaking.
00:10:51
Speaker
So I think it's pretty amazing. I think also the the script came together really quickly. The script was written in eight days. And Victor Sostrom also wrote the script. He's you know the director and the star of the movie.
00:11:04
Speaker
He wrote the script based on a novel, And his scripts would be very detailed in terms of describing the exact shots that he wanted and and and what he wanted it to look like. So so imagining writing that in eight days is just crazy.
00:11:18
Speaker
Well, and I think about how the writing would have to happen and then the rehearsing for such a precarious process of filming over existing film.
00:11:30
Speaker
the The level of rehearsal that that must have taken to get everything right and to be in the right spot and hitting the right marks. at the right times. I mean, it's, it's really, it's it's a really unbelievable production just overall. It is, it is. And and if this is your first foray into silent film or into films of that era era, it may not click at first just how amazing and how groundbreaking it is. It will feel more modern than you expect it to, I think.
00:11:57
Speaker
But you look at other movies from just a few years before that this, and it's like, I mean, they only had invented film ah couple decades before this, and the first feature-length film was only like a decade before this. So it's it's amazing.
00:12:18
Speaker
It's really amazing, and you have to imagine... You know, I know we will get into later, like, is this a horror film? Is this not a horror film? I'm sure anyone could who knows me can guess what I'm going to say. The thing that I
Supernatural Elements and Their Significance
00:12:30
Speaker
do keep thinking about is just how, like, earth-shattering it might have been to see these effects before your eyes at the time.
00:12:38
Speaker
Right? When, like, this was not... Nothing of, like, this caliber had really been done. yeah To even try to imagine putting myself in that situation where I've never really seen...
00:12:50
Speaker
anything like this before. yeah And how groundbreaking that would be, but also like how horrifying that would, that would have to be And it makes you think about like all of the other, you know, like in the date, like the earliest days of film, there were, and, and in photography, really like there were a lot of kind of weird things being done really, really early um in those processes. And so it's kind of interesting to, to think about how some of what was done in photos to kind of like grift, let's say, maybe, um would be kind of translated into this this like art form, right, that that has come to be and how different that would be for people. Yeah, yeah. One of the very first film innovators, Georges Méliès, was a magician, and and he, you know, used film...
00:13:39
Speaker
to do magic tricks that wouldn't be possible in real life and and he was all i think he was the first person to use double exposure also to to create this kind of ghostly effect like he would do the an effect of someone having their head cut off or someone disappearing and appearing in a new spot you know stepping out of his own body stuff like that but he he wasn't really doing feature films he was doing you know these like three minute four minute sequences just 20 years before this movie came out it was definitely exponential growth, like in a big way. Yeah.
00:14:12
Speaker
I guess let's like get into like more detail of the movie. I mean, the kind of general concept of being faced with death and then having to kind of relive maybe the worst times of your life, but not just the times where something was happening to you, but the times where you were the thing happening to other people. Yeah. Which I think is a particular type of reflection, right?
00:14:36
Speaker
yeah. yeah in In some ways, it you know it reminds me a lot of like a Christmas carol, right? Like going back and looking at your life, you're like, oh, I really screwed up. I feel like I should confess this as we are recording this, which is so of a piece with that in a way that I'm aware of. I've actually never seen that or read it.
00:14:55
Speaker
um So i I know the premise, so I know why they're why they're of a kind, but like i i don't know I don't know anything else about it. so ah Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's a similar...
00:15:08
Speaker
concept of someone who's really morally corrupt, right, going and being forced to face their past and the good times that they screwed up and with their own action actions, and also get a sense of what's left for them because of the way that they've they've screwed up. and And at the end, you have a moral shift and resolution with that character, and they get a chance to try to be better. so So in that basic outline, it's very similar.
00:15:36
Speaker
and know I'm like so tempted to ask you what you think about the ending, but I guess it's early it's early to do that. Yeah, let's get there when we get there. I wanted to quickly just ah highlight like liked the inspiration for this movie because I think it's pretty interesting.
00:15:52
Speaker
So it's based on a 1912 novel called Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness by Swedish author Selma Lagerloth. So Selma Laglerglof was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in literature in 1909.
00:16:07
Speaker
And she got a studio deal with a studio in Sweden for them to produce one adaptation of her works per year. And so Sostrom had previously adapted three.
00:16:18
Speaker
um he would write the screenplay and bring it to her and talk with her and see you know get her thoughts on it. but She was actually criticized for being too excited to have her books adapted for film. Like this would degrade the quality of her work.
00:16:30
Speaker
film was looked down upon at the time as an inferior medium. I wonder, too, if if any male authors were getting that kind of criticism,
Redemption and Hope in the Film
00:16:40
Speaker
right? I'm thinking that, too. I feel like it's that kind of tightrope walk of if she hadn't been very excited, they would have said she was not appreciative. And if she was visibly excited, they would be like, why like why are you so excited? What's wrong with you?
00:16:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's the curse of an ambitious woman. but But she was a fan of the director. She was a fan of Sjöström, and she liked having him adapt her works. Sjöström, beginning in 1912, made 26 films in four years, and and only a handful of those movies are still around, sadly. This one of only a ah few of his Swedish films that still exist.
00:17:19
Speaker
Have you seen all of them or are you like working your way through them? No, I haven't seen any of them except for this one, but I, but I have a list. And he also had a prolific career in Hollywood as well after he made this movie under the name of Victor Seastrom.
00:17:34
Speaker
Which is of course. right Got to emphasize the name. yeah But he he was the main character. The director, Viktor Sjöström, he also had been an actor since he was like 16. So he was, you know, hands in all the different aspects of filmmaking.
00:17:54
Speaker
The Swedish title, Kork Harlan, means the driver or the wagoner. So more refers to death's driver than the carriage itself. I like the name the phantom carriage. I think it's a cool translation that's not direct.
00:18:08
Speaker
I'm actually, I'm a little torn about the translation. i love, I do love the name. I loved the name like initially, but like the kind of ambiguity of it
Comparative Analysis with Bergman's Works
00:18:20
Speaker
just being called the driver or the wagoner that you might not, I mean, I don't know how whatever advertising for movies was like back then. But I do think that's like kind of interesting that you might show up and not have any idea of the,
00:18:33
Speaker
the ghostly phantom elements of it. Yeah, that's a great point. and and And it actually makes sense too, because there was, I think, a ah lot of censorship of supernatural content at that time for religious reasons, worry that it was corrupting or or whatever. So you know that may have been a way to get people in the door that wouldn't have seen it otherwise. I'm not i'm not sure. That's a great point.
00:18:58
Speaker
I'm always interested in the ways that and not just silent film, but I think even today, like the ways that mistranslation in subtitles too, not mistranslation, but maybe translation that like misses the nuance yeah of what's being, I'm always like very interested in how, what's lost in translation, literally. Yeah.
00:19:20
Speaker
Yeah, the translator faces a choice between being as close as possible to the text literally or being as close as possible in terms of the meaning. e So ah the the book itself is is based on an old British legend. So that so there this is an already kind of a I don't know, a mythology or a legend that existed in Britain was this idea of the last person to die on New Year's Eve becoming death's driver for the next year.
00:19:51
Speaker
Which is actually a horrifying concept, honestly. It is. had never heard of it prior to ah the movie, and i I was thinking about it, and then obviously in the context of the plot of the movie, I was like, wow,
00:20:05
Speaker
You have to do that all year and then you get there and you're like, oh, maybe my like buddy is going to take over for me and have to do this after me. and how kind of awful, like pretty awful enough that you're having to do it. And then you're like, oh, you might be next, my friend. That's kind of.
00:20:21
Speaker
but It is. It is scary. All right. So so we start on New Year's Eve. Right. Sister Edith is in her deathbed calling out for David Holm.
00:20:35
Speaker
like She has to speak with him before she dies. And I apologize for the anglicized names here. ah But... Better than the mispronunciations, that would be inevitable otherwise. yeah. So her two Salvation Army friends leave, right? The the woman goes to David's home, which is in ah in a slum.
00:20:58
Speaker
His children are asleep in bed. His wife's in the corner staring at the wall. Later, right, we learn that this is when his wife is deciding to kill her children and herself,
00:21:11
Speaker
So it makes that scene a lot darker in retrospect, even, you know, you don't really know why she's upset. And once you watch the movie through, like oh rough. yeah The wife, I think for me, like had the best performance in the entire movie.
00:21:28
Speaker
She's fantastic. her, I mean, i guess like face acting, right? Like, I just feel like she was so emotive and, you know, there were flashback scenes where everything was good and you you could like see the softness there, even though she wasn't, I don't want to say overacting, but like, you know, the way that silent films can be a little overacted because they're relying only on visual medium. She was really able to do it with subtlety, but also intensity that it was really, really cool. Yeah.
00:21:57
Speaker
Yeah, the acting is incredible. And then also the use of close-up um in a lot of shots is really helpful, I think, to highlight the human face. That was something that Bergman also used a ton of, is is a close-up on the human face. So you really get that nuance. And I think that at the time was not very common, to have those extreme close-ups.
00:22:18
Speaker
But yeah, she's she's excellent. And then we flipped to David Holm. There's no title card, but you immediately just know who he is, right?
00:22:28
Speaker
How he's framed. And he's drinking in a churchyard cemetery with his friends. So between the woman on her deathbed and the guy drinking in a cemetery, we're introduced.
