31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 4: Vampyr

Day 4: Vampyr, dir. by Carl Theodor Dreyer

Streaming Availability: HBO Max

Count Dracula is not the only vampire game in town. At the very same time that Universal Pictures was creating their masterpiece in the US, over in Europe, Carl Theodor Dreyer, one of the greatest filmmakers of his era, was shooting his own seminal vampire work. Just like its American rival, Vampyr was an early, uncertain step into using sound for horror films. However, where Dracula was a massive success that launched the Golden Age of Horror, Vampyr ended up considered one of Dreyer's lesser works. It has become even less beloved than the other major German vampire film of this time, Nosferatu. Why would those movies become true icons, where Vampyr would not?

This is frankly in need of correcting. Say what you will about Dracula or Nosferatu, but I say they both fall short of their competition today. Vampyr is the single best vampire movie of the early 20th century. It is an extraordinary piece of art, with truly incredible technique for its time.

Vampyr is very, very loosely based on Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novella, Carmilla, the seminal classic of lesbian vampirism. (Dracula's Daughter was influenced by Le Fanu as well.) However, other than featuring an older female vampire who preys on young women, Vampyr has almost nothing about it that is queer or even sexual. 

Indeed, The vampire in question is barely in the movie at all. She's a gets a name, Marguerite Chopin (Henriette Gérard), but no characterization or lines. What we deal with more often is her lingering influence of evil that has possessed their entire town. The main villainous role belongs instead to her "Renfield", the Doctor (Jan Hieronimko), who appears more often. He even gets a more brutal and protracted death, as if he is the one deserving of the greatest punishment. The creepy smiling young girl on the poster is not Chopin, who is an old woman. But rather the "Lucy" of the story, Léone (Sybille Schmitz), one of two sisters targeted by Chopin. Schmitz does flash a magnificent and terrifying Joker grimace, and that makes for the single most iconic moment of horror in the film.

But, I can see why Spongebob Squarepants brought in Nosferatu for a cameo, not Chopin, or any of the villains in this. The evil is more a subtle dread that lingers over the entire story, without a single memorable silhouette of a villain who you can put on a lunchbox or anything.

Vampyr has a very dreamlike plot, with images that are vert often more metaphorical than literal. Our protagonist, Allan Gray (Nicolas de Gunzberg, the film's financial backer, credited as "Julian West") wanders into a village. He then sees a man dressed in black, with a sickle over his shoulder, ringing a bell. Later a grave old man barges into Allan's room holding a package with the message "to be opened upon my death". That package turns out to be a very real plot device, but with a movie like this this, you can't be sure. 

A good chunk of the middle of the movie involves Allan having either a dream or an actual out-of-body experience or some mixture of both. Allen then sees or imagines himself as a corpse. He's buried in a casket with an open window at his face, allowing him to see up at the vampire and the Doctor carrying him away. We get a beautiful shot of the camera looking upward at the sky as our POV is lead away to his burial.

The plot even follows a kind of dream logic. It all seems to be happening in real time, as a single journey across a twisted and cursed place. Gray simply walks into the manor where the plot is occurring, and at no point does anybody ask who he is or why he's here. He does not know the daughters being haunted by Chopin, but they accept him in. He is just part of this now. Gray is as much a ghost watching the plot as a true hero, later just incidentally joining in on the final victory over the vampire.

Adding to the quirks is  Dreyer's ambivalence towards sound. Much like Tod Browning does in Dracula, Dreyer relies a lot on textual interludes to fill in the plot, as you would in a silent film. There's a lot of telling versus showing. This is most prominent in a little book of vampire lore that Allan reads from, which features a literal text dump on the audience of all the rules of vampirism you'd ever need. We get whole pages of the book shown to us at a time, and it fills up easily five minutes of the movie. Vampyr has remarkably few lines of spoken dialog, which adds to the ethereal quality here.

The most impressive feature though to Vampyr would have to be the technical aspects. Much of the film is not shot on sets, but rather on location in the town of Courtempierre, France where the film is set. Shooting outside was very difficult at the time, so sometimes the shots are artfully hazy, sometimes they're barely readable. But the town itself adds a ton of production quality thanks its various gothic mansions and lovely river. Dreyer is also doing things with his camera that nobody would attempt over at Universal. We have an impressive long-take with several camera moves that goes through the entire manor. Since he distrusts dialog, much of the film's affect is instead created by imagery.

