Like a gothic nightmare. Wonderful and haunting, but not for everyone.

Excellent movie. When I watch a movie where I don't know what is real or not, I know the director has taken me to a new experience. Great cinematography. We all have our shadow or dark side.

Ingmar Bergman's only horror film is Hour of the Wolf, and it's - no surprise - an ambiguous one. Is the artist haunted by horrific visions he feels compelled to paint actually under threat from demons? Or is he at crossroads in his work and life where his personal demons are keeping him awake? Is his wife sharing in the hallucination, or is she proof it is really happening? And so are the vampiric people in the castle merely creepy eccentrics, or are they tempting and humiliating shadows, or all in his/their mind? Can we even trust the artist's diary, and its shocking violence? Or does he talk about his feelings in images, as an artist might and none of it is to be taken at face value? This creates a rich, atmospheric piece which is really about the artist (whose work is never shown because it could never equal what is said of it, good choice) choosing between his art-fueling angst and real life, as represented by his very practical wife. And yet, she's in many ways the main character, playing detective as to what is happening to her husband and feeling him slip away, desperate to understand him, to know a certain osmosis with him. Bergman so often dramatizes one's existentialist inability to truly know the other, so it's difficult to think of her as sharing an illusion with her husband, and so the monsters must be real... Levels and levels and levels...