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Vampyr
1932 Fantasy / Horror
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Credits
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Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
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Script: Christen Jul, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Sheridan Le Fanu (stories)
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Photo: Rudolph Maté, Louis Née
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Music: Wolfgang Zeller
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Cast: Julian West (Allan Grey),
Maurice Schutz (Lord of the Manor),
Rena Mandel (Gisèle),
Sybille Schmitz (Léone),
Jan Hieronimko (Doctor),
Henriette Gérard (Marguerite Chopin),
Albert Bras (Old Servant)
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Country: France / Germany
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Language: German
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Runtime: 75 min
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Aka: Castle of Doom; The Vampire
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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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