The Four Nightmares

Wanderwelle, The Four Nightmares (2023), stills, b&w and colour, sound, courtesy the artists

The Four Nightmares, an experimental collage film, tells the story of a man plagued by a series of fever dreams whispered by a giant, malevolent egg. The great crises of our time follow one another like hallucinatory nightmares with no escape. The film has been selected for the Gouden Kalf Competition (2023) and the Debut Competition (2023) by the Netherlands Film Festival (NFF).

The film is influenced by the Bible book The Revelation of John in which the four horsemen of the Apocalypse wreak death and destruction. Despite the unpleasant idea, the prophetic book has many parallels with our modern world. Large-scale disease outbreaks, wars, ecological disasters and false prophets are commonplace nowadays and it seems the four horsemen have already made their sinister entrance on the world stage. Are these ancient prophecies slowly but surely transforming into present-day realities?

The source material of The Four Nightmares comes from the immense collection of the Eye Filmmuseum. Instead of focusing on the physical material, which is quite common in the found footage genre, Wanderwelle chose to focus strongly on narrative and allegorical references. By cutting up archival footage, re-editing it, manipulating it through digital techniques and artificial intelligence and adding sound design and music, the artists created a fast-pacing surreal plot of their own. The film’s grainy look and bleak imagery emphasize the existential fear of the bedridden protagonist.

Read the in-depth interview for Eye magazine here (Dutch/English)

Date
2023

Medium
Analogue film transferred to digital video (b/w, colour, sound)

Duration
25:53 min.