What's the Big Deal?: The Virgin Spring (1960)
One good way to make a novice horror fan's head explode is to tell him that Wes Craven's first film, the notoriously sleazy exploitation shocker The Last House on the Left, was based on a movie by Ingmar Bergman, the boring Swedish guy. It sounds like an absurd juxtaposition, like being told that Faces of Death was based on Shakespeare. (It wasn't. It was based on Oscar Wilde.) But Bergman's The Virgin Spring did indeed inspire Wes Craven, and was controversial in its own right when it came out. Why does Virgin Spring continue to interest movie buffs more than 50 years later? Let's put a toad in a sandwich and investigate!
The praise: The film won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film (it was only the fifth year that category existed) and was also nominated for its costume design. It won the foreign-language Golden Globe as well, and received a special mention at the Cannes Film Festival.
The context: Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), the son of a stern Lutheran minister, had a lot of questions about God. For example: What's up with God? And: What is God's deal? Many of Bergman's films grappled with these questions. The first such film -- and the first of any of Bergman's works to gain significant attention in the United States -- was The Seventh Seal (1957), now an icon of foreign cinema. (You know the one: man plays chess with Death, etc.) This was followed by Wild Strawberries (a classic in its own right), The Magician, a couple films made for Swedish TV, and then The Virgin Spring.
Released in Sweden in February 1960 and the United States nine months later, this retelling of a 13th-century folksong was immediately controversial for its graphic depiction of a rape and murder, and for the revenge which follows it. The film was banned in some places, and in the U.S. the rape-and-murder scene was edited. Naturally, this only helped at the box office, with people going to the film just to see what all the fuss was about.
The New York Times added fuel to the fire with a disapproving review: "Mr. Bergman has stocked it with scenes of brutality that ... may leave one sickened and stunned.... [The rape and murder] is a brutish and horrible offense, which Mr. Bergman has represented for all the hideousness and terror it contains." (And this was the edited version!)
Those who have seen The Virgin Spring may be amused by that description, in much the same way that we are fascinated by our grandparents' overreaction to Elvis Presley's swiveling hips. By the standards of cinema in 1960 -- when even married people slept in separate beds, remember, and gunfire rarely produced blood -- the pivotal scene in Virgin Spring was indeed shocking. But there would be mainstream studio films by the end of that very decade that would depict rape and murder in more graphic detail, and for more prurient and salacious reasons. The Times makes it sound like Virgin Spring is some kind of grindhouse shocker, like it's -- well, like it's The Last House on the Left.
American critics were generally kinder to Virgin Spring than the Times' Bosley Crowther was, but Swedish commentators were dismissive. Bergman usually traded in symbolism and allusion; here, for once, everything was plain and simple (as befits the story's folk origins), and Bergman's countrymen were unimpressed. Moreover, Sweden in 1960 prided itself on being a modern, secular society, and the spiritual and theological issues in The Virgin Spring were embarrassingly old-fashioned.
The movie: In ye olden medieval times, a fair young maiden named Karin (Birgitta Pettersson) is traveling through the forest to a church when she's attacked by three herdsmen. They rape and then kill her. Coincidentally, the villains later that night seek shelter at the estate of Karin's parents (played by Max von Sydow and Birgitta Valberg), who learn what has happened to Karin and exact revenge.
In addition to being remade in 2009 (with Craven serving as producer), Last House inspired plenty of copycats in the 1970s heyday of grindhouse/exploitation films: Last House on the Beach (1978), Night Train Murders (1975), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), Thriller: A Cruel Picture (aka They Call Her One-Eye) (1974), and so forth. These generally played up the "sweet revenge" aspect, moving further away from the intent of Virgin Spring (which, to be fair, most of those filmmakers weren't emulating anyway; they were looking at Last House). If Last House is the son of Virgin Spring, the Last House copycats are more like great-nephews of it.
What to look for: Though its descendants tended to be sensationalistic and cheaply made, The Virgin Spring is calm and polished, clearly the work of a serious filmmaker. (I don't mean to detract from the merits of exploitation films; I just mean that the intentions are very different.) Bergman drew inspiration from Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), which also dealt with rape and revenge in a medieval forest. Both films employ the "Shakespearean weather change" device, where nature seems to respond to an unnatural act: the torrential rain in Rashomon, the sudden snowfall in Virgin Spring.
God is mentioned constantly throughout the film and figures prominently in the characters' lives and motivations. Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), the pregnant, sultry servant girl, asks the Scandinavian god Odin for help in the film's opening moments. This is followed immediately by a scene of Karin's pious mother and somewhat reluctantly pious father praying to the Christian God. Christianity was relatively new to medieval Sweden, but it was catching on fast, and its adherents were zealous indeed. Great emphasis is placed on virginity, with Ingeri's illegitimate pregnancy serving as a visible reminder of her sinful nature.
What's the big deal: Bergman considered The Virgin Spring to be one of his lesser films, but it has an important place in his evolution as a storyteller. Most of his films in the 1960s would deal with similarly weighty themes of God, faith, and spirituality, and you can see him laying the groundwork for that here. The basic scenario of Virgin Spring is so primal and easily understood -- revenge against those who have harmed a loved one that it fits naturally into numerous other stories told in other genres. Unlike most of those films, though, this one considers the question of whether revenge, however understandable it may be, is truly justified.
Further reading: Bosley Crowther's appalled review in The New York Times is a good read. For contrast, here is Time magazine's glowing approval (which mistakenly refers to Karin and Ingeri as sisters; Ingeri is clearly not a blood relation, though she may have been considered a foster child). Mark Bourne's DVD review gives some good background too, and here is Peter Cowie's introductory essay from the Criterion collection.
Related columns:
