A projector switches on. A clapperboard. Off-screen voices. For a moment, the 1968 cinemagoer might have suspected a projectionist's error. But no. It is Ingmar Bergman who, with a gesture of superb and cruel meta-cinematic honesty, puts us on notice: you are about to witness not a story, but the dissection of a soul. What you will see is an artifact, a filmic document assembled from the fragments of a disaster. "Hour of the Wolf" is not a film one watches; it is an abyss that, patiently, stares back, waiting for the moment we are vulnerable enough to fall in.

On the remote island of Frisia (read: Bergman's Fårö, his own personal, psychological Skull Island), the painter Johan Borg (Max von Sydow) and his pregnant wife, Alma (Liv Ullmann), seek refuge from civilization. But as any reader of Edgar Allan Poe or H.P. Lovecraft knows, isolation is not a cure for the mind, but a magnifying glass. The external emptiness amplifies the internal noise until it becomes deafening. Johan is not haunted by external ghosts, but by his own hypertrophic artistic sensibility, which has transmuted his anxieties, his guilt, and his humiliations into a bestiary of "demons" all too tangible.

Here Bergman orchestrates his one and only true horror film. But this is a horror that has nothing to do with Hammer Gothic or the monsters of Universal. It is an existential, Scandinavian horror, Protestant in its rigor and its obsession with sin. Bergman's horror is the awareness that the boundary between the self and the other, between waking and dreaming, between creation and madness, is a line drawn in the sand. The "Hour of the Wolf"—that liminal moment between three and five in the morning, an opening title card explains, "when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most real"—is a synecdoche for Johan's entire human condition: an existence lived perpetually in that twilight fault line.

The "demons" who inhabit the castle on the island are not specters in the classic sense. Rather, they are the grotesque and parodic embodiment of high society, of the cultural establishment that the artist both covets and despises in equal measure. They are art critics, patrons, old lovers; they are the audience that devours the artist, vampirizing his soul for a momentary thrill. Their nature is revealed in one of the most chilling and surreal scenes in cinema history: the dinner at the castle. It feels like a hallucinatory anticipation of Vinterberg's "Festen," filtered through the distorting mirror of Goya and his "Caprichos." The conversations are thin blades, the compliments are veiled insults, the laughter is the sound of breaking bones. When the marchioness literally removes her face, taking out her glass eyes and dentures, Bergman is not showing us a monster, but the truth: the horror is not the mask, but what the mask conceals and, at the same time, represents. Social artifice is the very essence of these cultural cannibals.

The film's structure is a masterpiece of narrative manipulation. It begins as a chamber drama, almost a spiritual sequel to "Persona" (shot, not coincidentally, on the same island, with the same crew and the same actors, as if to suggest that the universe of Johan and Alma is the hell from which the protagonists of the previous film were fleeing). Alma, our anchor to reality, reads her husband's diary, and we read along with her. Through this mechanism, Bergman forces us to share Johan's perspective, to see the world through his feverish eyes. The flashbacks, the disturbing sketches, the sudden apparitions are no longer mere devices, but become our own perceptual experience. When Johan tells Alma about the episode of the boy he kills on the cliffs—an act of violence as repulsive as it is ambiguous in its factual reality—we are not just listening to a confession. We are participating in the collapse, becoming accomplices to his unspeakable secret, whether it be real or imagined.

Von Sydow gives one of the most courageous and physically grueling performances of his career. His Johan Borg is a Saint Sebastian of modern art, pierced not by arrows but by visions. His long, gaunt body seems like a violin string stretched to the breaking point, his face a landscape eroded by anguish. Alongside him, Liv Ullmann is the personification of devotion and sanity, a beacon of light trying desperately to penetrate an ever-thickening fog. Alma's tragedy is perhaps even greater than Johan's: she not only witnesses the disintegration of the man she loves, but begins to be contaminated by it, seeing her own fears reflected in his stories, until she confesses that love has made them so similar that they even share the same demons. It is the final, fatal affirmation of emotional vampirism: love does not save, but condemns one to a shared damnation.

Released in 1968, a year of revolutions, hopes, and violence, "Hour of the Wolf" seems today a work that is almost prophetically disconnected and, for that very reason, universal. While the world outside was burning with ideologies and political struggles, Bergman retreated to his island to map an even more insidious territory: the interior geography. And yet, the film breathes the air of its time. Johan's crisis is also the crisis of the bourgeois artist, of the intellectual who finds himself impotent and obsolete before a world he can no longer interpret, and who ends up being devoured by the decadent vestiges of an aristocratic past (the demons in the castle). It is the swan song of romantic individualism, a requiem for the idea that art can redeem. For Johan Borg, art does not redeem; it consumes, isolates, and ultimately destroys.

Visually, the film is a black-and-white nightmare sculpted by Sven Nykvist. The shadows are abysses, the faces are wax masks illuminated by a spectral light. The celebrated final sequence, with Johan fleeing into the forest pursued by his tormentors, is a piece of pure expressionist cinema, a naturalistic "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" that anticipates the found-footage horror aesthetic of "The Blair Witch Project" by decades. But where the American film played with the fear of the dark and the unseen, Bergman shows us everything, with a clarity that is even more terrifying. The bird-demon, the man in the hat, Lindhorst's face twisting into a grin: they are not creatures of the night, but products of Johan's psyche, and therefore infinitely more real.

"Hour of the Wolf" is a film that offers no catharsis. There is no explanation, no salvation. It ends as it begins: with an absence. Johan vanishes. Alma remains, forever marked. The film cuts off. The projector, metaphorically, goes dark. It leaves us alone, in the darkness of the theater, to question our own demons, to ponder that thin membrane separating our daily reality from the hour of the wolf that waits, patiently, inside each of us. It is a ruthless work, an act of psychological terrorism disguised as an art film, and it is precisely for this reason that viewing it is an experience as necessary as it is devastating. A black nail hammered into the heart of the cinematic canon.