The Duck Speaks

Before I dive in, thanks must be paid to Marxo Grouch, Smokey X. Digger, and Cliffie from the BMMB. Their thoughts were invaluable in helping me clarify my own, and for setting the tone of this review. Those interested in reading more from these fine folks should make haste to their websites- also, for your convenience, I’ve put Marxo’s comments at the bottom of the page.

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The Virgin Spring, directed by Ingmar Bergman
Once upon a time, there was a prosperous farmer and his wife. They had a beautiful daughter, Karin, who they loved above all other things. One day, the father sent his daughter to the church through the woods with virgin candles to deliver. Ingeri, the foundling woman, goes too, but when the two women arrive at the outskirts of the wood, Ingeri remained behind, claiming she was too frightened to go on. She was very jealous of Karin, who was spoiled beyond all reason by her parents, and thought that by sending the younger girl through the forest alone, some harm would come to her.

Harm does come, in the form of three shepherds claiming to be brothers (two adults, one boy), who after breaking bread with the girl, raped and murdered her. The brothers stole Karin’s dress and bags, and ran off through the woods, eventually finding their way to the farmer’s house. They ask for shelter for the night, and are welcomed inside; but when one of them tries to sell Karin’s stolen dress to her mother, the welcome turns deadly…

I don’t mind admitting, reviewing a Bergman film makes me nervous. I am severely under qualified for this sort of thing, having never taken a film class or even read a book of theory in my life, and while this would never keeping me from watching a movie, it gives me the unpleasant feeling that anything I say is, well, wrong. Or else so many people have said it before that my words are entirely gratuitous.

You’ll notice this doesn’t prevent me from writing a review. It just gives me a convenient way of stalling.

The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukallan in its native language) is based on a 14 century folk tale, a simple story of the human capacity for violence, murder, and guilt, played across the breathtaking scenery of the Swedish countryside. In the hands of a lesser director, you would be assured that the moral would be writ in large letters from the opening credits, probably in some sort of neon-blood-font. Characters would be less people than symbols to be manipulated in order to make a point, and any doubt of that point in the audience would be due more to a failure of nerve on the part of the director than any artistic choice.

What makes this film such an amazing, powerful experience, beyond the gorgeous camera work and terrific performances, is Bergman’s commitment to telling a story with all the ambiguity and uncertainty of actual life. The brothers are not pure villains. Only one of the men is allowed the dignity of speech; the other adult had his tongue removed and communicates by growling, while the youngest brother never opens his mouth. Their scenes with Karin inspire a perfect balance of fear and pity, and when they finally attack the young girl, the action is as desperate as it is inevitable. The actual murder is not even planned; the girl starts to walk away, and the mute shepherd snaps, grabs a log, and strikes her once on the head, killing her with a blow. The men share a moment of shock, but when it passes they immediately go to ransacking Karin’s bags and stealing her clothes. These are men driven to desperation, with no clear understanding of the consequences of their actions,

Also worth noting for its complexity is the depiction of the victim. We first hear about her through her parents; the girl hasn’t gotten out of bed with everyone else, claiming to be sick, even though she was dancing the night before. We get a sense right off that she is greatly loved by the family, and indulged on her almost every whim. This becomes even clearer when Mareta, her mother (Birgetta Valberg), goes in to wake the child. Mareta is very much aware of her inability to be harsh to her daughter, and bemoans it constantly; this doesn’t stop her from giving into nearly everything Karin asks for. Clearly, Karin is used to this sort of treatment, and she’s unsurprisingly manipulative and more than willing to play her parents off each other to get what she wants. What is surprising is that there is a charming sweetness to her that has survived the coddling. She expects to get everything she wants, but she is less arrogant about it than childishly delighted. There is a naivete to her that makes her parents adoration understandable, and, unfortunately, leaves her vulnerable to serious hurt.