00:22:40
Speaker
ah Death is everywhere, right, from from the very beginning. And he's telling his friends the story. This is the first of many flashbacks that we get. I think there's four stories.
00:22:51
Speaker
overall flashbacks, although there's layers to them. At least two New Year's Eve's ago, he's at a homeless shelter with his drinking buddies and his friend George tells them the legend of the Phantom Carriage.
00:23:05
Speaker
George, to me, here, when I was watching it, it made me think of this classic horror trope role, which is like the warning guy. don't go with first right like like the guy on Friday the 13th like this you know so it's funny to see that here in such an early example you know he basically sets up like hey y'all are fighting on New Year's Eve you really don't want to be fighting on New Year's Eve because if you die you're you're in trouble It's a crucial role.
00:23:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it is. It's great. It sets the the tone of suspense and discomfort early and the inevitable outcome that we're going to get. Right. And then we get the first couple of shots of the phantom carriage.
00:23:51
Speaker
These are really cool. It's it's silhouetted on a hill. And then you get the closeup of Death's driver sitting on the carriage. And then he arrives at this house and walks through the door, which is such a cool shot. oh well done.
00:24:07
Speaker
Like him disappearing through the door. it's Yeah, it's really well done. He disappears at the exact right time. They do the perspective perfectly. and we see this super gothic library interior and see the gun in the in the drawer of the desk, and you immediately know why the driver's there, right?
00:24:29
Speaker
a lot of the great visual storytelling here. The hooded figure walks in at the exact moment of suicide, and I think it creates this atmosphere of inevitable doom that that, you know, when the driver's showing up, he knows where to go. He's already there ready when the guy kills himself.
00:24:48
Speaker
Right. so why Yeah, yeah.
00:24:53
Speaker
i think that's like part of the kind of tragedy of the plight of the the wagoner, the driver, um right, isn't just the collection, but it's also the the powerless witnessing. Yes.
00:25:05
Speaker
And having to be, to be death while also being subjected to death over and over and over again. yes I guess for a year, but that would feel like a quite, quite a long year, I imagine.
00:25:18
Speaker
Horrifying, horrifying. And I wonder like if you actually think about how many people die every year and how many people die at the same time. like Are there multiple drivers?
00:25:30
Speaker
I actually had a similar thought because I was like, I feel like we stopped telling stories like this as we became more connected via distance, like as we had phones, the internet, like it becomes less feasible to even have a legend like this.
00:25:46
Speaker
And so then I was like, is it regional? Like where are the border like where are the borders? for the yeah I mean, it's kind of the Santa, it's like the Santa Claus dilemma, right? Yes. Everybody's house on the website. Exactly, exactly.
00:26:03
Speaker
um and we get, we get the next death from the the carriage driver. He drives over the sea. One of, oh, this, this sequence is so cool. Like, like how many layers here have to be involved and he's driving between the rocks on the ocean and then goes down underwater And underwater you have like seaweed in the foreground. Like it's so well done as he as he retrieves the dead sailor from the bottom of the sea.
00:26:31
Speaker
i think that's one of my favorite shots in the film. it's It's definitely... It's like in my top two, but like my other one is kind of silly and arbitrary. So I would say it was my favorite shot. It was definitely the most like striking and the most beautiful shot. It was just, I mean, not even just the one shot of him like taking the soul, but kind of the whole sequence of the carriage in the water.
00:26:53
Speaker
And I think. you are feeling sorry for this, this dead sailor, right? But you are also, i think, feeling very sorry for this death figure, for the wagoner having to do this, right? And having to kind of go into these, into people's homes, into isolated places, right? Like into all of these spaces and really see kind of like, again, right? Just death is everywhere. Absolutely.
00:27:19
Speaker
and This way made me laugh. So in silent movies of this era, they use the blue tint for nighttime yeah yeah and and the amber tint for inside lamplight kind of thing.
00:27:33
Speaker
One thing that's really notable about this movie was it did actually film outside at night. So the those scenes in the in the graveyard, in the cemetery, those were actually filmed at night.
00:27:45
Speaker
when they're walking around outside, those are actually filmed at night. And when you contrast this movie to Ignosferatu that came out the following year, it's very obvious the difference. I watched Ignosferatu a couple days ago cause i because I wanted to compare The two, and the nighttime scenes in Nosferatu are so obviously filmed in daylight, it's like almost painful at times. as As much as that movie is cool in other ways, the blue tint, but you can see the shadow of the of the carriage as it goes by or whatever, like it's very obviously...
00:28:22
Speaker
all the daylight cues everywhere. Whereas here, it's super dark and super moody, and it feels like nighttime. It's not just the blue tint.
00:28:34
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't know that, but I do remember thinking the scene, like the early scene of them drinking in the cemetery, like, wow, this looks, this looks really good. I was like, why does this look But that, I mean, that makes a lot of sense, right? It's, even when we're not, I think I can imagine watching Nosferatu immediately after this, you're also in that kind of comparative mode where you just watched this like really, really well done thing.
00:28:59
Speaker
But I think even when you're not paying as much attention and you're not maybe like consciously clocking things like shadows, you you still kind of have, it's it's almost like that uncanny valley type of a thing, but not with people. You're just like, something is not right. And I don't always know what it is, but I can tell that like something is not, my brain isn't buying a piece of this.
00:29:20
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I had to like consciously remind myself that I was watching something at night, like it would that it this was a nighttime scene because I i was like, oh, it's blue. Yeah. but Like, was like, you know, at at the time, that was normal cinematic language that people were used to, so it was probably easier for them to buy into it. But for us, that's just not how do night scenes like nighttime filming is very normal yeah and so it's not enough to just tint it blue but it was very difficult to do nighttime filming with the cameras that they had at the time so I can't blame them too much but I love that this movie goes over
00:29:59
Speaker
and and beyond with setting the mood and with using nighttime to full effect. That flashback ends, right? We find out George died ah year later on New Year's Eve.
00:30:12
Speaker
Hmm. I if that'll come up again.
00:30:19
Speaker
And then we get this sort of cross cutting between the churchyard and and edith over the next few minutes here like she's thinking about him or maybe there's this sort of psychic connection that that also is reminiscent of nosferatu um where there's cutting back and forth between the woman um and her husband when he's you know off being threatened by the vampire she's like sensing it over here or something and Obviously, it's not deliberate homage because this came out first.
00:30:49
Speaker
Maybe Nosferatu was modging this. I don't know. and I feel like that has come like become a bit of like a minor trope where that will happen, where there will be a transition from something bad happening to one character and then their friend, mother, or partner, whoever, like waking up from a nightmare along those lines where they're like, something is wrong.
00:31:10
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And this and that may be one of the first examples of that so idea. yeah So David gets into a fight with his friends.
00:31:22
Speaker
They think he's like bullshitting him or I don't remember exactly what starts the fight. Right. but the bell is tolling at the church. we don't We don't actually hear it, right, because it's silent, but you you can tell.
00:31:34
Speaker
and shows the clock. You know, they do enough visual cues you know what's going on. And right at the final stroke of the clock, he's whacked over the head with a bottle and he's down.
00:31:47
Speaker
And this is, we we can get more into the themes ah later, right? But alcohol is like a huge theme in this movie. And in the context that it came out, you know, it came out in the 1920s, temperance was a huge movement.
00:32:05
Speaker
The so Salvation Army was very involved in that movement, which is also very central here. It really has a um reefer madness kind of an element to it, right? Of like, if you drink with your friends, like you're going to kill you're going to kill one of them or or one of them will kill you, right? Yes. Kind of fear-mongering, cautionary tale kind of a feel to it.
00:32:28
Speaker
Yes, ah reefer madness is a great comparison. i had the exact same thought when I was watching it this time. It really is like like you touch the bottle and and things go downhill really fast.
00:32:43
Speaker
so Some people, when they watch this movie, they claim that David's actually imagining everything that happens um after he's hit on the bottle and he was just unconscious.
00:32:54
Speaker
I don't like that interpretation too much because I cause i like the the way that he kind of interacts with Sister Edith. That all being in his head doesn't really make a lot of sense. I don't know if you have strong thoughts on that either way.
00:33:08
Speaker
I certainly like the straightforward version where he actually just gets picked up by the fan. Like, i i I prefer that for myself, I think. Something I was thinking about through all of these films, these and then the Bergman ones, was that this is a story we keep telling over and over again of some sort of tragedy or life-altering something that just shakes everything up and really makes you step back, take inventory, really reflect.
00:33:39
Speaker
And I think that we do often put these stories in the context of death because I think that is ultimately the point of no return where you have you either do it now or you don't do it, right? that's That's kind of what it is. But if there's a lesson, the lesson isn't before you die, you should think about it. It's like, we shouldn't wait until we die to think about it. And I think that's a lesson we're still, we're still kind of learning as humans. yeah And so i do think that's like an interesting perspective, just in the sense that wouldn't it be night. And and again, i I do, I think for myself, I'm not accepting this like as like a headcanon, but I do think it's nice to imagine that maybe it wouldn't take dying for him to,
00:34:21
Speaker
go through this process of reckoning and go through this process of reflection and that maybe maybe it could happen without that level of tragedy, which it like often you know doesn't, which I think is why people come back to this motif and this story. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. Death death is that ultimate moment of finality where you can't go back from there. And there are all these stories of people having near death experiences and it changing their lives or having an overdose and and that being what, you know, sets them on a ah different path or something.
