Day of Wrath (1943)

Ah, Carl Theodor Dreyer, it's been a while. When you're not dabbling in artistic horror, I can count on you for some sort of religious message. This film, based on a play, is more drama than horror, but it seemed appropriate for my October lineup due to a focus on witches.

It's set in 1623 small-town Denmark, which apparently had the same problem as 1692 Salem. Early on, a woman begs Rev. Absalon to get her off the hook for alleged witchcraft, as he did for his eventual mother-in-law. He shows concern only for her soul, not her life, even when she threatens blackmail if not a posthumous curse. The thought weighs heavily on him after her execution, but it's rather incidental to his most immediate problem: His young wife, Anne, who apparently married him for convenience and not love, falls for his son from a previous marriage. What's more, Absalon's mother has suspected from the get-go that Anne takes after her mother in wickedness.

Ordet (1955)

The British Film Institute's favorite films include quite a few artsy numbers that do next to nothing for me. Taking a suggestion from the list, especially one that I'd barely heard of elsewhere, was pretty chancy on my part. I did enjoy The Passion of Joan of Arc and found Vampyr at least pretty interesting, so another Carl Theodor Dreyer hit would seem safe -- only I hadn't looked up the detail before. From the look of the title, I had assumed French, not Danish.

It means "The Word." If you guessed a religious connotation, congrats. The story concerns a Lutheran farm owner with three sons: Anders, who wants to marry a woman from a slightly (but too significantly for their fathers) different religious background; Mikkel, a bitter agnostic who nevertheless loves his wife Inger; and Johannes, who, having studied Kierkegaard, proclaims himself the second coming of Christ. When Inger has complications in giving birth, the philosophical focus rests almost entirely on whether faith can move mountains long after biblical times.