It is in Karin’s father, Tore (Max Von Sydow), though, that the most distressing grayness occurs. At the start of the story, he seems the most level-headed person on the farm, dealing with both his wife’s religious fanaticism and his daughter’s manipulations with calm good humor; but in the end, he commits on of the story’s harshest acts. While he’s killing the two men, the boy wakes up and runs to the protection of Mareta, who stands watching Tore avenge their child. When Mareta tries to shield the boy from her husband, Tore rips the child out of her arms and hurls him into a wall, killing him. It’s one of the most shocking moments of the film, because while we are bothered by the attack on Karin, it came from an expected source; seeing a character we’ve identified with committing a similar crime brings things to another level entirely.

The Virgin Spring is a religious film in the best sense of the word; there is a rich spiritual depth here, a depth that is as powerful as it is ambiguous. I’m overreaching myself, but I can’t help but wonder about the comparison between the “old” gods and the new. Ingeri, filled with rage and discontent, prays to Odin to come down and strike Karin- she is sullen and emotional, but her anger is well-justified, and she is far more knowledgeable about the outside world. Tore and Mareta preface almost every major action by offering up their prayers to the Christian god, and they are cultured, civilized individuals, with social power and a proud home. However, it is this very culture that makes Karin so vulnerable- they do their best to shield her from the dangers of the world, so that when one of those dangers finally does rear its head, she doesn’t realize it until it is too late. Also, the god-fearing parents are the only people to commit a cold-blooded crime; hours pass between when the two first understand what has happened to their daughter, and when they take action. Not enough time to get over their grief, but surely enough time to see what they intend to do more clearly.

About the only thing we know at the end of the movie for certain is that the violence in this world is beyond the comprehension of the sane mind. There’s a strong implication that the only place to find such comprehension, and the forgiveness which comes with it, is in looking to God; but the film is complex enough to resist any simple moral lesson. Instead, we are left with a story of uncommon horror and uncommon beauty, which expects us to come to our own conclusions, a rare gift in any medium.

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The Last House On the Left, directed by Wes Craven
Mari (Sandra Cassel) and Phyllis (Lucy Grantham) are going to a rock concert in a bad part of town. On their way to the concert, they try to score some pot off Junior (Marc Sheffler). Junior brings them to his father, Krug (David Hess), and Krug’s gang; they threaten the two girls and proceed to rape Phyllis while Mari watches on, horrified. The next morning, while Mari’s parents talk to police and grow more and more worried about their daughter’s disappearance, the gang stuffs the two girls into the trunk of their car, and tries to make a getaway. The car stalls on a back road, and while Junior tries to fix it, Krug, Weasel (Fred Lincoln), and Sadie (Jeramie Rain) take the girls out into the woods for a little “fun,” unaware that they’ve ended up less than a hundred feet away from Mari’s home…

The first thirty minutes of Last House play like a bad after-school special. The music is bland and unassuming, if occasionally pretty; the acting is cut-rate community theater; the dialogue is clunky and forced; and the stabs at philosophy or subtext are heavy handed, to say the least. It’s not completely terrible- Sandra Cassel and Lucy Grantham are, if nothing else, enthusiastic in their roles, and when the story is outdoors, the camera work is able to get away from the staged look that haunts a lot of low budget productions. When the girls are first trapped by the gang, there are moments of genuine tension as a previously safe scene starts to get seriously unsafe; Hess and Lincoln are especially good here, switching between casual charm and viciousness with a frightening ease.

Still, if the movie had cut out after those thirty minutes, nobody would remember it. It’s what happens next, when Krug drags Mari and Phyllis out into the woods, that gives the movie its reputation and its power. Up until that point, the difference between real-world violence and movie violence is clear, and while it’s possible to feel nervous for the heroines, there’s still that distance from them. You know it’s only a movie because the camera panned up when they raped Phyllis. You know it’s a movie because Mari’s facial reactions at the time were, context aside, kinda goofy. You know it’s a movie because the mother and father are terrible, terrible actors.

When they go into the woods, though, you stop knowing anything. Something breaks, only you don’t hear it till it’s too late.

