Our new series about some of the cinema’s most horrifying films—that aren’t classified in the horror genre. Welcome to Beyond Horror.

Ingmar Bergman filming 1965. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In a way, every one of Ingmar Bergman’s films was a horror film. The Swedish filmmaker was obsessed with the horror of death, of human mortality, and of the void—the horrifying thought that beyond this life lay…nothing. Even beyond this thematic horror, Bergman had a way of staging a scene, of capturing light and darkness, and of utilizing sound and silence that made his films distinctly creepy. Max von Sydow playing the Grim Reaper in a chess game for his soul, the dream sequence in Wild Strawberries, the Spider God of Through a Glass Darkly—there are plenty of images that make my skin crawl just recalling them. Heck, The Virgin Spring was the inspiration for Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left.

But the most horrifying of Bergman’s films are probably the four films that he made from 1966 through 1969, each taking the deconstruction and disintegration of human society and personality as their topic: Persona, Hour of the Wolf, Shame, and The Passion of Anna.

Persona. Persona, the first and best of these four films, may also be the best of Bergman’s career. The film begins with an assault of strange, provocative, and creepy images, before settling down to tell the story of two women: Alma (Bibi Andersson), a young nurse assigned to care for Elisabet (Liv Ullmann), an actress who has suddenly and without explanation gone mute. The two women go to the seaside, where the talkative Alma confesses a past sexual indiscretion to the silent, listening Elisabet, and then…what? It’s not exactly clear. At one point, the picture on the screen fragments, evoking the literal tearing of the filmstrip the movie is printed on. From that frame on nothing is the same, as Alma and Elisabet seem to switch personalities back and forth, their once stable personas disintegrating along with the film they’re in.

Influential film critic Lloyd Michaels has called Persona ”a kind of modernist horror movie.” Thematically, it considers the breakdown of the self in the face of the historical catastrophes of the 1960s, like Vietnam and nuclear armament—but basically it’s just weird and hypnotic and creepy as hell.

Hour of the Wolf. A possibly mad artist and his wife (Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann) visit a baron’s castle nearby. Bizarre happenings ensue. Are the baron and his guests horrible preening socialites, or demons in disguise? Or is it all just a joint hallucination? This one takes the weirdness of Persona to a whole new level, with mixed results. It’s not quite as successful, but at least twice as scary.

Shame. A husband and wife (von Sydow and Ullman again) take to the coast to flee a civil war. They can’t escape, however, and soon the conflict catches up with them. What follows might be a meditation on the horrors of war, but in Bergman’s capable hands it becomes a meditation, once again, on the disintegration of the personality in the face of life’s horrors, as the husband and wife are subjected to violence, hopelessness, and sexual humiliation. It all builds to a horrifying closing image that you won’t soon forget.

The Passion of Anna. The last film of Bergman’s deconstructionist phase tells the story of the relationship between Andreas (von Sydow), recovering from the demise of his marriage, and Anna (Ullmann), mourning the recent deaths of her husband and son. It sounds the most straightforward of the bunch, but it’s anything but, as Bergman loads up the film with metafilmic flourishes like interviews with his actors about their characters. The tale itself is perhaps the most horrifying of the four, featuring sexual betrayal, emotional violence, shifting identities, dishonesty, spying, a possible murder, and animal mutilation. As with Shame before it, The Passion of Anna brings the viewer to the point of maximum confusion and horror and then leaves them hanging there, without resolution or relief.

Sounds fun, right? Seriously, if you’re looking for a creepy movie that isn’t the same old horror fare, you could do a lot worse than any of these four. They’re thought-provoking, mesmerizing, and yes, scary as all get-out. What could be better on a dark fall night?