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1932’s Vampyr was Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s first sound film and is a landmark in horror history.
Dreyer’s last film had been Joan of Arc, unquestionably one of the greatest films ever made,
but he struggled to find backing for Vampyr,
working outside of the studio system and getting funding from aristocrat Nicolas de Gunzburg
who agreed to bankroll the picture in return for playing the lead role under the pseudonym Julian West.
The film was shot as a silent, with sound added later,
and benefits hugely from silent technique as well as having a full score,
something Hollywood films of the era mostly lacked.
#Music# ‘Silence!’
And Dreyer’s brilliant use of sound effects is something that often gets overlooked alongside the film’s more famous visuals.
#Clock ticking and gears cranking#
On the other hand the actors had to mime their lines in French, German and English for the different release versions.
Although the English version may never even have been completed.
I could go on and it’s easy to get carried away with the behind the scenes story but the film itself is extraordinary.
Based on a pair of stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, the narrative follows Allan Grey,
visiting a French village to research the supernatural and finding more than he bargained for.
It could be the plot of any number of horrors but Dreyer focuses more on atmosphere than traditional narrative,
letting the evocative images tell their own story as Grey encounters reflections from nowhere,
strange locals and shadows in search of their owner.
There is an almost overwhelming air of the unexplained,
Centred on daughter of the manor Leone,
who seems to be the victim of a legendary local vampire.
Dreyer seldom bothered with straightforward naturalism during his career,
and here that stylisation contributes to the pervasive sense of unease.
On its release, Vampyr was, I think it’s fair to say, hated by audiences and critics,
and it may have suffered in comparison to Universal’s Dracula which had already come out
and offered a more accessible and less ambiguous version of a pretty similar story.
It’s taken time for Vampyr to get the credit it deserves but it remains a challenging, even infuriating,
first watch for horror fans, thanks to it slow pace and opaque plot.
This is not going to make you jump, it’s not even going for the quiet, insidious horror of something like Nosferatu.
Vampyr is unnerving
even disturbing and the all the more so for the fact that we often do not know what’s happening.
As is often the case with Dreyer, there’s nothing else like it
and putting what makes it special into words is next to impossible.
Better to just watch it and make up your own mind.
Thanks for watching. Vampyr is the gold standard of arthouse horror,
what other films would you put in that somewhat dubious category? Let us know in the comments below.