Hour of the Wolf

Made immediately after Persona with the same two leads and the same cinematographer, Hour of the Wolf is the closest Bergman came to a horror film, and it has been quietly influencing the genre ever since. The American critics' bodies gave Bergman their directing award for it and Liv Ullmann their acting prize, in both cases shared with Shame, made the following year.

Johan Borg, a painter, has moved to the island of Baltrum with his wife Alma. He is not sleeping. He keeps a notebook of the visitors who appear to him in the small hours — the hour of the wolf, Bergman's title for the time between night and dawn when most people die and most are born. Alma reads it. Then the aristocrats from the castle across the island invite them to dinner, and the film's second half becomes a nightmare of social humiliation among people who may not exist. Sven Nykvist shot it in a high-contrast monochrome that goes almost white in the daylight scenes.

Bergman drew on his own night terrors and on an abandoned project about cannibals. The film's imagery — the woman who removes her face, the man walking on the ceiling — has been borrowed by everyone from David Lynch to Ari Aster. It is the strangest thing in the Bergman canon and, for a certain kind of viewer, the one that lodges deepest.