Even cooler though, are the special effects. The single best moment of Vampyr happens early on as Gray walks through an old mill full of shadows come to life. These shadows are in some way are servants of Chopin. She's let the town's spooky ghosts loose to distort reality without various optical illusions. Gray sees a one-legged man's shadow, which later sits down to join its body. There's a boy shoveling dirt backwards in time, so the shadow catches the loads in mid-air to drop them back to the Earth. Later Chopin's face appears to take over an entire window, as her final curse dooms her servants. Vampyr is going beyond spooky to a psychedelic and weird level that I love.

Vampyr is next-level stuff compared to what we've been doing so far this month. This is achieving a mood, an unsettling feeling, simply beyond Hollywood's capability at the time. I am so happy to have discovered a work of art this interesting this early in film history.

Next time... back to Draculas. We zoom ahead to 1958 with the first of the Hammer Dracula series, Horror of Dracula.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 3: The Return of the Vampire

Day 3: The Return of the Vampire (1936), dir. by Lew Landers

Streaming Availability: Rentable for cheap on quite a few sites

Bela Lugosi's life makes for a very sad story. Watch the movie Ed Wood, you’ll get a crash course on his sad final decades and his bitterness with Hollywood. Despite creating one of the greatest performances in horror history in the original Dracula, Lugosi struggled to find a secure place outside of horror, and eventually, even within it. He was passed over for roles because of his Hungarian accent, because of his age (he’s in his sixties in today’s movie and looks it), and eventually his health problems. Eventually, by the 1950s, Lugosi could not get his calls answered by Universal Pictures. The only work he could find was in independent trash productions like Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla or Plan 9 From Outer Space.

However, between Dracula and his B-movie era, Lugosi would still have a number of solid horror movies. He's magnificent as the original Igor in Son of Frankenstein. And we also have today's movie, where Lugosi more or less reprises his great vampire role.

The Return of the Vampire, directed by Lew Landers, is besides Dracula’s Daughter, the closest thing we have to a direct sequel to Dracula. This is clearly unofficial in numerous ways. It claims no inspiration from Bram Stoker’s novel, it shares no character names, and it isn’t even made by Universal, instead it is a Columbia joint. Bela Lugosi is playing a vampire named “Armand Tesla”. Tesla just so happens to dress like Count Dracula and behave in exactly the same ways, but no, completely distinct figures. Please do not be confused. This was not the second time Lugosi would play a vampire on screen, nor would it be the last time. However, if want a dignified successor to his classic bloodsucker performance, The Return of the Vampire is as close as you’ll get.

Before the main plot of the movie begins, we have a brief prologue featuring a super speed-run of the original Dracula story (minus some filed-off serial numbers). In 1918 London, mysterious deaths are occurring, and wouldn't you know it, women are turning up drained of blood. Professor Van Helsing, I mean, Professor Saunders (Gilbert Emery) uses his rational science to defeat the foreign dark magic. He's assisted by Lady Jane Ainsley (Frieda Inescort). They drive a stake through Dracula, I mean, Tesla’s heart. This saves Tesla’s latest victim Nicki.

Nicki is only a little girl, which is sure shocking. All the sexual overtones of vampires makes this utterly gross in a way I don't like at all. However, I realized this plot construct means Nicki can return in the main plot as a young woman played by Nina Foch, thus becoming the Not-Mina. Still, yuck.

Also, Dracu- Tesla has a Wolf-Man “Renfield”, Andreas (Matt Willis). This is because by the 1940s, just one monster was not enough to draw crowds, you needed at least two. After his master is killed, Andreas returns to human form to become Lady Jane’s sub. This werewolf costume and transformation effect is a pure rip-off from the Universal version, yet not a bad performance.

Anyway, we cut to twenty-five years later. With the return of World Wars also comes the return of Count… you know who. A German bombing blows open the vampire’s grave, which causes two foolish gravediggers to assume the corpse has been defiled in the bombing. After doing the nice thing of pulling the stake out, they unwittingly bring Tesla back to life. Bela Lugosi returns Andreas to his hairy slave form, and then appears in London society under the alias of Dr. Hugo Bruckner, supposedly a scientist escaping Nazi Europe.

