Review of Thriller: A Cruel Picture

You might ask yourself why there was a clause in the filmworkers contracts that they must keep the real director a secret. Well, it is on the surface a very provocative and nasty swedish film for its time and even by today's standards. I do however know a really disturbing reason, which was presented by one of the main workers on this film on a movie buff gathering in Sala (Sweden) when this cast or crew (I won't give the name) attended as a guest. The thing is, the scene with the eye, is real - performed on a fresh corpse (which was a suicide victim which gave automatic permission for an autopsy) at the Karolinska hospital supposedly, and the director had contacts who granted him to film the exercise on the eye in connection to the autopsy. This is gruesome stuff, and probably the real reason why the director still wants to remain obscure and doesn't give interviews. However, he wasn't alone, and in Spain they did several films with real gore due to the lack of a special effects talent. Javier Aguirre's "Hunchback from morgue" is one more known example, where the star Paul Naschy began severing a real head before he couldn't finish it - but they kept the frames where he cuts half-way, and they finished the scene with a prop head. This is described in Naschy's autobiography as well as his commentary track on the german special edition dvd. So, back to Thriller. It is indeed a shocking film and an admirable piece of film history - just see what has come out of it with Kill Bill and all. Worth mentioning is the beautiful score by Ralph Lundsten, which gives the film a dreamlike and surreal quality - and something you can see in all of Vibenius films is his great talent to direct dreamlike and surreal scenes. I have all of his films and I happened to see the first one when I was 4 or 5 something. His two following works however, I am happy to have seen later as a young adult. Gosh, you gotta be a special guy if you first do a movie for kids and then move on to Thriller and Breaking Point. We will never see an official box set with these three films, safe to say.