Jack London State Historic Park: Wolf House, the Cottage, Silos & Museum

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• The History of Colonia Dignidad
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And so we embark on Maria’s psychedelic misadventures when she flees the pressures of her clan and finds refuge in a remote home. With no living soul on her side other than two of the pigs whose escape she facilitated, the lonesome Maria soon realizes her sentient shelter responds to her fears, desires and thoughts, modifying itself accordingly every waking second. There also seems to be a wolf somewhere out there, spying on Maria in an utterly Big Brother-esque fashion. The kaleidoscopic animated fable follows Maria, a girl who ran away from The Colony to avoid punishment for allowing three pigs to escape from their pen.

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The History of Colonia Dignidad

Despite Maria trying hard to run away from the Colonia and escape her past, the wolf at the door catches up with both her and her children in the end. Much like Paul Schäfer and the rest of the Nazis at the Colonia, Maria’s pursuit of purit was constantly at threat from her own guilt, and everything fell apart due to it at the end. As Chile descended into fascism under Augusto Pinochet’s rule in the 70s, things at the Colonia became darker and more violent. Rather than just being a cult in the woods, it was transformed into an internment camp for political dissidents.

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The characters and many of the props are constructed out of papier-mâché, an unusual animation medium that proves fitting to depict the fragility and malleability of a dreamlike world. The action freely flows between 2D and 3D, the characters alternately depicted as paintings on walls, live figures in the space, or in some unsettling in-between state. The Wolf House looks like no other film, which makes its horrific imagery all the more difficult to shake from your head. A clue to make sense of this nightmarish fever dream is fed to us right at the beginning, as we view what appears to be propaganda footage of a southern Chilean cult known as the Colony, where its German inhabitants lived close to nature in alleged harmony. In order to dispel the nasty rumors that have spread regarding the community—none of which are specified—the Colony has delved into its vaults to present us with the following indoctrination video designed to venerate the purity of their lifestyle. Indeed, one can imagine cult members toiling away on this meticulous spectacle as ordered by their tyrannical leader, whose seductive voice takes the form of a wolf (Rainer Krause), while the pervasive sickness of their ideology inadvertently creeps into every frame.

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Perhaps comparing it to a David Lynch film can come close to characterizing the experience. And one’s viewing of it might greatly benefit from some Wikipedia-level familiarity with the history of Colonia Dignidad (the Dignity Colony), a remote, Chile-based Nazi sect founded after the World War II, which loosely lends the film its basic narrative. While it was supposedly formed to represent a simple agricultural lifestyle, the cult was known for its torture practices and murders, especially during the Pinochet regime, as well as its longtime leader Paul Schäfer, a convicted pedophile and notorious criminal.

Mindful of the severe damage caused by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, London and Farr incorporated great strength and durability into the design of the structure. The fire had a profound effect on those most involved in the project—Charmian wrote that “the razing of his house killed something in Jack, and he never ceased to feel the tragic inner sense of loss”. Jack London wrote so often about wolves and dogs that his friend George Sterling gave him the nickname “The Wolf”.

They claim there is enough food in the house and that leaving would only put her at risk of being caught by the wolf. For the first time, María thinks longingly of the Colony and voices a more positive view of the wolf. “Our work is fundamentally interdisciplinary, drawing resources from both visual arts and the worlds of film and animation,” León and Cociña explained in a statement. Dale’s Subservience, and recently wrapped the four-part drama series Coma for CBS Studios and Channel 5 Television. She was previously featured in Ian Fitzgibbon’s Christmas Carole and Carol Morley’s Typist Artist Pirate King. The home's sparkling pool offers yet another tranquil spot to take in the sweeping views.

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The film unfolds as a single continuous sequence, the camera and the animation constantly in motion, with the walls surrounding Maria pulsating as she melts into them. Her body crumbles as papier-mâché and rebuilds itself in pieces of silicone. Maria and the pigs will be paintings on the cabin’s walls one moment and three-dimensional puppets the next. The paint on the surface of a puppet that imbues it with life will melt off onto the floor, leaving the character drained and ghostly. These techniques create a sense of claustrophobia, but in a peculiar way; the walls are not closing in but rather perpetually remaking themselves, yet never with a way out. It’s often difficult to tell whether it is the camera that’s moving or the backgrounds, as a bathroom breaks apart tile by tile and reconstructs into a dining room.

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So, when Jack started building his dream house in 1911, it was only fitting that it would become known as the “Wolf House”. Construction was nearly complete when a fire began late on the night of August 22, 1913, spreading rapidly and gutting the interior of the house—only the massive masonry walls remained standing by the morning. Although arson was suspected, no substantial evidence was ever discovered. In 1995, a forensic team of investigators concluded that the likely cause was the spontaneous combustion of linseed oil soaked rags left behind by workmen.

Needless to say, this unsettling origin story forebodes what was to come. Schäfer was joined by hundreds of other Germans emigrants – many of which were former Nazis. Some sources even claim that Josef Mengele, the infamous Angel of Death, could be found at Colonia Dignidad. In other words, we don’t fault you if you feel a bit lost after watching The Wolf House.

Maria’s life is a tale being used to show that the German community is nothing like those awful rumors that you may have heard. If an Orwellian fable were to be visualized by a surrealist in the vein of Salvador Dali, the result would look and feel something like “The Wolf House,” a jaw-dropping marriage of various animation techniques, chiefly stop-motion. Audiences will frequently ask themselves, “How on earth did they pull that off?

We try to create something that shows you all bones, fibers and blood. It might be hyperbolic or unhelpful to label Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña’s “The Wolf House” as the darkest animated movie ever made, but merely describing this stop-motion nightmare should be enough to explain the impulse. In a brief closing narration, the wolf says María regained her helpful and hardworking spirit once she returned home. He offers to take the "little pigs" in the audience home to the Colony, where he promises he will care for them.