00:34:56
Speaker
Is that realistic from a psychology perspective or is that overstated? Do you think? Hmm. I do think it often takes pretty extreme things, but I don't think that it requires it.
00:35:07
Speaker
Something that I think does get talked about a lot, I think particularly in addiction spaces, is like this idea of rock bottom, right? Everybody's rock bottom is different, though. You know what I mean? And if you...
00:35:20
Speaker
I don't know if you have like any addicts close enough in your life or like you ever would have gone to like a 12 step meeting, but I've gone to some, some of that was for school. Some of that was for work. And some of that was with people that I know. yeah,
00:35:35
Speaker
you know, you hear people's stories and some people's rock bottoms don't sound so rock bottomy and some people's are horrible, like, ah like awful, awful, awful. And it's just like how you react to it.
00:35:47
Speaker
But one of the things that does get spoken of is kind of that when we go through terrible things, it kind of forces us to do this. And it's a little harder you sit in a comfortable place and say, let me really take out my microscope and get into this.
00:36:02
Speaker
And when people work the steps and I don't think everybody has to do like whatever people get sober, how they get sober. But when people work the steps, they do their moral inventory. That is like, what which is kind of what this film is, you know, before that was a thing. That's kind of what's happening here.
00:36:18
Speaker
That is like a big part of it. And I think that most of us don't do that. It's easy to ignore that kind of stuff when things feel comfortable and good and stable. And when we want to change our lives in a big way, we're more motivated to do that if things don't feel good and stable.
00:36:34
Speaker
Yeah. And then we're more likely to say, okay, if things have gotten so out of hand, what was my part in that? I think it is true, but I don't think it has to be true. It's just that a lot of us don't sit down and decide to do it.
00:36:48
Speaker
And it's thrust on some people. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, I think it's interesting, too. We'll get to this in just a second as we talk through the plot, but he he has an earlier moment where he has a rock bottom of sorts, but it's too late already in that moment rights for him to make the change that he needs to.
00:37:08
Speaker
So he he dies, we'll say. I think that's the best interpretation. um and And George shows up in the Phantom Carriage. Tragedy.
00:37:20
Speaker
Tragedy all around, honestly. Yeah. yeah ah This is another point of of commonality with the Christmas Carol because it's one of Scrooge's friends who passed away who comes to to tell him about the three ghosts that are going to visit him.
00:37:38
Speaker
It was too late for his friend. So so the the idea of your friend who was too late for being your sort of guide into this reflection is common between the two. Yeah.
00:37:50
Speaker
I don't know if the author had that in mind when she wrote it or not, because A Christmas Carol had already come out decades before this, or if it's a happy coincidence, but that's a point of similarity for sure.
00:38:03
Speaker
So they they go on off on the phantom carriage and straight to Sister Edith's back. um And she she's not ready to die. She says, you know, it's come too soon. And there's just one last person she needs to talk to before she dies. and And she begs for more time. and And I don't know. I don't think we actually said the two movies from Bergman that I asked you watch were Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal. Yeah.
00:38:31
Speaker
But this concept of bargaining with death is especially a big theme in The Seventh Seal. You know, there's there's a little bit of that also in Wild Strawberries, but much more literally in The Seventh Seal and in The Phantom Carriage.
00:38:47
Speaker
So she she she believes that she's caused great misfortune. somehow shes She's placing some of the blame for what's going on with David um herself. And she has this pure sort of love for David that I honestly find confusing.
00:39:02
Speaker
i think of all of the elements of the story, like this is the part where I feel the most surprised that the original story that this was based on was written by a woman. Because I find it very confusing. I mean, first of all, he's pretty terrible. I think people are redeemable, whatever. I'm not saying he should die.
00:39:19
Speaker
But he's pretty bad. He's a pretty bad guy And he knows that immediately. And there is kind of that, and this is jumping ahead a tiny bit, but there is that moment where she's like, I want you to stay here so that I can continue to challenge you or whatever whatever the line is.
00:39:37
Speaker
And it is, it's like, it feels so... It's hard to believe a woman wrote that, I think. yeah you What's interesting is in in the book, the book is a little bit different in terms of their relationship.
00:39:51
Speaker
It's actually a sort of soulmate romantic relationship between the two of them in the book. And the wife is is actually thrown under the bus. And here, Victor wanted the wife to have more dignity as the real victim. That kind of goes to the same kind of like purity vibes as the temperance.
00:40:11
Speaker
element, right, of, like, the wife inherently has to be the good woman, right? There's always got to be, like, kind of a good woman and a bad woman. i would say less bad in this one, but there's always kind of the one who ruined everything and the one who, like, got screwed over or something.
00:40:30
Speaker
yeah yeah, and in the book, I think the wife takes more of the blame for, like, abandoning him, even though that abandonment, obviously, is completely... understandable and justified and necessary for her safety as we will get to but I think that another way maybe to look at Edith's character within the film is i was thinking if if it's almost a codependent sort of view of of him. Like she wants to, shes she's in the Salvation Army because she wants to save souls, because she wants to convert people, because she wants to save them, she wants to improve them.
00:41:06
Speaker
And she wants to feel like she's done that for him. And he, as we'll get to has consistently rejected all of her attempts to try to to help him. And it it almost like makes makes her want it more.
00:41:22
Speaker
she she really turns him into a project. Exactly. it's i can i can fix him. Exactly. Exactly. yeah And I think that codependency, you know, gets very much into the alcohol piece of this whole story. i do think it's not the best encapsulation of alcohol issues I've ever seen, right? But it is very much there. It's very central. And I do think viewing her as this kind of codependent figure who really just wants to get in there and fix it and get in there and make it better and and be the person who changes this other person's life.
00:41:58
Speaker
It rings true. It rings true. And it it feels like that view of their relationship really bolsters the alcohol conversation in an interesting way. Yeah, yeah, that's a great point.
00:42:09
Speaker
probably A common dynamic with addiction of having having a partner. Well, she's not his partner, but you know having that person who who can't accept the fact that you're in addiction and and can't accept the fact that it's not their role or their job to fix it.
00:42:26
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Here's where we get into we start getting into the other flashbacks. So first, we see David at the very beginning, his family life and decline, right?
00:42:39
Speaker
The color tinting here is cool. i don't know if it's intentional or not, but when we flip back to him first picnicking with his family on the lawn, it has this pink rosy tint, and that made me think of like rose-tinted glasses a little bit in the way that we... like look back at the good times in the past.
00:43:01
Speaker
I don't know that it's intentional. There's other outdoor daylight scenes that have that rose sort of tinting. Maybe that was just the effect of the tint on outdoor scenes. I don't i don't know, but it works in my head canon.
00:43:15
Speaker
We get these sort of idyllic scenes with his family, ah scene that is replicated in both Wild Strawberries and the Seventh Seal, them picnicking and eating strawberries and in Sweden in a meadow.
00:43:28
Speaker
You're very nice, honestly, though. Like, I would love to, I wish that we could be sitting on a field in Sweden eating strawberries right now.
00:43:37
Speaker
It does sound nice. It does. This scene fades beautifully. Well, his family fades and he's in the same position and his friends fade in and they're getting drunk in the same field very quickly. Right. So so it kicks off his decline very quickly and it ties it very directly to alcohol.
00:43:59
Speaker
Yeah. His younger brother becomes ah drunk. He, you know, he comes into the family's house being mean to the kids, being a complete asshole. other end Yeah. yeah The wife takes him outside and oh, there's David laying face down in the street and she doesn't even seem surprised. It's like, this is, this is their life now.
00:44:21
Speaker
It gets to the point, right, where the now the brother has become a murderer. He's in jail. David sees him. And this is that moment where he has his first rock bottom moment and chance for redemption.
00:44:35
Speaker
and he he says he's going to change his ways. He's going to go find his wife. He's going to make things right. And he runs out of the jail cell and he runs up to see his wife and she's already gone.
00:44:46
Speaker
If he had just realized it earlier, maybe things would have been different. But yeah, I think that's sad that we see this first chance for him to get redemption, but but it's too late.
00:44:58
Speaker
It's not that, you know, dying was his only chance, but this one didn't work out, right? And he's quickly back to alcohol. and And that's probably common with addiction too, right? People expect everything to all of a sudden be okay when they stop drinking. And then the second something goes wrong again, they're back.
00:45:17
Speaker
Well, especially when you think about people today, but like more more than that, people back then who didn't, there were no resources for that, right? Everybody who was an alcoholic was a dry drunk when they were not drinking. Nobody was in recovery, right? Everyone was probably really white-knuckling it. And I think when you are white-knuckling it and you're not getting support, i mean, I think this is true with like any vice.
00:45:40
Speaker
If you're white-knuckling it and you're not getting any help and not getting any support, Like, what else are you supposed to do? not Not to excuse it, right? Not to say, oh, like, it's it's great and fine that he would go back to alcohol. But it's like, yeah, you get home and your whole family is gone. and like, you have nothing.
00:45:57
Speaker
You don't really have anyone who can provide you the type of support that you need. It's like, what like truly, what else are you supposed to do in that moment? But try to escape it somehow. Yeah, it's really sad.
00:46:08
Speaker
And I don't know exactly when he gets tuberculosis here. It may be between that flashback and the next flashback, but he's definitely sick by the time we get to the next flashback.
