Originating from a script entitled The Cannibals, Hour of the Wolf is the first of three films featuring Max von Sydow as Bergman’s alter ego, the artist in retreat to an island (Faro, the director’s own home) where all his demons and imagined monsters can come out to play, threatening to possess their creator and “disappear” him into the darkness behind the brain.  A strikingly Gothic tale of horror, Hour of the Wolf owes much to Bram Stoker’s Dracula in its evocation of the artist’s admirer’s and tormentors as vampires, flocks of flesh-eating birds and insects.  A puppet show of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, staged after dinner in a sinister castle, counters the artist’s descent into nighttime madness with a quest that ends in light and joy. With Liv Ullmann, now playing an Alma, Ingrid Thulin, and Erland Josephson.