Korkarlen (The Phantom Carriage)

Image credit: Amazon UK

One of my all-time favourite things about going back in time with cinema is when you find those films that spawned so many recognisable and iconic scenes. It’s a truly weird and delightful feeling when you watch a scene in a really old movie and it reminds you of a scene in a film that was made decades later and that part of your brain that remembers and stores scenes and images lights and begins whirring like mad. This afternoon I watched a particularly good one of these movies: Korkarlen (The Phantom Carriage).

Rather reminiscent of Dickens’ classic ghost story, Korkarlen takes place on New Years’ Eve at the bedside of a dying Salvation Army sister (Astrid Holm). Her dying wish is to see the man whom she loves turn over a new leaf. Outside in the cold the man of her prayers, David Holm, (Victor Sjostrom) is drinking away the remains of the year when he gets into a tussle with his companions and dies. Death’s carriage arrives to take his soul, but the driver –a former sinner and friend of David’s- prolongs the engagement by showing David’s ghost all the pain and misery he has caused in the hope that there might still be time to save his soul.

Historically, The Phantom Carriage is a cinematic masterpiece for a number of reasons. Not only did it cement the fame of Swedish silent cinema throughout the 1920s, it is probably one of the most widely sampled and quoted films within modern cinema –especially in films that depict the spirit world.

It might not be the first, but it is definitely the most celebrated ghost movie in silent cinema, with the scene of the soul rising from the deceased body and then staring back down at it, being one of the most widely recognisable sequences in modern movies. Made in a simple, but incredibly time-consuming and meticulous way with series of double exposures, the film was the first time audiences got to see a three-dimensional ghost world on screen and it’s truly haunting.

The eerie tale of disease, decay, and spiritual corruption is highlighted further by the supernatural element as well as the film’s (at the time) modern narrative method of telling the story through flashbacks and even flashbacks within flashbacks. All this results in an intricate and complex tale of society in decline, which would depress even the dead, but is uplifted by its resounding message of hope and the opportunity of turning over a new leaf that the New Year brings. It is wonderfully metaphoric while at the same being completely sincere and the drama and horror of the central stories of woe is superbly brought out by the mesmerising performances of the cast.

Image credit: IMDb

Sjostrom in particular, is a captivating protagonist, beginning the film as this cackling and hateful, disease-ridden human who, in true Scrooge fashion, gets sense finally knocked into him through a series of scares and forced re-livings of his own past perils. Getting all the best scenes in the movie including looking down at his own corpse and breaking down a locked door with an axe a la Jack Nicholson, (“Heeere’s Johnny!”) it’s a true testament to the power of visual storytelling and performance that this hateful character can make us cry along with him in the end, and seriously Sjostrom is remarkable!

The Phantom Carriage influenced the works of Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, and practically every other director who ever did a transparent ghost movie, and even all these years later it still stands up as a truly moving, impressive, and iconic film.

Director: Victor Sjostrom, 1921

Cast: Victor Sjostrom, Hilda Borgstrom, Tore Svennberg, Astrid Holm, Concordia Selander, Lisa Lundholm, Tor Weijden, Einar Axelsson, Olof As, Nils Ahren, Simon Lindstrand, Nils Elffors, Algot Gunnarsson, Hildur Lithman, and John Ekman