00:46:23
Speaker
Tuberculosis plays an interesting role here, too, because you know it's not the problems aren't just tied to alcohol. He also has this illness. another thing to bring him down to make him want to drink himself to death is that he's he's dying of, he's dying of consumption in in two ways.
00:46:43
Speaker
I think, yeah, I think it's another reason to kind of feel like giving up. And then I think also it's like a mirror to the drinking because he's careless about it, right? He's like coughing in people's face. He doesn't care about how he's affecting people. And I think that that's true of where he is with alcohol too, like he's not all that concerned about how that's affecting the people around him. So there's this kind of emphasis on carelessness and um almost like a like a bitterness and a malice towards the people around him that I think
00:47:16
Speaker
can happen to people when they're in a really dark place, right? where We're in a dark place. We're being really mean to ourselves. And when we're being really mean to ourselves, it gets real easy to be mean to other people. And then right, those people leave you because you're being awful to them. And then...
00:47:31
Speaker
you feel worse about yourself, you're meaner to yourself, you're meaner, right? He's he's really kind living. People want to isolate themselves from you for their safety. i think the the tuberculosis is a good metaphor for like the emotional damage that he's doing to the people around him and his own emotional pain.
00:47:51
Speaker
As we see like in the next episode, ah scene So then the next flashback is when he meets Sister Eda. He goes into the Salvation Army for somewhere to sleep for the night, and she mends his jacket.
00:48:06
Speaker
This is how she gets tuberculosis, because it's all over his jacket. And she's like, no, no, it's fine that, you know, our desanitizing machine or whatever is not working right now. Like, it'll be okay.
00:48:20
Speaker
she fixes his coat and he takes it and, and he like asks who mended it. And you think that, you know, he's going to actually thank her. She, she comes out like excited to be thanked and he just rips it back up again. So he has this extreme like resentment towards being helped and this desire to like cause other people pain and make them feel the way that he feels, I guess.
00:48:47
Speaker
Yeah. Sad. Sad. This is sad movie. is. It's a really sad movie. It's, I think, also one of those movies where you get to kind of view it how you want to view it. Like, you can view it and be like, wow, this guy's a dick.
00:49:02
Speaker
Fair. you You got me, right? like that's But it's also really, really evidently a tragedy, especially when you contextualize it in the time period and, like, what life was like and what people could do and couldn't do and access it's really sad. It's really, really sad to watch this person who clearly needs help and support just be devastatingly me.
00:49:28
Speaker
And not to say that Edith is a super pure motives, right? She's, she, I think does have this codependency and this need to be needed, but imagine like, right. I mean, like really, like even just right now, like if you handed me something and I just like ripped it up in front of your face, that's kind of an unbelievable thing to do.
00:49:47
Speaker
Oh, it's, yeah, it's horrible. It's horrible. And I and i think Codavan as she may be, I mean, I think it comes from a genuine place of of care and of wanting to help people. I think i think her faith is real. i think she she thinks she's really helping people.
00:50:02
Speaker
It's sad she's rejected. And I don't know she's an emotional masochist, but she...
00:50:09
Speaker
She will continue to try. so she asks him to to meet her again in one year's time. right This is a new another New Year's Eve that he's there.
00:50:22
Speaker
and And the use of New Year's Eve is interesting here because we talked about how it's this legend, right? But also New Year's is associated with a time to, like, start fresh, start new, set resolutions, get off on a good start, and for the year put but last year behind us, right? So it's very thematic, too, that it takes place around New Year's, I think.
00:50:44
Speaker
Something I was thinking about through this movie and the Bergman movies was... i mean, these movies, I think, are pretty Christian. So, like, there's a part of me watching that feels very, like, outside spectatory.
00:50:57
Speaker
But this one, especially because it was revolving around New Year's, had me thinking a lot about, like, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Because we have Rosh Hashanah. These are, like, some of the biggest Jewish holidays in the Jewish calendar, right? And we have Rosh Hashanah, which is the New Year. And then, like, right after that, we have Yom Kippur, which is basically this movie where you're like, what what fucked up shit did I do last year?
00:51:20
Speaker
Where have I let myself down and other people down, right? Where have I essentially like cast pieces of myself away from myself and like become a ah lesser version of me? And so I was thinking about that a lot during the movie because this is playing that out kind of without probably realizing it.
00:51:37
Speaker
Yeah, oh that's yeah, that's interesting. with a Christian perspective to not as tied to new year's idea of, you know, ah ah atonement for sin obviously is a huge, huge part of Christianity.
00:51:52
Speaker
Bergman was actually the son of a pastor, a Lutheran pastor, and he he had a very hard upbringing, very strict upbringing. He struggled to retain any kind of faith in God after his childhood, and and almost all of his movies deal with that in some way. All right, so it's funny to hear it described as Christian. It's definitely very influenced by Christianity, but it's not like a Christian perspective.
00:52:20
Speaker
Right. It's culturally Christian in a way that I think generally like a lot of horror movies tend to be. Yeah. And I think a lot of the time, even I think even today, right, how many people are creating these stories, not out of religious belief, but out of their experiences with religion and what it felt like to them and the impact that it left on them, maybe not in their belief, but in their psyche and the the stuff that gets its hooks in you when you're really raised that way. Yeah, absolutely.
00:52:49
Speaker
Here is probably out of all of them, right? This is the most just straight up Christian of the movie. I don't know much about Sjöström's personal beliefs. he He liked to let his movies speak for themselves. He didn't like to give interviews or talk about them. He would say like the artists should do their work and let the work be the work.
00:53:10
Speaker
But I mean, Sweden is an extremely Christian nation, or it was it even more so at the time. And the Salvation Army, obviously, a very Christian organization, although a controversial one at the time. The Salvation Army was a very teetotaling organization. You know, they required all of their members not to drink alcohol at all.
00:53:33
Speaker
Another aspect of that is they didn't do Holy Communion, which involves drinking a sip of wine. and so So this is one way in which they were extremely controversial.
00:53:46
Speaker
They really were a weird fringe sort of movement when they started. and they've gained popularity over time through social works, but their view of Christianity was very fringe when they first started.
00:54:00
Speaker
ah Very relevant to the sort of teetotaling of this movie. This next flashback is the reunion. The wife coincidentally, I think, ran away to the same town that he moved on to.
00:54:16
Speaker
You can imagine they're probably worth that. it was close by. I don't know. But they they're in this meeting hall, I guess, of the Salvation Army, and you see his his wife notice him, and she kind of hides off in the background.
00:54:35
Speaker
Edith finds David approaching a coughing woman in the back of the hall, who clearly also has TB, and he's like mocking her. because she's Yeah, she's trying to cover her cough, like, leave everyone alone. And he's like, why do you even care? Cough all over him.
00:54:51
Speaker
It's very cynical. It's very, fuck it. It's very, we're doing that anyway. Yeah, exactly. Like, why do we care what other people I'm going down here. You're coming. Yeah. He really wants other people to feel his misery. yeah Some people, when they have these overwhelming, intense emotions, it's not enough to just feel them. They have to like, feel like everyone else feels what they're going through. i don't, I don't know. He definitely has that need to spread his misery.
00:55:18
Speaker
I kind of almost wonder with people like that, if that's something about wanting to be just understood that they're not able to look at in a different way.
00:55:29
Speaker
right like I do wonder if if there's something under there where like if they were more able, willing, whatever it is, to reach out to express, like hey, like this is actually what it is like inside my head.
00:55:42
Speaker
Because they're trying to do that anyway. They're trying to get somebody to have a close enough experience that they can maybe know what's going on in his brain. And it's like, if you could talk. And that's such a, I guess, therapist-y thing of me to say. And talking doesn't fix everything for sure, but like talking is the thing that can make us feel seen and understood.
00:56:01
Speaker
And so it there are moments where you're like, if you could just tell someone how you felt and let them empathize with you. Would you like want to cough in your kids' faces when you have TB? Like what would it have done for him for someone to say like, hey, you seem to be in a lot of pain.
00:56:15
Speaker
What's going on for you? And that's no one's responsibility ultimately, right? But you can't help but wonder. Right, because as much as Edith reaches out to him and wants to help him, she has no understanding of what he's actually going through and what he's actually experiencing.
00:56:30
Speaker
And it's her naivety that leads her, right, to try to reunite the two of them after this meeting. That was so hard to watch. And I, you know, I always think about the statistics on domestic violence and how, you know, women are often like at the most risk of being killed by a partner right after they've left. Yes, it's extremely naive, extremely dangerous for her to just be like, oh, well, you guys are both here. You must want to see each other.
00:56:57
Speaker
Things will be better now, right? And in the scene, right before they do see... i mean, they've seen each other at the meeting hall, whatever. But, like, right before they're, like, really, truly reunited. And obviously that goes awfully.
00:57:10
Speaker
And this was one of the moments where I was like, wow, like, the person who's playing the wife is really good. She's wringing her hands. You know what I mean? She's fidgeting. She looks really scared and distressed. But also looks like she does not want to look scared and distressed. know what I mean? It's like you can just see...
00:57:27
Speaker
I know that I can't appear to be in distress when I see this person, but holy shit, I really am so scared. And it's just like written all over her. And it's it's hard. It's like hard to watch.
