Caseus Archivelox: The Magician

2002-02-05
An Ingmar Bergman thinking man’s horror film. At least that is one description of it I have read. In the movie, a “magician” (Volger) who studied under Mesmer enters 1846 Stockholm with his wife, his grandmother, a drunk and dying actor, and his handler. He and his wife (Amanda) are disguised (and he has acted mute) in order to throw off the police who want them for undisclosed crimes, but likely related to the fact that they are frauds and do all their healing with mirrors and the like. They are lead to the house of a city council member, who is waiting with a doctor (Vergérus) and the chief of police who want to expose the magician as a fraud. That night, Vergérus tells Volger he wants the magician to make him feel something. During one of their tricks the next morning, one of the servants of the house “kills” the magician. I want to write about one of the later (9 min. long) scenes that is the only scary scene in the movie. The doctor takes what he believes to be the body of the magician up into the attic and performs an autopsy on it. The magician’s wife locks the doctor in the attic at the bequest of a muffled voice and a hand, and after he finishes writing the autopsy’s findings down, the doctor begins to hear and see strange things. First, he hears an extra chime on the clock, and when he tries to start writing more, he sees an eye in his inkstand. Then his papers are knocked off the desk, and when he attempts to organize them, a hand is put on the papers. He stands up, insinuates that it is the heat that is causing him to see and experience these weird incidents and tries to leave, only to find that he has been locked in the room. When the doctor tries to find some tools to break the lock on the door, he looks into a mirror and sees the disembodied head of the magician. An interesting cut to the face of the doctor is used to show that the head is not there for the uninvolved audience, but for the doctor alone, as only after the cut to the doctor’s face do we see the head in the background of the mirror. He tries to confirm that the head is not on the body that he has just autopsied, but something rips his glasses off right before he can do so, and then steps on them to break them. Assuming that he is dreaming, the doctor then sits down to wait until he wakes up, but hears the clock chime again, unnaturally. Right beyond the clock is a mirror, and the doctor sees the magician in it, standing right behind him. As a short bass drum roll is the first music in the scene builds, the mirror cracks, the music stops, and the doctor gets up and runs to the other side of the attic to check the mirror. He backs up against a slotted wall and is choked by a hand that comes through the wall as the drums begin again, and quiet down only to build slowly except for certain startling scenes. Escaping, he stumbles to the other side of the room, and falls into a dirty hole in the floor that could be construed as a coffin. Standing up again, the doctor begins to follow the magician through the slotted wall, until the magician sticks his hand out to stop him. The magician (in the rags of the now-dead actor) then begins to walk slowly towards the sitting doctor who flees, still sitting down. The drums build again, and a tambourine joins in giving the proceedings an eerie rattle, until he falls down the stairs and starts to scream. The magician is stopped from attacking the doctor by the timely intervention of his wife. The doctor says that all he got was a slight fear of death, when it is obvious that he was more than a little afraid for his life.

The scene is genuinely frightening, as the audience is not sure whether the magician is actually dead or not. Vergérus is the pinnacle of science and the fear in his eyes at the supernatural experience that he has (with the magician coming back from the dead to exact his revenge upon the doctor, in classic gothic fashion) is an interesting look at the tendency of all people to believe what they see rather than what makes rational sense when they are threatened. As for music, there is only a small amount of disjointed pizzicato string music at the very beginning as the hand tells Amanda to lock the attic, but for most of the scene there is little dialogue or music, and so the audience focuses upon the strange goings on onscreen. Whenever something strange occurs, the drums stop.