The Virgin Spring (1960)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Devout Christians Töre and Märeta send their only daughter, the virginal Karin, and their foster daughter, the unrepentant Ingeri, to deliver candles to a distant church. On their way through the woods, the girls encounter a group of savage goat herders who brutally rape and murder Karin as Ingeri remains hidden. When the killers unwittingly seek refuge in the farmhouse of Töre and Märeta, Töre plots a fitting revenge.
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What critics compared The Virgin Spring to
Nonetheless, if the chilling tone and visual starkness can be compared to anything, it might be to Ingmar Bergman’s then-scandalous 1960 rape drama The Virgin Spring .
The number one inspiration that comes to mind is Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring .
In particular, I thought there were strong parallels between this film and The Virgin Spring (1960), which was about the living nightmare experienced by a girl when she is trapped in the woodlands and the repercussions of a violent act.
At times, thanks to the harsh landscape and baroque production design, this concoction feels like “The Virgin Spring” meets “Lady from Shanghai.”
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Having made his mark with The Last House on the Left, such as it was, by turning Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring into ultra-sleazy and ridiculously amateurish drive-in horror, it took Craven five years to come up with Hills, which was essentially Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs set in the desert with inbred mutants standing in for inhospitable British rubes.
Matched against the golden dirt of the desert is the sad nocturnal blue of a swamp, where scavengers prowl on stilts and where, in an extraordinary spectacle, Max wrestles with a lonely tree, just as Max von Sydow did in Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring.”
"Did you know it was based on Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring?"
But no matter how hard it tries to dress up its sadism in bogus pretensions, this ain't The Virgin Spring.
This kind of movie has been made before, aside from Zarchi's original, and it could be argued more effectively: Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1960), and its unofficial American remake Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (1972), as well as the inferior remake of that film, from 2009.
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Among the missing: After the Rehearsal (1984), Face to Face (1976), The Touch (1971), Brink of Life (1958), The Magician (1958), Sawdust and Tinsel (1951) and Summer Interlude (1950).