{"id":9602,"date":"2025-02-28T13:57:12","date_gmt":"2025-02-28T19:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/?p=9602"},"modified":"2026-02-17T16:20:25","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T22:20:25","slug":"korkarlen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/?p=9602","title":{"rendered":"K\u00f6rkarlen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>And then there are some nights when you sit down to watch a silent Swedish film that is spiritually ripping off A Christmas Carol<\/em>, but if the Ghost of Christmas Future is the only one who showed up to berate Scrooge, and if Tiny Tim were a consumptive self-deluded Salvation Army worker.<\/p>\n

It’s New Year’s Eve, and Sister Edit is dying, while David Holm is getting drunk in a cemetery. What do these scenes and people have in common? This informs the entire plot of The Phantom Carriage<\/a>, except for the part about the carriage itself, which we are notified in Act I is driven around all year helping Death to reap souls, by whoever died closest to midnight the previous year. (If nobody dies on New Year’s Eve, I think the previous person keeps the job? This doesn’t seem a likely scenario, however.)<\/p>\n

At first, as per my cheeky but fair summary above, I did not consider this to be a horror movie. Just because there’s a horse ghost and a guy in a hood with a sickle, it was still mostly<\/em> a drama about bad decisions. But somewhere in the second half, it goes dark, and it goes hard, and I gotta say, in the end I was impressed. Between the depth of darkness and the (for 1921) technical prowess of the special effects, I can understand how this has turned into a classic’s classic. (You know, people in the industry love it, people outside the industry never heard of it. Like the anecdote about how only 300 people heard The Velvet Underground’s first album, but every one of those people went on to form a successful band.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And then there are some nights when you sit down to watch a silent Swedish film that is spiritually ripping off A Christmas Carol, but if the Ghost of Christmas Future is the only one who showed up to berate Scrooge, and if Tiny Tim were a consumptive self-deluded Salvation Army worker. It’s New Year’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[446,106,30,1327,1395],"class_list":["post-9602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","tag-drama","tag-fantasy","tag-horror","tag-plex","tag-random-number-generator-horror-podcast-9"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9602"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9607,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9602\/revisions\/9607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}