Wes Craven is, like most gifted directors of horror films, an uneven sort of genius. If you doubt it, watch A Nightmare on Elm Street and Vampire in Brooklyn back to back. Last House is his first movie, and it shows. The attempts at character development are the work of someone who knows what he’s trying to get at, but doesn’t understand how to get there without tripping over himself. The comic relief bits are incredibly out of place. But if you look past the flaws, you can see a number of themes at work that continue to show up in his later work: primarily, the setting of horrific violence in a suburban setting, an idyllic family forced into violent opposition against a hideously distorted version of itself. (This last is the central story of Craven’s next film, The Hills Have Eyes.)

Even more apparent than the familiar plot elements, though, is Craven’s clear talent for putting things on screen that call up a primal reaction in us. Other filmmakers since him have gone further and shown more, but there is something about the torture sequence in this movie that is absolutely bone-chilling. It isn’t the gore, which is relatively minor; we get a brief, icky bit with someone’s intestines, and a severed arm, but it’s nothing that hasn’t been done since. What hasn’t been replicated, at least not nearly as often, is the stark presentation of violence, and the film’s willingness to follow a premise through to its conclusion without wavering, without blinking. There are no last minute reprieves here, no fades when the action gets too brutal. Craven doesn’t celebrate or polish the horror. He just shows it with a ruthless honesty that is absolutely heartbreaking.

It is also repellent, and whether or not suffering through the unpleasantness is worth it is up to the individual viewer. What saves the movie for me is its complete lack of artifice. If the actions portrayed on screen were done with better craft (or rather, a different kind of craft), if the movie was any easier to watch during these sequences, I would agree with the critics who have labeled it as morally repugnant. As is, because it simply shows us events with a clear unflinching eye, it’s unpleasant and difficult, but not despicable.

For example: Krug forces Mari and Phyllis to have sex with each other. If this was a pure exploitation flick, we’d get loving close-ups of the act, with constant cuts between the leering gang and the girls, each step lovingly lit and blocked for maximum titillation. As it is, we don’t see much. The two girls undress, and there is nudity, but it is not sexually appealing. This is a painful scene to watch, and when Phyllis tells Mari, “It’s just you and me, we’re alone, I’m not going to hurt you,” it’s the farthest thing in the world from erotic. It makes you want to cry for the rest of your life. (Unsurprisingly, this line was unscripted; much of the best stuff in the movie was improvised by the actors.)

For my money, one of the hardest scenes in the movie has no overt violence in it at all; watching Mari beg Junior to help her, and hearing the very real desperation in her voice, made me want to look away.

Even when judged by these standards, there are some serious missteps. While the sequence in the forest is an immensely powerful one, the ensuing carnage at Mari’s house is not. When the camera goes inside, scenes become cramped and phony looking, and the acting here returns to the . In the final reels, when the parents take their revenge, we switch from brutal realism to semi-fantasy, concluding on a chainsaw fight in the living room that is a hell of lot less disturbing than watching Weasel play with his knife. Craven is trying to make a statement about the cyclic nature of violence; unfortunately, the acts of Krug and his gang are stuck so strongly in the viewers mind that you can’t help but feel they get their just deserts.

I usually hate it when people say this, but: This movie is not for everyone. I don’t regret watching it, and I’m not ashamed that I think it has value, but I am unable to recommend it without serious reservations. Whether or not you’re willing to put up with some intense ugliness for little reward is a decision you have make. It’s not as awful as I’d heard, but it’s pretty bad.

COMPARE/CONTRAST:
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: The Virgin Spring is a much, much better movie than The Last House on the Left. This isn’t a debatable point; you could argue that Last House has more of an immediate visceral impact than VS, but it would be ludicrous to say that it has even a fraction of the artistry, narrative skill, and acting prowess of Bergman’s film.

But I’m sure everyone knows that, and there’s no point in dwelling on it. It would be foolish to expect the first film by a complete newcomer to the cinematic world to be in the same artistic league as the work an accomplished master. That I can even compare the two with a straight face is a mark of favor for Craven’s accomplishment, and even with the above qualifications, there are some folks who’ll just dismiss whatever I say next as bordering on sacrilege. Well, screw ‘em if they can’t take a joke. We’re here to talk ideas, people, not worship film canisters like holy relics.