Last movie we had a female Dracula, so this week, we have a female Van Helsing, who is Lady Jane. (Professor Saunders has died between scenes, which we're told was Dracula’s curse from beyond the grave.) Lady Jane is a perfectly competent nemesis for Dra- Telsa. Really though, Tesla's defeat is just a massive self-inflected L. By the middle of the movie he’s got Nicki under his thrall, Andreas working for him in secret, and he’s in Lady Jane’s parlor drinking something that isn’t wine – as we know, he never drinks... wine. The vampire could win this right now, but instead blows it. That pesky holy force of goodness once overcame his hypnotism powers too many times.

In a rather elegant touch, after being reborn thanks to a German bomb, Teslacula is also undone by the same awful power. His base is blown up and the Sun’s light paralyzes him. Andreas comes back to his senses long enough to kill his master. Lady Jane hardly defeated her enemy as much as let his plans fall apart on their own.

As for Lugosi, he’s the reason you’re here. He’s still an imposing "Dracula". The Return of the Vampire opens with the werewolf letting the vampire out of his coffin. Even just seen as a shadow on the wall, that classic silhouette has so much power. We get plenty of close-ups on Lugosi’s eyes, which have sadly lost some of their piercing powers during the last ten years. It does feel like Lugosi is doing an impression of himself at times. But even a diminished, older Lugosi is a fascinating figure that can carry a movie.

By the 1940s, the Universal Pictures horror era was already turning into cliché. You can already see it happening here. We open on a spooky graveyard covered in fog, exactly the imagery you’d assume for this period in horror. The Return of the Vampire is not doing anything new either with vampires or werewolves, it never becomes more than a rip-off of older and better movies. But ten years after Dracula, we have a more modern-looking movie, at least. The camera is freer to pan around scenes, cuts are more frequent. The director is not just filming a stage-play, the camera itself is telling the story, even in a small way.

However, if you want to talk about the power of filmmaking, we need to rewind a bit.

Next time we go back to 1932 with a classic German take on the vampire (but not that one), Vampyr.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 2: Dracula's Daughter

Day 2: Dracula's Daughter (1936), dir. by Lambert Hillyer

Streaming Availability: N/A (but easy to find if you know which Archives of the Internet to search)

The original Dracula has an abrupt and jarring conclusion. This was not that unusual for the era – “story’s done, get out” is how a lot of movies ended back then. Still, it does feel like a scene is missing. Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) has defeated Count Dracula. Mina, rescued from the sexy foreigner, goes up the gothic stone stairs with Jonathan Harker, the heteronormative order of the world restored. However, before they leave, the couple asks “Aren’t you coming with us?” and the Professor responds “Not yet, presently” with no further explanation. We cut to a Universal logo. What was he doing down there?

Five years later, Universal Pictures picked up the story right where it left off with the sequel, Dracula’s Daughter, directed by Lambert Hillyer. We open on two bumbling English Bobbies walking into Dracula’s lair, only to find two dead bodies. They also meet a mild-manner professor calmly explaining he’s murdered one of them with a stake through the heart. Scotland Yard is unsurprisingly doubtful of the story Van Helsing (called “Von Helsing” in the credits for some reason) tells of vampires and heroism, so he's arrested. However, just as peace seems to have returned to London, one of the doofus cops is found dead later that night. And Dracula’s body has disappeared.

Do not get your hopes up. Bela Lugosi and his piercing Male Gaze are not in this picture. Dracula’s corpse is immediately burnt by the new villain of the picture, Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden), assisted by her stern brute, Sandor (Irving Pichel).

The movie makes a big point to keep some mystery around the Countess. She believes herself to be freed from “Dracula’s curse”, yet Sandor insists she’s doomed towards evil. There’s a great scene between the two where Marya is playing music, and tries to describe a beautiful day with dogs and flapping wings, but Sandor notes the wings are of bats and the dogs are wolves. Once confirmed that her mind is still twisted and bent, she goes off to kill again.

We sadly do not get any extravagant powers like Papa Dracula had. Countess Zaleska never turns into a bat or a night fog. We’re left unsure if this is a psychological compulsion to kill or true supernatural powers. Gloria Holden is a good actress when it comes to playing a cold, mature society woman. But she just cannot bring the same graceful theatricality to the vampire role as Lugosi. It also does not help that her monster costume is just insufficient for the horror. They dress her up in a black niqab to cover her face besides her eyes, and Holden can sure hold up her arm with her magic hypnotism ring well-enough. But the costume has no sharp angles. It is just not a memorable silhouette. At least the Countless makes the same “I never drink… wine” joke as Dadula.

