Vampyr
1932 Fantasy / Horror
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Credits
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Summary
A student of the Occult, Allan Gray, is travelling in France when he arrives at the remote
village of Courtempierre. Whilst staying at an inn, he is visited by an old man
who gives him a parcel, not to be opened until after his death. Some mysterious
shadows lead Gray to an isolated castle in which lives the old man he met at the inn,
with his two young daughters, Gisèle and Léone. The latter is seriously
ill, but no one knows the cause of her sickness. The old man suddenly dies,
prompting Gray to open the parcel. He discovers an ancient book recounting a tale
about vampires...
Review
Nowadays, the fantasy horror genre in cinema is regarded with scant seriousness and even
some degree of derision. Often as not, what springs to mind are recollections of
the low budget, slightly camp Hammer productions of the 1960s and 1970s which, when seen
today, are more likely to provoke howls of laughter than send shivers up the spine.
In the early days of cinema, things were very different. Fantasy horror was a new frontier (must as sci-fi became several decades later), a place where imaginative avant-garde filmmakers could explore themes and techniques that had no place in conventional films. Consequently, these films were among the most ambitious, visually alluring and poetic of their day, an opportunity to really push the boundaries of what was possible. German expressionism was where the horror film was born. Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920) is often credited as the first horror film - and, with its heavily stylised design and artful use of shadows and oblique camera angles, it is certainly one of the most disturbing. This was followed by F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), cinema’s most famous, and arguably most chilling, interpretation of the vampire story. Watching this film alone at home, late at night with all the lights turned off, is probably the most sure-fire way of giving yourself a nightmare. It wasn’t until the 1930s that the horror film became established as a recognised genre. The success of Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), starring Bela Lugosi, resulted in a series of popular mainstream horror films from Universal Pictures, featuring Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, the Werewolf as well as that perennial favourite Dracula. This was the Golden Age of horror. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr stands apart from both the German expressionist and early Hollywood horror films. Stylistically, it’s a completely different kind of film, with an alluring dream-like quality and an otherworldly poetic sense. In most other horror films of the period, the threat was represented by a solid visible manifestation of evil - be it a toothy vampire, a lumbering monster or such like. In Vampyr , the threat is more abstract, an unseen presence which is held in the fabric of the film - sometimes glimpsed in shadows, sometimes felt in the atmosphere of a set or the way in which light is caught by the camera lens. There is a vampire in the film, in the form of a strange old woman, but somehow this is only a small fragment of the evil the spectator senses whilst watching the film. Here, evil is not a thing, it is an impression. Vampyr was shot as a silent film, but just before its release Dreyer added a soundtrack which included some sparse (and pretty superfluous) dialogue. Three versions of the film were released, one in French, one in German and one in English. Dreyer’s main backer for the film was Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg who, under his stage name Julian West, played the lead role in the film. Dreyer hired only two professional actors - Sybille Schmitz and Maurice Schutz. The film was based on stories from Sheridan Le Fanu’s book "In a Glass Darkly". A propos, "Wampyr" (an old Balkan word for vampire) was the name that the writer Bram Stoker originally had in mind for Dracula. Today, Vampyr is almost universally regarded as a masterpiece, and certainly one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of fantasy horror films. Yet when it was first released in 1932, the film was a commercial failure, virtually ruining its director and preventing him from making any further films for a decade. Before making this film, Carl Theodor Dreyer distinguished himself with La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), an artistically inspired account of the trial and martyrdom of Joan of Arc. Vampyr is no less alluring, thanks to its hazy photography, which gives it its distinctive dream-like feel. This was achieved by over-exposing the film and by placing gauze filters over the camera lens. As in the expressionist films of the 1920s, shadows play an important part in the look of the film - emphasising the ghostly presence and adding to the dreamlike illusion. Perhaps the most memorable sequence in the film is where the main character splits into two - his spiritual and physical selves - with the spiritual half ending up being nailed up in a coffin and carried to its grave. This sequence includes the most imaginative shots in any of Dreyer’s films, depicting the journey of the coffin, seen from the perspective of the still conscious body within it. There are two other sequences of note - the impaling of the vampire woman and the gruesome death of her human ally (the sinister village doctor) in a flour mill. Both scenes score highly on the scare-o-meter, and both had cuts imposed upon them by the German censors when the film was first released. What makes Vampyr unique as a horror film is that it genuinely does feel like a dream. It has the unsettlingly partial reality of a dream - that curious mix of the familiar and the surreal, with that hazy border between the two. There’s that sense of disconnection that we only ever experience in dreams, of things not quite joining up. And there’s the awareness of the unknown - glimpses of strange images mirroring what lies buried deep within our subconscious - true horror, unfettered, unknown, and utterly terrifying. Vampyr is indeed the stuff of dreams - or rather, nightmares... © James Travers 2007 For World Cinema on DVD...
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