Shadows of Shadows: the Undead in Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

Reminiscent of earlier haunted screens in Swedish cinema, Ingmar Bergman’s ghosts and his fantasies of spectrality emerge with close ties to a broader series of cultural influences. Bergman’s spectral presences, as this chapter aims to demonstrate, are complex presences echoing gothic and pagan traditions, national and international literature. At times mere hallucinations dissolving into thin air, Bergman’s ghosts can also be corporeal and animated dead bodies. This characteristic is reminiscent of a pre-gothic narrative tradition provided by Scandinavian and Icelandic sagas, where spectres inhabit the barrows in which they were enclosed and that are known as draugr or haugbúi. They leave their burial sites to prey on men and maintain intellect and a residual personality. This chapter thus aims at an in-depth reassessment of this aspect of Bergman’s cinema and his narratives eerily populated by spectral presences caused by disturbances in the acts of dying and grieving.