00:57:38
Speaker
You kind of know what's going to happen. and even if you don't know what's going to happen, you kind you kind of do. Because this is all about the harm this man has caused people. And you can see how scared she is. And you don't know, obviously, literally what's going to happen, but you know it's going to be a disaster. You know it's going to be something...
00:57:56
Speaker
that just hurts her more. you know, he's obviously clearly been through enough. Up until this point, I don't think we've actually seen any abuse depicted screen. We saw him in the gutter. We saw the way that the brother treated the family. It's it's more just so implied by her reaction, by her running away.
00:58:16
Speaker
And then we see this next sequence, which is the scariest in the film from like a real life perspective of him coming into the house, drunk again, violently banging on the door.
00:58:32
Speaker
He casts this looming shadow on the wall that loved. Yeah. Very creepy showing showing how threatening he is. He goes over, starts coughing in his kids' faces, trying to get them sick.
00:58:46
Speaker
He just wants to get revenge on his wife for leaving him at this point. And seemingly even his children. And his children. It seems like he thinks maybe a good way to punish his wife would be to get their children or hurt their children.
00:59:03
Speaker
Which is so scary. The willingness to essentially sacrifice his own kids for For revenge for something that ultimately he did. It's horrifying. She tries to run away and he flies into this rage and she locks him in the room and he grabs this axe and starts chopping the door.
00:59:26
Speaker
I love so much that you picked a movie that allows you to talk about Bergman and to talk about Stephen King for like a minute. Because I you know I had told you I had seen this movie before, but it was a long time ago and I didn't super remember it. This was one of the things that I remembered really well for obvious reasons.
00:59:44
Speaker
And it's just that really like aggro, so intense. He's hacking at the door with this hatchet. It's so bad to watch and it's crazy because I think about The Shining really kind of almost shot for shot duplicating the scene. I mean, there's one less kid, right? And they're in a bathroom. But go look at a YouTube video that compares them or whatever.
01:00:07
Speaker
It's interesting how effective as it it is without the sound. Because when I watched The Shining, I think the sound makes it more scary. But there was something about watching it helplessly. And you can't really tell how hard he's hitting things. But you can only imagine it's awful. And it's kind of like when they don't quite show the gore. And your brain makes it.
01:00:26
Speaker
way worse than it would have been probably on screen but with it's very chilling very unsettling and another similarity with the shining too is the alcoholism being a major theme right we don we don't have to break down the shining but that's a major theme that movie domestic violence alcohol and and yeah the specific scene um especially the movie, like The Shining.
01:00:53
Speaker
And i'm i'm I'm only going to stick with things that are overlap. I'm not going to go down whole raffle here. But it is kind of a similarly unsympathetic look at this person who's clearly struggling with addiction.
01:01:03
Speaker
It's not so nuanced about the person who is drinking. I would say this movie is like fairly nuanced about the people around him, but he's not given that same treatment. And I think that's true of the him and of Jack Torrance in The Shining, in the movie The Shining, where they're both kind of put on a platter and just like, here's this asshole.
01:01:24
Speaker
When you have to know that there's more to it than that, because nobody's just an asshole, but it's kind of is just presented in this really kind of black and white. Yeah, I mean, I think the one thing this movie has going for is it does offer a chance at redemption, right? Whereas The Shining...
01:01:39
Speaker
No such luck for Jack Dorrance.
01:01:46
Speaker
Especially in the movie. Especially in the movie. It's really bad. yeah He's frozen that state. Literally, literally frozen. Pun intended.
01:01:58
Speaker
So she collapses at his wife, right, at this point when he finally breaks through the door. and And you get the sense, this is the only thing that stops him from just straight up killing her is she's already collapses, kind of interrupts his whole flow.
01:02:11
Speaker
And you think maybe this is rock bottom finally, right? Maybe this is a moment. Because he he goes to get her some water and and you think that this is a sign of kindness maybe. she And she takes the water and then he says it wasn't so easy to run away this time.
01:02:28
Speaker
It's not about kindness, it's about control. And you think about that in the context of, again, the way domestic violence works and how there's these cycles, right, where like after blow up, there is that like kind of like honeymoon type, here are flowers, I'm so sorry, like whatever. So he's bringing the water and you're like, maybe they get a period of peace, but then it's like, no, he just wants the control.
01:02:50
Speaker
He feels obviously so powerless in every other respect, right? And he's powerless to the alcohol, and especially in society at that time, right Like, here is a person I have power over and can just kind of exert it however He is miserable. he hates his life. And having this control over her here gives him something because he he doesn't have much going for him at all, right?
01:03:11
Speaker
But at least he can control this poor woman, That scene is chilling, and and it at least this time when David's re-watching it, he has he has a breakthrough.
01:03:22
Speaker
So it takes being outside of that moment and watching it back for him to realize how awful he's been, which I think is often how it is for us when we screw up. in the moment we think that we're justified, we're not thinking through our actions, but like if we could go back and watch on videotape ourselves at our worst moments, I think a lot of us would have a wake-up call.
01:03:44
Speaker
No, I totally agree. I think that it's not okay to be violent, but if someone is upset enough to be violent, they're also upset enough to not really be able to reckon with their decision to be violent. They're not coming from a place of logic and reasoning.
01:03:58
Speaker
Yeah, but it's one of the first moments where you really kind of feel like maybe he's starting to see the problem, which is good on the one hand, but also like, God damn, like you had to chase your wife with an ax to realize that something was wrong. Not even to realize was wrong, had to like see it again. Right, because he was just out drinking with his friends in the cemetery. So he, you know, doing it wasn't enough.
01:04:23
Speaker
And I don't know and when he's out in that cemetery, like how long after that. moment and is it immediately after it it it might be right because she's making her plan at that time um so you have to assume it's pretty soon after and him telling her you know it wasn't so easy to run away this time yeah it makes a lot of sense even though obviously it's horrible and this is kind of weird but when he dies might that be the first moment he's been sober since that incident
01:04:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. In the universe of this movie where that is a thing, that he became a spirit, you do wonder, right, like, is that the first moment of lucidity that he's even had to...
01:05:07
Speaker
look at that incident without the filter of alcohol-induced rage. Yeah. Yeah, and i that's a great point, and I think that's more evidence for the fact that that he does die here, right? Like, being knocked unconscious while you're drunk is not going to result in the kind of realization that he has Yeah. Yeah.
01:05:30
Speaker
i would I would agree with that. i do think that's an interesting take, though. I do think it's an interesting take. But yes, no, I think I would agree with that, that that's like some more kind of points in favor of him having an actual, and altered state, but an altered state that and is kind of the least altered state he's had in so long, you know, that it's probably so different.
01:05:54
Speaker
This just occurred to me, but, you know, withdrawal from alcohol can kill you. It's like one of the things that like if you're an everyday drinker and you get like the DTs, you should like be actually in a hospital while you're stopping drinking because you'll you could really easily die. And we're taught that like if somebody comes in with really bad alcohol DTs, that's like the shaking and stuff, to treat it as a medical emergency because it is one.
01:06:19
Speaker
And so to go from daily drinking to a point where you have been sober long enough to have some amount of clarity is like a big period of time where there's a lot of opportunity for relapse and a lot of opportunity for other problems to come up in real life.
01:06:35
Speaker
But to imagine going from the drinking every day to like pure kind of unfiltered clarity of being dead like in a second is wild to think about.
01:06:47
Speaker
Yeah, not a chance that people get in real life. That's really interesting. So at this moment, right, he finally has his epiphany and he's able to reach through the the astral plane and touch her and swears that he'll be a good husband and and a good father.
01:07:09
Speaker
and so she's finally ready to die. and This is an interesting little religious moment, right? Because the driver says, but those who are to receive her will arrive shortly.
01:07:21
Speaker
Like, she's too good and pure to go death's carriage. She gets her own little send-up. And in in the book, apparently, you see angelic figures arrive in her room to take her away.
01:07:38
Speaker
I'm glad they didn't do that in the movie. I like that it's just a little bit more ambiguous. It lets you kind of fill it in yourself. Yeah, i like that for I like that for a book, but I have trouble imagining, especially back then, like how how they would translate that in a way that felt impactful.
01:07:54
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, agree. Something like the poltergeist spirits on the staircase kind of thing. I don't know how you do that with those effects back then. Yeah.
01:08:07
Speaker
We ah go now to the wife, right? We see the wife that she she wants to die. She's lost all hope. We see how that what she's putting in the tea. that she's She's planning on basically poisoning her children and herself. She doesn't want to leave them behind.
01:08:24
Speaker
and And David pleads with the the death driver stop them, but he responds he doesn't have any power over the living. and so then he appeals to God. Unlike what you'll see in any Bergman film, God responds yeah and allows him to return to his earthly bodies.
01:08:43
Speaker
But when we when he bursts in the room, like... The situation hasn't changed, right? His wife is terrified of him still. She can't trust him. and And I think this is where his acting, ah her acting's great in this scene. His acting, I think, has to do a lot of work to make this believable that he has actually had a change of heart because we've watched him just be horrible for an hour and a half.
01:09:06
Speaker
When she sees that that he's crying, she realizes that his pride has faded away and and and decides to forgive him. I love the line.
01:09:18
Speaker
Film basically directly delivers its message with this line, Lord, please let my soul come to maturity before it is reaped. And that gets back to what you were talking about earlier, right? The idea of like, like we hope it doesn't actually take death to become the person that we want to be.
