10. Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage) (1921)

Title: Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage)
Genre: Drama, Horror, Thriller
IMDB User Score: 7.9/10 Stars
Year: 1921
Language: Swedish
Format: Black & White, Silent
Length: 93 Minutes
Director: Victor Sjöström
Producer: Charles Magnusson
Screenplay: Victor Sjöström, from a novel by Selma Lagerlöf
Photography: Julius Jaenzon
Music: Matti Bye (1998 restoration)
Cast: Victor Sjöström, Hilda Borgström, Tore Svennberg, Astrid Holm, Concordia Selander, Lisa Lundholm, Tor Weijden, Einar Axelsson, Olof As, Nils Ahrén, Simon Lindstrand, Nils Elffors, Algot Gunnarson, Hildur Lithman, John Ekman.
Oscar: No
Oscar Nomination: No
Budget: ?
Revenue: ?
Reason it’s Worth Watching:

- Extremely advanced special effects for its time period, using a painstakingly long post-production method utilizing double exposures to create a 3D “ghost effect” that had never been seen before.
- A very sophisticated narrative style, using flashbacks within flashbacks to tell the film’s plot in a way no movie ever had up to that point.
- A very bold movie in that it stands up against censorship guidelines of its time period. The movie’s themes of mysticism and the occult would have been grounds to ban the film at the time, had the film not been so extraordinarily good.
- A HUGE influence on the famous director Ingmar Berman, who called it “the film of all films” and the main influence on his works.
- The famous “Here’s Johnny” scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), was a direct homage to this movie. The Shining is also very thematically similar to this film.

This is a COOL movie, first and foremost. The special effects are just insane for the time period, especially given how much manual labor was required to do it with 1920’s film equipment. One scene in particular that stands out for me is a scene early in the film where the titular phantom carriage travels from land onto the ocean seamlessly, and the driver then gets out and walks along the bottom of the ocean floor to reap the soul of a shipwreck victim found there. The fact that the ghosts in this movie can walk around the screen in 3 dimensions is even more incredible. For example, when a ghost walks behind a table, his legs actually go behind the table, instead of continuing to be seen. This might be something you’ll want to take for granted, but anyone who has seen the way film editing was done during the dawn of cinema will be scratching their heads as to how exactly this was achieved. I personally don’t even want to THINK of the editing process and how many layers of film were needed to create this movie. The post-production on it was infamously long, and the hard work shows in the quality of the movie.

They could have just made this an hour long visual experimentation flick and it’d still be considered a classic, but they didn’t just stop with the visuals. The storyline here is poetic, to say the least. Using a series of complex, yet very accessible flashback sequences, the movie is able to create dramatic irony in a way most films at the time would never be able to equal. The story isn’t really anything revolutionary; it’s basically A Christmas Carol, only with a grim reaper straight out of hell as opposed to three ghosts and about ten times as macabre. Our recently deceased protagonist goes on an odyssey; looking at his past sinful behavior, and seeing first hand the series of tragically ironic events they set off, causing misery, pain, and death for everyone around him. But it’s the way that the story is told that really makes it feel like something you’ve never seen before.

My only complaint with the film is that it has a bit of a deus ex machina ending. I think the film would have been much more powerful if things had followed through to their logical and terrible conclusion, rather than pulling the divine intervention card at the end. That aside, this is still a purely magical film. The atmosphere is fantastic, the story is gripping, and the production values are absolutely off the charts. Of special mention is the soundtrack that was added to the film’s restoration. The original film had no soundtrack, as music for it was always performed by live orchestras at theatres where it screened. The 1998 soundtrack that has been subsequently added to it is amazing. It’s this awesome industrial effect track that really adds to the film’s already overwhelming feeling of dread and despair. Movie lover or not, I would recommend this piece to just about anyone. It’s easily the most universally accessible silent film I’ve ever seen up to this point, and it’s easy to see why it has had such a long lasting effect on the industry.