Last House isn’t a true adaptation. While Craven readily admits to being inspired by VS, his movie is more of a modern interpretation of the original’s basic structure: a girl leaves home, gets ravaged and killed, the murderers take shelter in the girl’s parents’ home, and the parents figure things out and kill the murderers. Craven uses the storyline (with his own embellishments- the worldly figure, instead of being a minor antagonist to the heroine, is close friends with the daughter, and suffers the same torments) to make his own point about the nature of violence and its destructive capabilities. And while both directors would agree that nature is not a thing that can be controlled, Craven’s viewpoint is far darker.

The clearest sign of this is in the presentation of the “villains” in each story. In VS (aside: every time I write that, I feel like I’m talking about a Pearl Jam album), the shepherds are little more than beasts gifted with the power of speech. Not even that, as only one member of the gang ever is able to use his voice to communicate; his adult brother had his tongue taken out, and the boy with them is either mute out of circumstance or birth. Even when the men threaten Karin, they never seem more frightening than a pair of rabid dogs- there is no thought to their actions, no impulse to cruelty. Just animal need.

Put them against Krug and his gang. Only Junior seems as inept, as desperate as the shepherds were, and his worst crime in the movie is not trying to stop the others from doing what they do. Krug, Weasel, and Phyllis are relatively intelligent, self-confident, and take a clear delight in causing others pain. They are in control of the situation from the moment they come on screen, which makes the situation all the more frightening. In Bergman’s world, the criminals are outcasts from society, essentially only able to exert power on an individual even more powerless than they. In Craven’s world, the gang is less a group of social misfits than a symptom of a deeply troubled world. They all end up dead, but you get the feeling there are many others out there more than willing to take their place.

Krug and his gang do lose much of their power when the sequence in the forest reaches it’s lowest point. There’s a sense of the events going out of their, or anyone else’s, control; and while early on in the movie, they mock each other and their captives, once things reach a certain point, all talk just- stops. When Krug finally rapes Mari, it’s hardly more graphic scene than the assault on Karin; Mari stays in her shirt, and Krug just collapses on top of her, look like nothing more than a rutting pig. The bad guys in Last House are more evil than their ancestors, and by extension, the cinematic world they live in is capable of harsher cruelty, but the horrors they commit still manage to outdo them.

Oddly enough, one of the rare moments of beauty in Last House happens soon after this moment. When Krug finishes with Mari, the girl wanders blankly away, less an escape attempt than the blind stumbles of someone who has lost her mind. She comes to a lake and wades in, maybe to drown herself, maybe just because it’s in her way. The gang follows her listlessly, watches her go into the water; then Krug takes Weasel’s gun, takes careful aim, and shots Mari three times.

Beauty is too strong a word. It’s not a happy scene. But something about the girl’s expression, the calmness of the water and the look on Krug’s face, created an image that stuck in my head. At a similar point in Bergman’s film, the boy is left alone to watch over Karin’s body, and it begins to snow. The boy is horrified, and crawls close to the dead girl- and the corpse, the frightened child, the falling snow, it’s like a painting. It’s stunning. Mari’s death is a sordid, less effective version of this, but there is still a hint of that power. I don’t know what it means, but I know it reached me in some fashion, and that’s enough to make me mention it here.

The real difference between these two, aside from the skill-level, is that Bergman’s movie is about more than rape and murder, while Craven’s film is about only that. Violence of any sort of difficult to justify in art, and the degree of difficulty hinges on the explicitness of the violence shown. In Virgin Spring, the actual rape/murder is less than five minutes long; it’s unsettling but brief, and, to quote a cliché, you don’t see anything worse here than you’d see on the evening news. In Last House, the attack runs somewhere in the area of a quarter of an hour or more, and it dominates everything else in the picture. Bergman manages to give violence in his movie significance beyond its obvious ugliness. Craven doesn’t even try- his movie ends on a friggin chainsaw attack. Nothing in the last twenty minutes comes even close to supplanting the horrors we’ve seen.