01:09:37
Speaker
Because you think about what does it mean to you have a mature soul? i mean... this movie has like a Christian lens on this, right? But let's kind of step into more broad terms, right? Like what is our soul, but the thing in us that is the universe and everything. And like, like what are what are you and I connected through, right? Is like my soul to your soul, so to speak.
01:10:03
Speaker
So you have to think about like the maturity of a soul being so directly tied in with like what what you do and how you impact the world around you, the people around you, the places around you, like nature. How do you show up in this world that's so much bigger than you and try to leave it better than you found it and maybe try to clean up the mess you already made.
01:10:23
Speaker
Yeah. ah Achieving some sort of virtue or goodness while you still can. If you think of virtue as like a skill that you develop over the course of your life, like that hopefully you've. And I think. that Yeah, I do too And you hope that you've put in enough work that you have actually developed that skill by the time you leave the world.
01:10:49
Speaker
um And you're not leaving it the way that David would have left it had he not had this experience. So all that being said, how do you feel about the ending?
01:11:00
Speaker
Like, how do you feel about him getting a second chance? How do you feel about... like him returning to his family. I have mixed feelings. I like it, but I don't know that he deserves it, but i but I still want it because what this movie does really well is somehow I still find myself empathizing with Skye.
01:11:21
Speaker
It does a great job of of creating that, and if someone's listening who hasn't seen the movie, that would be hard to imagine after everything that we just described. We can do yeah time but but you really do want him to have another chance you don't want his wife to kill herself and their children you want the whole family to have another chance and i and it's a nice fantasy to imagine that that can happen here yeah is it realistic i mean i don't know
01:11:58
Speaker
ah It's hard to ask if it's realistic in the context of but him dying and coming back to life. Yes, yeah, yeah. That kind of change. I mean, could someone who is an abusive alcoholic um have a near-death experience and become better? what What kind of additional work does he need to do to actually be better in like a sustainable way? like The next time that something bad happens in his life,
01:12:27
Speaker
what's going to stop him from going back to alcohol and going back to his abusive behavior. Like, life is hard and it's not perfect. Sunshine and Roses, he's going to be challenged again. And so obviously, like, that sort of lasting change is not something that's explored here.
01:12:46
Speaker
But i I like to think that it's possible. yeah i think that's a really good way of looking at it. What about you? Do you like the ending? I feel pretty I feel like pretty similar to you and that i I want it for him. And i and I also can appreciate that, like, it's good to have these stories where things do end happily and you can just kind of take it at face value. I do have trouble doing that, I think.
01:13:14
Speaker
I think whenever I see an ending like this, it feels very, it just feels rushed, kind of like what you're saying, like like, what is the other work that has to follow this moment? And I would love, and I understand that this is just not what this movie was doing, but, like, I would love to see a similar movie, which will never happen now because no one no one would make a similar movie now, but I would love to see a similar movie with, like, with just a little bit of different pacing,
01:13:36
Speaker
especially for how long it was not that it's long by today's standard but it's an hour 45 I mean it's it's longish and I wish they would have given a little more time to like aftermath yeah what like what is he actually doing to be a good father and a good husband yeah or even like a flash forward five years and they're just happy and we don't even need to know what he did but clearly something worked right like but some indication where it doesn't feel where you don't have that feeling of like oh but like now what and I I will say i am kind of a sucker for a bleak ending. i don't know what that says about me. as
01:14:13
Speaker
So i do, I like balk a little at an ending like this, but I also, you like you were saying, like I also felt so sympathetic toward him. And I think ultimately this is why stories that have redemption arcs, this is this is loosely a redemption arc because we don't really see the nuances of it as much as we would want to. But I think one of the reasons that's so beneficial for us is because we're so quick to label people as good people or bad people in real life.
01:14:40
Speaker
And I think that the empathy that I feel towards him, I think is like, This sounds conceited, but I don't mean this just about me. But like I think that that makes me a better person. like I think I'm a better person for like having watched this movie and like looked at it that way. Yeah.
01:14:54
Speaker
And I think stories like this where you can either read it as he's an asshole and like you're still going to get the whole movie if you read it as just he's an asshole. like It's still going to make sense to you. But I think that when we challenge ourselves to look at these really aggressive, scary, dangerous figures and really allow ourselves...
01:15:12
Speaker
to open up to the idea that they're suffering. yeah I think that's a really powerful thing that any type of stories, be it book, film, anything, music, whatever, i think that's like something that is really cool that is provided for us because I think it's easier easier to practice that on something that's not real. Yeah, movies movies are ah empathy machines.
01:15:34
Speaker
the Totally. Yeah, yeah. I have a bleak ending for you. Here you go. he he's already dying of tuberculosis, so, like, maybe he gets... Maybe he gets one more a year of of actually being a good father and a good husband. That's true.
01:15:52
Speaker
Oh, I was, like, fast forward five years. I totally wasn't... They're all dead. like, the everybody's dying. But that actually... I mean, I think we can kind of, with this, transition a little bit into these other two movies, too, but...
01:16:08
Speaker
I said this when we were talking before we recorded, but I've been kind of going through my head of like, which of these three movies was my favorite. And I'm bouncing around every hour. But one of my favorite moments was when the guy was like painting in, this was in The Seventh Seal, and he's painting and and the other the other guy is kind of like...
01:16:27
Speaker
He says, why are you painting that? And the painter says, to remind people that they're going to die. and i was And i was thinking about i was thinking about that because I think about death all the time. I mean, not...
01:16:41
Speaker
in a way that feels super scary to me. Sometimes, sometimes certainly. I mean, and we have a lot of stuff going on in our world, whatever, but more also death like death practices and like what like what meaning does death give to lay? like I think about this stuff a lot, but I also think about how I made a podcast to talk about horror, which is something where people are constantly being killed or dying in tragic ways. And it is funny because it's like, why do we watch horror? And I think part of it is actually to remind us that we are going to die. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Keep that keep that in front a little bit, because certainly there's a point where that can be too far and you're riddled with, you know, death anxiety, which isn't ideal.
01:17:22
Speaker
But I think like also, similarly, right to this idea of I hope it doesn't take death for me to look back on my life critically and seriously. if I remember that I'm going to die all the time,
01:17:37
Speaker
I'm much more inclined to be like, I need to be constantly, and don't want to say vigilant because that sounds a little excessive. I can't think of the word that I want to use, but constantly aware and mindful, I guess. Yeah.
01:17:49
Speaker
My actions and like, and constantly kind of reassessing and, and trying to take in feedback and new information and, and just kind of keep moving forward.
01:18:00
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. If you remember that you're going to die, you can make the choices now. that you know David here makes afterwards right we don't we don't get second chances like in movies so forces you to think like think about you know this can happen to you at any time and what kind of life do you want to have lived and what are you doing right now to live that kind of life Yeah. And I think that's one of the threads of this whole kind of group of movies. And I also want to say one of the things that I love is like talking about.
01:18:38
Speaker
like families of movies and like movie lineage in the way that you wanted to with the Bergman movies and Phantom Carriage. So I'm very excited to yes these presented to me because i had seen the Phantom Carriage before a long time ago. It was also, I think, maybe the first silent film I watched, which was not a good call, which is probably also why I don't remember it so well ah from the first time. But now i've I've watched it twice getting ready for this.
01:19:00
Speaker
It's an extremely influential movie. And i know you were you were like, oh, wow, I gave you so much homework. But like, i love this kind of thing. I love to see the way that like humans take and repackage and chip away at and add things like I just love the way that we continue to make old things new again.
01:19:24
Speaker
Yeah, this is this is a great triple feature here because you have the phantom carriage that that deals with, you know, a ton of flashbacks and memories in the in the face of death and the consequences of our choices um and how we want to live our life.
01:19:41
Speaker
And Wild Strawberries, which is one of my favorite movies of all time, is all about getting older Looking back at your life and and longing for those times in your life where you felt like you were innocent and and you hadn't had these hardships and you hadn't screwed things up and and you had the world.
01:20:07
Speaker
ahead of you, and reconciling with that, and the fear of death, and the idea that, like, maybe even at that age, you you won't feel comfortable necessarily with death, or or with your life, and that's very scary, and and hard, and then you have um the seventh seal that's all about a society in the in the Black Plague where death is everywhere all the time
Existential Themes in Bergman's Films
01:20:34
Speaker
for everyone. It is not this, like, yeah, someday I'll die, and, you you know, I know a few people who have died. It's like everyone is dying everywhere, and this is really scary, and does this make you believe in God more because you need something to cling to, or does it make you believe in God less because you
01:20:52
Speaker
you have all this uncertainty around you and no matter how hard you try to ask God to talk to you and reassure you, there's nothing that responds to you. And so so this common thread, I think, thematically runs through all of these movies.
01:21:08
Speaker
And if you liked those, it's a common thread through most of Bergman's movies. I was thinking I should, I should work my, I know you're, you you've been wanting me to do that for like a long time. Um, but I, I do feel like this made me, um, yeah, and not that i not that I was even like reluctant, but I don't think I had like a fire lit under my butt to do it, so to speak. And I think this like lit that fire and I'm like, oh my goodness. Okay. I gotta like, I have to explore this more. And I just love movies that really make you think and really make you feel. I know that sounds very like
01:21:43
Speaker
Of course, like, that's what movies should do, right? But i I think movies that get in your brain a little and just, like, turn some screws. Yeah, yeah. And I think these do both.
