Film: Phantom Carriage
Director: Victor Sjöström
Country: Sweden
Released: January 1921
Runtime: 107 minutes
Genre: Horror
Studio: AB Svensk Filmindustri
Influenced: Ingmar Bergman, Julien Duvivier, Frank Capra, Stanley Kubrick
Scandinavian noir and horror has long been a stalwart of TV & film history, and Victor Sjöström was an early Swedish pioneer of this genre, his success leading him to a career in Hollywood and a memorable starring role in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957). Sjöström also plays the lead role in The Phantom Carriage, his most famous film, a memorable performance as the drunkard David Holm who finds redemption after an encounter with the Grim Reaper.
Compared to the epic panoramas of Cabiria and Intolerance, this is filmmaking on a much more human scale with its naturalistic portrait of life on the margins and on-location shooting. Also vital to its cinematic power is the narrative, a mix of horror, social realism and morality tale, based on a novel (Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness!, 1912) by Nobel Prize winning author Selma Lagerlöf.
Elements of the story reminded me of Dickens' A Christmas Carol (like Scrooge, lead character David Holm has an encounter with ghostly spirits who help him mend his ways) and Cinderella (the transformative power of the stroke of midnight), but the ending is far from happy or sentimental.
What's most unique to me about the film is its artistry, making it feel very modern. The carriage collecting the soul of a drowned seaman is something that will stick long in my memory, along with the special effect of souls rising from their dead body and the clever use of flashbacks, all sublimely done given the technical limitations of the time.
You can also see the film's abiding influence on cinematic history, with moments like the Here's Johnny scene in Kubrick's The Shining, when David Holm's wife is hiding in the bathroom with the kids and Holm hacks through the door with an axe, as well as the ending that is visually reminiscent of It's A Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946).
See also: For more silent film era Scandi noir, see Häxan (1922, Benjamin Christensen)
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