The Phantom Carriage (1921)
Plays here · source: Internet Archive
On New Year's Eve, a dying Salvation Army worker's last wish to see the dissolute David Holm sets a ghostly reckoning in motion: struck down at midnight, Holm is carried through his own wasted, cruel life by Death's phantom coachman.
Victor Sjöström’s double-exposure ghost effects were state-of-the-art in 1921 and remain quietly unnerving a century later, and The Phantom Carriage’s nested-flashback structure left such a mark on Ingmar Bergman — who reportedly screened it every year on his birthday — that its fingerprints show up across his own career.
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