01:21:56
Speaker
they They all do both, right? They all make you feel and they make you think. And they make you think about, like, yourself and other people. And, like, it's just... They're just very effective. Like, they're very effective. And I don't think, I don't mean this in a, like, way to criticize the movies individually, but I think they work together in a way that makes all of them more than the sum of their parts.
01:22:18
Speaker
I think all of them are totally good and, like, totally stand on their own two feet. But yes, like, there was something really, really cool about, like, walking through these. Yeah. and it was it was definitely really fun to see the level of influence. And like that's just always something that I find really fascinating.
01:22:37
Speaker
and the And the influence here right is very direct. right so Sjöström mentored Bergman when on when he first started working on film in Sweden.
01:22:48
Speaker
um They had, you know, several conversations as Bergman was just starting out as a new director. And of course, Jostrom is the star of Wild Strawberries and as a much older man.
01:23:01
Speaker
And so it's just such a cool thread to see this this film. from 20s, major influence on this director who made films from the 40s to the 2000s, and he gets to cast his inspiration as the star of his film about aging.
01:23:23
Speaker
It's really, really cool, and I think when I was watching all of them, but I think particularly when I was watching Wild Strawberries, I was thinking about there's a type of therapy that you do with like elderly folks. I think probably it would be good to do with people who maybe were terminally o um And it's actually, it's called reminiscence therapy.
01:23:45
Speaker
And it's just basically what it sounds like where you just kind of like walk through. i like to think of our brains as like, we we remember lots of things, but we kind of have like ah landmark memories that help us kind of identify time and shifts in ourselves or like our circumstances. Right. And so it It's basically these movies, but a little bit gentler, let's say And I was thinking about how good it can be for older folks to have an opportunity to really, really walk through their life with somebody who's just purely interested and engaged.
01:24:22
Speaker
And then I think about maybe that alone should be motivation to live in a way where that will be a pleasant experience for us to do when we are old, right? I want to have the type of experience as an old person or, you know, God forbid, like if I ever ill, whatever, like I would love to have the experience of being confronted with my past and, and being pretty okay with it.
01:24:46
Speaker
Yeah. You know I think, I think that's all anyone wants. Right. And so I think that even to imagine myself being confronted with the idea of being confronted with my life, right. Is really what we're talking about.
01:25:00
Speaker
And Yeah. that does feel really motivating to me. Like, it's interesting. These movies are all about death, but I i for sure walk away from them kind of feeling very alive and very, just like feeling very in my thoughts about why it matters that I'm alive and and what I need to do with that.
01:25:20
Speaker
So I love, I love that. I don't know. This has been awesome though. Yeah, it has. Wild Strawberries, i love that the young people in that movie are so, but you know, they look at,
01:25:36
Speaker
Sjostrom's character and they think you know he must have it all figured out he's old he must be so wise he's going to accept an a basically a lifetime achievement award um and and they're like you must know everything right and he's sitting there like I don't know anything and and I miss being young and so and and if you can take that those two in juxtaposition you can try to like You understand there is no point in your life necessarily where you're like, this is the right age.
01:26:08
Speaker
So like let me appreciate you know whatever it is about this age that I'm in right now. And i could die young, I could die very old, but but keeping that in mind think is an important part of of living a good life.
01:26:25
Speaker
You know, ah Wild Strawberries in Swedish, it it alludes to this expression, like an idiomatic expression of a a special idyllic place that holds nostalgia or somewhere that you feel safe and happy. That makes a lot of sense, especially thinking about them kind of visiting his...
01:26:44
Speaker
yeah It seems like a summer like a summer home from his childhood and like that being that place for him, right, where he has some difficult memories, certainly, but clearly there's a fondness with which he yeah remembers that time in his life, and so that's really that see lots of things get lost in translation and ah yeah yeah and then in the seventh seal there's a scene where they're eating wild strawberries in a field and it's it's so funny Bergman references himself in his other movie that he like both of these movies came out in the same year but yeah and then both of those scenes of course I think as I said earlier remind me of the the scene in the phantom carriage just is the only like good time in in David's life with his family um picnicking
01:27:30
Speaker
I'm so glad you watched all of them. Highly recommend everyone do the same thing. There's a bunch of other overlaps, right? You get this, in the seventh seal, you get this physical embodiment of death, very similar to the carriage driver, the black.
01:27:46
Speaker
cloak and the scythe. ah I think the characterization of Death is very funny in The Seventh Seal. He has a sort of sense of humor. um Yeah, he has a mischievous clown vibe to him.
01:28:02
Speaker
When he's sawing the tree and the guy is like, would I have a performance? He's like, cancelled on account of Death.
01:28:10
Speaker
It's like almost cheesy, but it's done too well to be cheesy. Yeah. Yeah, but I did love the idea of like playing chess with death. I had never, i understand that's like, This wasn't the first time that that was ever referenced anywhere, but that's like not something I had heard of. But my immediate reaction to the idea of playing chess with death is that like we are all doing that every single day of our lives, right? we yeah We're like eating this, not eating that, doing this, not doing that, taking these meds, stopping these meds, which makes perfect sense, right? That's not like a criticism of that behavior, but it is funny, like right? Isn't like life just one giant chess game with death?
01:28:46
Speaker
Yes. But we know we're going to lose. that's the that's like the real key of it, right? Is it's a chess game that we know we're gonna lose and we're playing de defense the entire time. yeah yeah. And that that idea came, like Bergman got that idea from a a medieval painting in a church that he saw. and and But that movie is what has made it like really iconic in pop culture. Like if you see it referenced in the show, which it, I mean, it's been referenced so many times, that's where they're pulling it from.
01:29:17
Speaker
But it's interesting because, he you know, the reason he wants to play test of death and and prolong... Like, he knows he'll go he's going to lose, but he wants to prolong it just so that he can do one meaningful thing before he dies.
01:29:29
Speaker
And it is very similar, right, to the phantom carriage idea of just wanting to let your soul mature before you die. There's always, like, something that you want to do before it's too late.
01:29:40
Speaker
But... They also, so Bergman and Sostrom both deal with a lot of themes of of religion, atonement, guilt and remorse, death. Ghosts and visions appear frequently in their work, you know, in the in the memory and wild strawberries.
01:29:58
Speaker
It's a dream, sorry, not a memory. there's There's a lot of both, right, in Wild Stravies. But the dream where there's literally a carriage driving like a hearse and the coffin falls out and the clock doesn't have hands on it, like all of that pretty direct reference.
01:30:14
Speaker
And that scene is also filmed filmed almost like a silent movie. like it's it's It's very weird and eerie. There's no sound or talking or anything until there's the screeching hearse sound, yeah which is very similar to the violins or the phantom carriage.
01:30:34
Speaker
But the phantom carriage didn't didn't just influence... Bergman. You know, we talked about The Shining already. yeah Charlie Chaplin actually said that this was the best movie ever made.
01:30:46
Speaker
He said, Victor Sostrom distinguishes himself with his finer feeling and better taste. He's the best director in the world, which is huge praise coming from Charlie Chaplin.
Influence and Cinematic Techniques
01:30:57
Speaker
Lost Highway by David Lynch homage is a shot from this which is it's the jail shot it's like framed almost identically i don't know if you've seen Lost Highway but no I haven't um i will have to yeah there's another like shot shot for shot comparison and then I also saw there's a a point where the wife or the mom
01:31:20
Speaker
leans over Edith's bed with her like hands up by her face. That's very similar to Dracula leaning over the woman's bed in the, in the Bela Lugosi. Yeah. It's very sinister. Yeah.
01:31:34
Speaker
Super sinister. I want to talk a little bit too about some of the other film techniques. Cause we talked a lot about the, we talked about the color tinting and we talked about shooting at night. We've talked about obviously the multiple exposures. Yeah.
01:31:49
Speaker
One thing that I thought was really cool in this watch is I noticed this this triangular composition that he uses where there's two people in the foreground having a conversation and there's another person in the background doing something else and it's off center. He does this multiple times.
01:32:03
Speaker
and i watched Citizen Kane a few weeks ago, and that setup is done frequently in that movie to impressive effect. And I was i was wondering like rewatching it, I was like, this has to have influenced that movie because of the way that the shots are set up is so similar. And then...
01:32:23
Speaker
He also does a lot of like panning around the scene and showing things at different angles, kind of breaking the 180 degree rule in film where, you know, early films especially were very much like set up as if it was a stage, you know, and and we can only be on this side the stage. And he breaks that Frequently. And then also the iris focus is what it's called, where you take the screen and you like black out, you know, large portions and just have a circle. i really i think that was used so well in this in this movie, especially like I really liked when that came into play.
01:33:02
Speaker
it just. Yeah, it's like so it feels so intense in such a fun way. Yeah, it's it has a great narrative effect because it ah uses it at times to show, you know, David's isolation from other people and his his loneliness.
01:33:18
Speaker
You know, it mirrors our own focus on the on the screen, um the way that he's kind of like self-oriented, think. Yeah, and I think it makes you really focus on people's face. I mean, we've we've talked about like the emphasis like more on more shots of people's faces, and I think the times where like you're really just not, there's nothing else to look at. So you're kind of confronted with what is going on for this person in front of me.
01:33:42
Speaker
Yeah, and it's not just and a normal close-up, but it's like, let's look at this one particular part of the screen. It's very cool. People don't really do that anymore.
