A Great Filmmaker Takes Us on a Journey Into the Subconscious
Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889-1968) earned a secure place in the pantheon of great filmmakers with The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Ordet (1955). The former is a sad and beautiful movie about the trial of the famous historical figure, while the latter is a strange and upbeat film about a man who claims to be Jesus Christ and the miracle of a dead woman coming back to life. Dreyer was noted for his striking compositions and idiosyncratic visual style.
In 1932 the mesmerizing Dreyer film Vampyr was released, and it is a one-of-a-kind vampire movie that constantly confounds viewer expectations. Dreyer was much more interested in mood and atmosphere than in conventional plot and character development. The film has a dreamlike quality, creating a psychological reality rather than a naturalistic one. The result is an enigmatic movie that is unsettling and haunting.
There is minimal dialogue spoken in Vampyr, and the sensibility here is essentially that of the silent cinema. This works to the film's advantage, helping it to maintain a somber tone while avoiding slipping into camp as so many vampire movies do. The sparse dialogue is probably due in part to the fact that Vampyr was originally intended to be released in separate French, German and English versions. This intention was realized for the French and German versions, but a scholar on the DVD says there is no record the English version was ever completed. On the Criterion Collection DVD set, the feature film is the German version, although some clips from the French version are shown in bonus materials.
Poetic Visuals Tell an Uncanny Tale
The protagonist in Vampyr is a young adult man who is here called Allan Gray (but known as David Gray in some versions). Gray wanders into an out-of-the-way French village and finds himself in an area plagued by a vampire in the form of an unattractive, dour old woman. Her chief henchman turns out to be the evil village doctor. Gray soon meets a pair of good-looking sisters, one of whom is being fed upon by the vampire, and he gets caught up in a series of eerie experiences. But it's often ambiguous as to whether what we see is supposed to be happening in the real world or only inside Gray's head. The film leaves much unexplained.
But Dreyer's concern is not so much with narrative coherence as with visual rhythms and images. The most celebrated sequence involves shots from the point of view of a man lying inside a coffin and looking out through a small window as he is being carried to the cemetery. Another unforgettable sequence shows a terrified man trapped inside a cage as a massive amount of flour pours in on top of him. There's also a disquieting sequence where a man with a pegleg is sitting on a bench when his detached shadow comes walking up, leans a rifle against the wall and sits down alongside him. In yet another disconcerting sequence, a man carrying a scythe rings a bell to summon a boat that ferries him across the river. It is arresting images like these that linger in the mind long after the movie is over.
A Little Perspective on the Roots of Dreyer's Vampire Movie
For most of us, Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi is the quintessential vampire movie. But this Hollywood film couldn't have had much influence on Dreyer since he was winding down photography on Vampyr in France at about the same time Universal Studios began shooting Dracula in L.A. Still, Dreyer must have known about the stage versions of Dracula that were big hits in New York and London during the 1920s, and he would surely have been familiar with the 1922 German film Nosferatu. He would also have been aware that the stage plays and the movies Dracula and Nosferatu were all derived from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula.
At a very high level of abstraction — a young guy travels to an isolated place where he encounters a vampire — Dreyer's story bears a slight resemblance to Stoker's novel. But Vampyr was made without obtaining the rights to the Stoker material, and this may explain in part why the filmmakers claim the movie was based on Sheridan Le Fanu's book In a Glass Darkly, a collection of supernatural stories published 25 years earlier than Stoker's Dracula. That collection does contain a story titled "Carmilla" which has a female vampire in it, but there is almost no other similarity to Dreyer's film. Buyers of the DVD set can verify this for themselves since it comes packaged with a book containing both "Carmilla" and Vampyr's screenplay.
In short, Vampyr owes very little to either Le Fanu or Stoker, but the filmmakers may have stated the movie was based on In a Glass Darkly as a way of establishing that they were not doing a version of the Dracula story.
Good, but Nerdy Bonus Materials
Arguably the best bonus material on the DVD set is the scholarly 36-minute English-language "Visual Essay" by a professor from the University of Copenhagen. He says that the entire film was shot on locations found not far from Paris. He claims that Dreyer kept tinkering with the title and finally ended up with The Strange Adventure of David Gray. (It was probably the German distributor who ultimately changed the title to Vampyr.) The professor identifies some of the visual influences on Dreyer as coming from the painters Fuseli, Goya, Millet and Corot. Perhaps the most interesting thing is the scene deleted by German censors showing that it is Gray who wields the hammer when the iron stake is driven through the vampire's heart.
Another good extra is the 30-minute 1966 Danish-language documentary "Carl Th. Dreyer," which chronicles the great director's career. Clips from several of his films are shown, ordered by release date, and after each clip Dreyer talks about making the movie. He directed only 14 feature-length films, of which only five were talkies. But he will always be remembered for The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943), Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964).
The most enjoyable bonus material is probably the audio commentary track provided by film scholar Tony Rayns. He covers almost everything you would want to know about Vampyr and astutely observes that it is full of disjunction, by which he means unorthodox editing and framing and shots that don't seem to match.
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