Vampyr (1932)
Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer

Film Review

Nowadays, the fantasy horror genre in cinema is regarded with scant seriousness and even some degree of derision.  In the early days of cinema, things were very different.  Fantasy horror was a new frontier (much 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, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), cinema's most famous, and arguably most chilling, interpretation of the vampire story.

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.  Many regard this as the Golden Age of horror.  Hammer would revive the classic horror genre, very successfully, with its Gothic cycle in the late 1950s.

Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr stands apart from all of these horror films, and is neither expressionistic nor Gothic in its design.  Rather, it employs a subtly different stylisation, one that possesses a poetic dreamlike feel.  In most other vampire films of its era, the horror element is represented by a solid visible manifestation of evil, Count Dracula or one of his brood.  In Vampyr, the threat is more abstract and is something that is felt, not seen.  There is a vampire in this film, in the guise of a strange old woman, but this is not what provides the chills when you watch the film.   Here, evil is not a solid, tangible thing; it is an impression, a cold dark shadow that falls across the soul.

The film was based on stories taken from Sheridan Le Fanu's book In a Glass Darkly, including the vampire story Carmilla, which would later be adapted by French director Roger Vadim as Et mourir de plaisir (1960) and by Hammer as The Vampire Lovers (1970).  A propos, Wampyr (an old Balkan word for vampire) was the name that the writer Bram Stoker originally had in mind for Dracula.

Dreyer made this film on the back of La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), which had been a critical and commercial success.   When he parted on bad terms with the French producers of that film, Société Générale de Films, Dreyer founded his own company, with the financial backing of aristocratic playboy and cinephile Nicolas de Gunzburg.   The latter was descended from a wealthy Russian banking family and, having lost his entire fortune in the mid-1930s, he would emigrate to the United States and re-invent himself as a socialite and fashion editor on such august publications as Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.

The one condition that Gunzburg stipulated in exchange for writing Dreyer a virtual blank cheque was that he should play the leading role in Vampyr, under a pseudonym (Julian West).  This suited Dreyer because he preferred to use non-professional actors where he could.  In fact, he employed only two professional actors on this film: Sybille Schmitz and Maurice Schutz.  Gunzburg's obvious lack of acting experience (and talent) works to the film's advantage - he is a passive observer whose role is merely to provide the gateway by which the spectator may enter the film.   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.

Today, Vampyr is widely regarded as a masterpiece of the horror genre and one of Dreyer's greatest films.  Yet when it was first released in 1932, the film was a box office disaster, virtually ruining its director and preventing him from working on any further films for a decade.  The combined strain of making this film and near-bankruptcy propelled Dreyer into a nervous breakdown, and he ended up in a Paris hospital, the appropriately named Clinique Jeanne d'Arc.

Vampyr is one of Dreyer's most visually exciting films and demonstrates not only the director's celebrated perfectionism but also his penchant for experimentation.  Instead of the fast cutting and extensive close-ups that had defined the visual style of his previous film (La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc), Dreyer employs long takes involving complicated gliding camera movements, a technique he would develop and refine on his subsequent films.  The ethereal haziness of the exterior sequences was achieved by over-exposing the film and by placing gauze filters over the camera lens.  This, together with some atmospheric lighting and imaginative use of multiple exposure, gives the film its distinctive dreamlike quality.

Perhaps the most memorable sequence in the film is the one where the main character (Gunzburg) 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 one of the most inspired pieces of camerawork of any Dreyer film, depicting the journey of the coffin from the perspective of the still conscious body within it.  There are two other sequences of note - the impaling of the aged 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 virtually unique as a horror film is that when you watch it you really do feel that you are experiencing something akin to a dream.  It takes us away from the world that we recognise as our safe, cosy reality, where everything is ordered, predictable and explainable, and deposits us in a strange ill-defined landscape that instantly awakens our most primitive fears, a place where symbols of death abound and where shadows walk by themselves.  In making this film, Dreyer wanted to show that true fear derives not from the things we see around us, but from our own subconscious.  Vampyr is indeed the stuff of dreams, or rather, nightmares...

Film Synopsis

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...