01:33:53
Speaker
Funnily enough, in 1930, French film critic complained that this movie had not aged well due to the special effects. That's unbelievable. Yeah. But also couldn't imagine...
01:34:07
Speaker
I do wonder, though, like, is there kind of, because I feel that way about movies that are, like, fairly recent, and I kind of wonder if when it's closer and you're seeing the difference that five years can make or 10 years can make or 30 years can make, it's, like, I do wonder if that changes it. Because, like, this is now, and in a way that it probably wasn't when that critic said that, I feel like the way it is now is it's, like, in its own category of thing because it has become so old.
01:34:38
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Like at the time they're just, they're less than 10 years out. Right. So maybe multiple exposures fell out of favor as this effect for showing like supernatural ghosts or spirits or whatever. and And so they see that and it makes it feel very dated.
01:34:55
Speaker
yeah it's ah i was That's so funny. I was talking to, um we're redoing my like grandma's house right now. And I like was talking to my family about like my opinions about home decoration trends and how like they make your house look so dated so quickly because they come in and out of fashion so much compared to if you just like think about what you like and just go with that. And then it is kind of timeless in that way.
01:35:21
Speaker
And I feel like it's like a, it's like a similar thing here, right? Where they, i certainly they were working with like what they had, but they really, really did the best version of the thing that they were doing.
01:35:32
Speaker
yeah And, It doesn't matter if something else came into favor because they were doing the best version of this thing. yeah I agree. I think the way we appraise these movies now versus then is it takes a long time for you to know if a movie is going to be legendary. to yeah You can't tell that in a couple of years at all.
01:35:54
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the Citizen Kane was not really fully appreciated until like 20 years after it came out. ah they I heard recently that there's, so there's i don't know if you've seen that movie, but there's there's newsreel footage at the beginning that is very much supposed to mimic a newsreel of the particular time that it came out.
01:36:14
Speaker
And it aired a few years later in France than it did in the United States. And people were like, angry or like thought that like the oh the newsreel like it's so dated it's so like like are you why are you showing us this old movie which is so funny because it totally just provides you the context of the movie i don't know i can't remember what i was watching but i recently watched something in like espresso like the sabrina carpenter song espresso wasn't it and i was like wow in like 50 years people are gonna be like wow that movie is so of its time right like it but i don't even remember what it was but
01:36:52
Speaker
It's kind of that same type of thing, right? Where if you if you watch a movie and the song Espresso comes out, you know you know when that movie takes place. You don't know when that movie takes place. Unless they talk about it and make it something else, like you're going to be like, oh yeah, that was like this summer.
01:37:07
Speaker
but Yeah.
Genre Discussion: Horror and Existentialism
01:37:10
Speaker
So is this a horror movie? I think yes, but my general thesis is that lots of things that don't get called horror movies are horror movies. And they don't get called horror movies because horror is like a stigmatized genre.
01:37:22
Speaker
ah So to me, Phantom Karen absolutely a horror movie. Yeah. Yeah. I think both Wild Strawberries and Seven in the Steel have horror scenes.
01:37:33
Speaker
The dream sequence in Wild Strawberries, absolutely. Wild Strawberries, some of the dream sequence the dream sequences kind of felt like a little Twilight Zone-y to me. Oh yeah, yeah, definitely.
01:37:46
Speaker
Definitely. And but the Phantom Carriage, absolutely. I mean, I think there's a reason why it's been referenced like so clearly in different horror movies. I think it sets up a lot of tropes. It sets up a lot of mood.
01:37:59
Speaker
You know, it definitely isn't ah like evolved into the horror tropes that we see today. It's not scary in the way, like it doesn't have any jump scares. It doesn't have any big twists.
01:38:11
Speaker
But it forces us to think about something that's really scary. I feel like the mom poisoning the kids is a twist. That, to me, feels like... Oh, that's a great point. yeah drink that's like a I think that is literally... so like like That's a classic to me. And like this might even... all right Yeah, no, right? Because you see them in that scene, but you don't know that's happening.
01:38:31
Speaker
And then later, you're like, holy shit, she's about to kill herself and her children. like You're so right. that That is a great point. Yeah. It's not like a twist in the traditional way where it's been set up to be a different thing.
01:38:42
Speaker
it just like hasn't been set up as anything. And it's like introduced late, right? but Yeah, and I think I would say The Seventh Seal feels like horror because to me, anything that's like surreal and dark to me is horror because I'm horrified by it. Like I find like there are parts of it that just unsettle me in the way that I associate with horror so much. And like, they're not all like really kind of like objectively like horror kind of parts.
01:39:07
Speaker
Like it's just it's under my skin in a way that to me feels like horror. Yeah, no, that's that's a great point. I think ah horror is is such a broad genre that really includes a lot of other genres. Right.
01:39:23
Speaker
Depending on the movie, it can be a comedy, it can be a romance, it can be fantasy, it can be, you know... more like a thriller or anything between, you know, it's, it's, it's like saying sci-fi as a genre. Sci-fi sci-fi is, is a topic.
01:39:39
Speaker
Like, is it really a genre? you know It is, but it's, it's like, i have, I have to, i have now I'm going to have to think about if I feel this way about sci-fi and I probably do. But I like generally just like if someone tells me they don't like any horror movies, I'm inclined to not believe them. Like, I think they believe it. I don't think they're lying, but I think they're wrong because I do think what horror is what it's like fear, shock, disgust.
01:40:03
Speaker
Those are like, I think, like the definition Yeah. And I feel that way about a lot of movies that are not classified as horror. And I think that it is a genre, like it's it's a genre, I guess, but it's also just like so much its own thing that it's almost like saying I don't like Yeah.
01:40:20
Speaker
You know what i mean? And it's like, you might not love to sit down and watch TV all the time, but like, I'm sure there's been a show that you've really liked. Right. And so I, yeah. And I mean, I think that's like something that I have liked. My friends are often giving me opportunities to find horror movies that they will enjoy. Which is one of my favorite things to do is to kind of convince people that they do in fact like it.
01:40:42
Speaker
Because I don't think everybody likes to be scared, which is totally valid. Like, yeah I do think that would be true. I don't think everybody likes to be scared. But yeah first of all, that's super subjective anyway. All this is really subjective.
01:40:56
Speaker
Yeah, not not not it's not always scary. Like, the Phantom Carriage isn't scary. It's, like, kind of existentially scary, I guess, but it's not scary, like, boom, scary. Yeah, you're you're not going to have trouble, like, going to sleep at night, probably, after watching this movie. you will, because you will be thinking so much about, like, the implications of it, right? You might not be...
01:41:19
Speaker
True. You're not like looking around your room at the shadows, right? Like you might act. Yeah. Like, I don't know, the new Nosferatu, right? Like you might be kind of like, oh, like it's dark in my room and I love that right now. But you might be. And this is like would you go so far as to say this is related to the name of the podcast of like what haunts you?
01:41:39
Speaker
Because I would say like this is a movie that will like kind of haunt me, not necessarily in a bad way. but it is like it's one that I want to continually turn over in my head and like dissect.
01:41:50
Speaker
You're scared when you go to sleep, but not in a way that the nightlight will help. Yeah, which I think is ultimately the most kind of human fear. Death, I think, is is one of the scariest things there is, and and all three of these movies do a really great job of exploring that yeah one last uh horror connection for you uh max von seidel the knight in the seventh seal is the older priest in the exorcist that is so funny i thought he looked familiar and i couldn't place him and i was like i must just be wrong because that would be so random for me to have seen him in anything else that's really yeah that's a really
01:42:34
Speaker
Yeah, he he was in a lot of Bergman's movies, and then he did manage to actually transition over to Hollywood. Yeah. But was mostly typecast in these like religious roles. He does have that look. I mean, I get it. Yeah, yeah.
Conclusion and Future Themes
01:42:50
Speaker
I think that death is one of the scariest things. That's why we're always coming back to it. But I i think, in my mind, I think I find it, in equal measures, scary and comforting.
01:43:02
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that these movies are focused on the scary side, right? And the side of like of dying with all this regret and all this all this kind of pain. But yeah, like I said before, it it it it leaves kind of a weirdly positive taste in my mouth of like wanting to do right by myself and right by my understanding of the world.
01:43:26
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah.
01:43:48
Speaker
Thanks for listening to this episode of What Haunts You, a podcast about the stories that haunt our dreams. Thanks again so much to Kelly for bringing me this awesome set of movies.
01:43:59
Speaker
Remember, you can find Kelly on Letterboxd at KellyVK if you want to keep up with her and what she's watching. Kelly will absolutely be returning to discuss more movies with me in the future.
01:44:11
Speaker
We are already tossing around some ideas for what she'll bring in next.
01:44:16
Speaker
Our next episode is going to be the first episode of our series exploring horror through the decades and uncovering the political and social influences on the genre over time. We'll be starting with the Roaring Twenties and heading straight through the Thirties into the Great Depression, also covering the development of the Motion Picture Production Code, more commonly known as the Hays Code.
01:44:39
Speaker
I hope that this episode got you ready to dive further into some old movies. I'll be sure to include a list of the movies that I'm covering in the next episode in the episode description, in case you want to check them out before listening.
01:44:52
Speaker
I hope you enjoyed the episode, and in the spirit of acknowledging that life is really just a game of chess against death and that we always lose, go do something nice for someone today, or something nice for yourself.