Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring

The Virgin Spring was Ingmar Bergman's 1960 film based on a 13th century Swedish ballad. Basically, and I'll warn you, this could be a SPOILER-------- a couple of herdsmen rape and kill a girl on her way to church. They steal her dress. They travel on a ways and stop at a farm. This is Sweden and it's cold at night, so they ask if they can spend the night in the barn. They offer to sell the wife the dress. The woman recognizes it and realizes these guys have murdered her daughter. Her husband gets out his butchering knife and, well, you can probably guess what happens from there.

But it turns out that the original ballad was a bit more like Oedipus Rex.

It was first sung in the 13th century, as I said. It was still being sung in the 19th century, and it had gone through some changes over the centuries. The ballad had three sisters killed by three men.

One version had the three men demand that the girls become their wives. They refuse, so the men kill them and steal their dresses. They travel on. They come to a farm. They offer to sell the dresses to the farmer's wife. She recognizes the dresses as her daughters' and yells to her husband. He kills two of the men with a sword. He demands that the third one tell him who he is, who his parents are. And it turns out that the three men were the farmer's own sons. The farmer had thrown them out years earlier when they were children and they had been fending for themselves all this time.

So it was brother-sister incest instead of mother-son incest. And the father manages to kill the sons rather than the other way around. But still, weirdly Oedipal.

It would have been a bit much for a movie. Bergman wisely toned it down.

The first Star Trek episode Charlie X seemed to be loosely based on Oedipus Rex, and all the episodes where Captain Kirk has to battle for the control of the Enterprise have been characterized as "Oedipal conflicts".

But, okay, in the medieval ballad, the father is wracked with guilt because he killed his own sons. In The Virgin Spring, I can't tell. When I saw it years ago, I thought the father felt bad about killing the rapists' little brother, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I guess he was upset about killing anyone at all. I heard that early Christians would hire Vikings to serve as mercenaries----back then, if a Christian killed anyone, even in war, they'd have to fast and do some sort of penance for a year.

I also watched some of Last House on the Left, a rather disgusting slasher film based on The Virgin Spring. A pretty nasty movie. Wes Craven's directorial debut.

I heard Craven in an interview. After the movie came out, he had friends who wouldn't let their children around him. I think that's a reasonable response.