Vampyr (1932) Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
★★★★☆
In German, this uniquely stylized horror film was originally titled Vampyr – Der Traum des Allan Gray, or “Vampyr: The Dream of Allan Gray.” Appropriately, the film has an eerie dream-like quality to its scenes. It was notably funded by European aristocrat Nicolas de Gunzburg, who also starred in the film under a pseudonym (“Julian West”), and the script for the film was based on J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s In A Glass Darkly, a collection of horror stories (though it contains obvious echoes of other popular vampiric stories like Bram Stoker’s Dracula). The two chief stories they drew upon were “Carmilla and “The Room in the Dragon Volant.” Despite being extremely unpopular in its heyday, today Vampyr is rightly celebrated as an amazing landmark in the history of horror cinema. What it lacks in plot it makes up for with captivating visuals and cinematography –much of the evocative imagery pays loving homage to classic silent era horror films like F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu.
A chilling Gothic classic, Vampyr tells the story of Allan Gray, a student of the occult. He travels to an Inn near Courtempierre, a village located in northern France, which is currently being haunted by a vampire. Eventually, Gray learns the secret of the vampire and kills her, lifting the curse. It is a simple, almost non-linear plot for an unnerving, unsettling film.
Vampyr was a challenging film for Dreyer to complete as it was his first sound film, and it was actually completed in three different languages –German, French, and English– and therefore to avoid endless reshoots, it features very little dialogue (Vampyr was mostly shot in the style of a silent film and the actors all mouthed their lines in three different languages). Dreyer employs soft film techniques and other unique special effects, such as shadows or reflections moving without a person in front of them. Notably, Vampyr was Dreyer’s immediate follow-up to his seminal 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc, but tragically, despite attempting to capitalize on the popularity of stage performances of Dracula at the time, Vampyr was met with audible boos upon initial release in Berlin. It is only in more recent years that Vampyr has been hailed by film buffs as an experimental classic of nightmarish horror cinema.
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Credits:
- Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
- Writers: Christen Jul and Carl Theodor Dreyer
- Based on: “In a Glass Darkly,” an 1872 story by Sheridan Le Fanu
- Produced by: Carl Theodor Dreyer and Julian West
- Starring:
- Nicolas de Gunzburg (credited as “Julian West”)…..Allan Gray
- Rena Mandel…..Giséle
- Sybille Schmitz…..Léone
- Henriette Gérard…..Marguerite Chopin, the vampire
- Cinematography: Rudolph Maté
- Edited by: Tonka Taldy and Carl Theodor Dreyer
- Music by: Wolfgang Zeller