Images comes closer to fascination than frustration. These three movies are the epitome of the “art horror” subgenre, a corpus of films that is by turns fascinating and infuriating. Phallic images and viscous fluids reappear often. Though I like the Polanski and Altman films, Repulsion, Images, and Antichrist are all too schematic in attributing certain stereotypical tropes to male or female sexuality-brute force, an arrogant sense of entitlement, and cool, emotionless rationale for the males ceaseless paranoia and self-criticism, emotional hysteria, and vengeful penetration for the females. All four of them are misogynistic to varying degrees, with Bergman's film by far the most sensitive to individual female characters as distinct people with relatable crises, and with art film techniques that amplify the characters' plight instead of overshadowing them. All three films (and Antichrist as well) take place in a nightmarish realm where the metaphorical guises of male and female sexuality torment female characters to varying degrees, shattering identity and disturbingly fusing together women's corporeal and psychological states. With Images, we are in the realm of Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966) or Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965), two films that Altman has cited as influences. The symbolism is too blatant, too coldly pedantic, but it remains interesting we may be turned off by some of Altman's film-schoolish allusions, but we are simultaneously aroused by them, in every sense of the word. We experience the latter when Cathryn heeds Marcel's advice to kill him-again-by shooting him with a shotgun, only to realize that she has shot and destroyed her husband's expensive camera instead. She becomes convinced that the only way to rid herself of these apparitions is to kill them, leaving a trail of corpses in her wake-some real, some imaginary. We can never really trust what she sees, unsure if the force that is terrorizing her is the synecdochic phantom of male sexuality (the “male gaze” turned murderous) or Cathryn's own guilt. Although the possibility is raised that Marcel never took the flight and is still very much alive-or, on the other hand, that his ghost continues to haunt Cathryn, as an apparition and not a hallucination-it seems clear that Cathryn's aggressive and self-annihilating imagination is tearing her apart from the inside. In addition to her husband, Hugh, a schoolboy-ish joker oblivious to his wife's torment, two other men show up: a neighbor, Rene, boorish and impetuous, who paws at Cathryn every chance he gets and who believes her sexual reticence can be cured by persistent harassment and Marcel, one of Cathryn's ex-lovers, a Frenchman who died in a plane crash three years ago. While there, the wife, Cathryn (characters actually have names here, unlike in von Trier's film, in which we can only identify the protagonists with the emblematic labels “She” and “He”), plummets into a hallucinatory nightmare of sexual guilt. One of his few films that could unquestionably be called a horror movie, it concerns a husband and wife's weekend retreat to a foggy vacation home buried deep within Ireland's atmospheric hillsides. Images is an odd duck in Altman's filmography. The latter stems from character its horror and violence emanate from a troublingly real place. The former takes root with brutality infamy is its claim to fame. Whereas Lars von Trier's Antichrist amounts to little more than grimy self-indulgence, Images is, though cold and difficult, almost endlessly fascinating. The comparison, however, almost entirely favors Altman's film. A recent viewing of Robert Altman's heady 1972 thriller Images brought to mind last year's more shocking, more self-conscious, and more juvenile horror provocation: Antichrist.