Which is probably to the best. One of the reasons so many people despise Last House is that it lacks any attempt at explaining or contextualizing its nastiness; to me, this is what makes it the movie it is, and changing that would cheapen things. Besides, Craven lacked the ability at this point in his career to be as powerful with positive imagery as he is with negative, and seeing an inept redemptive ending would have looked more like a failure of nerve than transcendence.

The Virgin Spring is a well-made piece of art. Much of Last House on the Left is not well-made, and I’m not sure I’d call it any of it art, but it is the most purely horrifying movie I’ve ever seen. It is not scary. It is not suspenseful. There are no sexy half-dressed nymphettes screaming in the darkness. There is only the truth of what one person can do to another when the good guys are out of gas, the woods are to big to get out of, and Mom and Dad are too busy baking cakes to hear the screams.

When I was first thinking of watching this movie, I asked a few friends who had seen it before for their thoughts. Here’s one letter I got in response, from the one and only Marxo Grouch:

Well, you know my policy, so I’m certainly not going to tell you not to watch it. I cannot however promise you in any way that you’re going to find it a rewarding experience if you do. It’s definitely cheaply made and it gets quite unpleasant at times. On the other hand, it is the feature debut of an important horror director. Plus, if you can stand it, a double viewing of House with its “inspiration,” Bergman’s The Virgin Spring is interesting, if not exactly uplifting.

For a bit more on this I hunted down a letter I wrote to the Horror-wood webzine a while back… when they had an article about House, so here ’tis:

Renfield-
I’m sure that other people have pointed this out in the wake of the Last House On The Left article from the last issue, but just in case…Craven was inspired to write the film from seeing acclaimed Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, a fact that has been snickered about copiously, given Bergman’s art-house respectability and Last House’s undisputed trashiness. The Virgin Spring is an emotionally wrenching story about an innocent, but spoiled young girl, the daughter of the leader (Max von Sydow) of a small group of peasant farmers, who sets off on a journey through the woods and is subsequently raped and murdered by three goat herd brothers. The brothers then unwittingly seek shelter at the very house the girl has come from and when they try to sell the girl’s bloodstained cloak to the parents, von Sydow and his wife realize what has happened and he takes his violent revenge. Any of that sound familiar to anyone? What is not apparent in the synopsis are the other elements to the film, particularly the devout religious nature of the peasants and the important subplot of the girl’s stepsister. The stepsister is pregnant out of wedlock and subsequently scorned by the rest of the community. She is intensely bitter, for the above reason of course, but also, justifiably I think, because of the way the rest of them fawn over the girl, treating her as much like a princess as their meager means will allow them. The naiveté that this constant coddling instills in the girl is a part of what gets her killed, but the stepsister becomes convinced that it is entirely her fault, partially because she had been with the girl in the woods and had gone off on her own, but much more so because she had cursed her for the good treatment she received (she fears that, as she had been warned would happen by her Christian brethren, her “pagan” interest in the Norse gods that are, after all, a part of her country’s heritage, has resulted in disaster). Admittedly it has been a while since I’ve seen Last House, but I don’t remember it being as morally complex as the film it was based on. On the other hand, while Virgin Spring would not conventionally be considered a horror film, it certainly has horrific elements, not the least of which, along with the rape and murder of the girl, is the violent murder of a young boy. Many critics refer to the unconventional connection between these two films with a marked level of contempt, but I have to say that it’s just the kind of bizarre association that appeals to my warped sensibilities. And while you won’t walk away from the Craven film having learned any deep lessons (except perhaps to run like hell if you ever see David Hess), if you can stomach it, it can be enjoyed as the raw work of a man who would go on to make some truly memorable horror flicks.–Marc Beschler

I don’t know how much of a completist you are, but if you are one, I’d say go ahead and see it at least once. But then it’s exactly my desire to think of myself as a completist that may eventually lead to my seeing the infamous Italian cannibal flicks. Eeeuugh.

-M

I think that pretty much covers it for me. Tune in next week when I really try to piss someone off.

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