“You’re right to worry”: the shamanic journey responsible for Lars Von Trier’s ‘Antichrist’
One of the major takeaways from experiencing peak Lars Von Trier in Antichrist – beyond the standard what-the-fuckery – is wondering how on earth a filmmaker could come up with something so intentionally maddening and deliberately provocative.
The simple answer is because that’s what Von Trier does, with the auteur’s career defined by going against the grain, taking the art of cinema in completely different and unmistakably unique directions, while regularly inciting controversy for taboo-busting subject matter and graphic content.
In that regard, Antichrist is his magnum opus. To call the reaction to his 2009 arthouse horror polarising would be doing it a massive injustice. Many are willing to die on the hill that it remais one of the greatest motion pictures of the modern era, and just as many have no issues calling it the onscreen equivalent of scraping the bottom of the barrel in the name of shock and awe.
As always tends to be the case with boundary-pushing cinema, the truth lies completely in the eye of the beholder. One thing that can’t be argued is that it’s the work of a singular visionary, regardless of personal preference towards the troubling depictions of graphic genital mutilation.
How did Von Trier concoct the dreamlike imagery, narrative savagery, and relentless assault on the senses that Antichrist became? According to the man himself, it required a shamanic journey that took him down a path so dark and desolate that even Nicolas Cage would give it a second thought before diving in.
“You’re right to worry,” Von Trier admitted to The Guardian of the mindset he found himself in during the process of realising Antichrist. “But it’s not good to worry about something you cannot do anything about. Truthfully, I can only say I was driven to make the film, that these images came to me, and I did not question them.”
The deer, fox, and raven that regularly appear onscreen are symbolic of grief, pain, and despair, with Von Trier explaining that “all these animals come from a practice I did.” To get into the zone, he embraced “a Brazilian technique where you enter a trance through this very powerful drumbeat.” Remarkably, there were no drugs involved whatsoever, although the director did clarify that “it’s not really that difficult to enter the parallel world.”
What did he find once he’d entered this parallel world? “When I first went there, I met the fox that you see in the film,” he explained. “It was biting itself, and I was very shocked. It was unpleasant to watch so I travelled on until I saw a family of silver foxes, very Disney-like, all the young ones and the grownups, running around. Happy foxes.”
It sounds suitably trippy and perfectly on-brand for Von Trier. Anyone who’s braved Antichrist knows that the story and visuals weren’t created through conventional means, so adopting Brazilian trances and speaking to hallucinatory foxes actually makes a decent amount of sense. Contextually, at least.