And the mystery is less intriguing than it could have been. There’s a third act reveal that Marya is Dracula’s daughter, and well, who’d have guessed? The movie is spoiled by its own title! If you want intriguing ambiguity with vampirism or dark fantasy, well, Vampire’s Kiss this ain’t.

In general, Dracula’s Daughter is a more conventional movie than the original. For one, it is set in the then-present 1930s, versus Dracula's ambiguous Gothic time period. Dracula’s Daughter does have a score, removing the awkwardness of the first one. The hero characters actually have personality. The protagonist is Dr. Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger), a respected psychologist drawn into the story by Van Helsing and also by running into the Countess at a social party. Van Helsing more or less disappears from the story, which is disappointing, leaving Dr. Garth open to fall into a love triangle with the Countess on one end and on the other, his fashionable assistant, Janet Blake (Marguerite Churchill). No character in the movie is lacking for personality like the original. Janet and Garth have decently funny screwball comedy banter.

Competent batter will make a scene watchable, but will it make it SCARY? The answer is no. I’m sorry to say. A lot of this movie feels like selling out. There’s something fascinating and unique to Dracula, despite its archaic qualities or maybe even thanks to them. Dracula’s Daughter is just another one of a thousand movies just like it. It is a much easier movie to forget.

Dracula’s Daughter does have something interesting going on, luckily, and that’s the queer undercurrents. This is on display even as far as the trailer, which prominently features the Countess leering towards a young woman with naked shoulders. Lesbian vampire stories predate even Bram Stoker’s Dracula, they feel inevitable for the genre. Queerness is a core element to the vampire concept, vampires being an escape from mainstream society’s ideas of decency. This movie never spells out the issue directly, yet the theming here is not subtle. We have this Countess compelled towards a forbidden lust, desperately attempting a conventional life with a man. Interestingly, that forbidden lust just keeps appearing as Marya devouring beautiful women. (The film spends a lot more time with Countess Zaleska nearly kissing Janet than Dr. Garth getting any, if you're wondering what it finds erotic)

We’re still in the Thirties, however, the queer element is going to be destroyed. Countess Zaleska is murdered by her assistant in almost literally the last second of the movie. Dr. Garth and Janet escape her castle and go home, with again, heteronormativity restored. 

I do not think Dracula's Daughter fully achieves the potential of the Zaleska character. Tragically, as far as I know, she would never again return in the any of other Dracula mythos. There's a lot in this movie that’s fertile ground for a remake. Sadly, there is not quite enough for a reappraisal. 

Also, we'll see plenty more of lesbianism in vampire movies, don't you worry.

Next time: Bela Lugosi unofficially returns to his star-making role in 1943’s The Return of the Vampire.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 1: Dracula (1931)

Day 1: Dracula (1931), directed by Tod Browning

Streaming availability: Tubi

The legend of the European Vampire dates back to at least the 1700s. The dead rising to feast on the living is an ancient fear that goes back to the very beginning of our species. For centuries though, people feared a creature they called "vampire". In their imaginations, it had a thousand forms and a thousand faces. 

That is until 1931. After 1931, the Vampire had one face. Even after ninety years of subsequent movies and reinventions of the character of Count Dracula, there is still an Ur-Vampire in popular imagination, one that will never be supplanted. Even now, seventy years after his death, the Ur-Vampire lives on, as immortal as the character he played. When you close your eyes and picture a vampire, inevitably you see one man,  and that is Bela Lugosi.

There were vampire movies before 1931’s Dracula, of course. There were several silent film adaptations of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel made across Europe. That includes, of course, the silent classic, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. But this vampire movie was uniquely special and had an impact the others did not. The vampire emoji on your phone right now does not depict Max Schreck, it depicts Bela Lugosi. Even Sesame Street's vampire is a play on this icon. Dracula along with Frankenstein a year later, launched the Universal horror boom of the 1930s, the first great era of horror cinema. Dracula captured the vampire myth and solidified it down to one figure with a cape, a widow's peak, a Hungarian accent, and a piercing stare.

With a movie this old, you do need some patience with it. This kind of filmmaking was already ancient even when our grandparents were born. However, Dracula, does hold up. It is legitimately surprisingly how a movie this old can be successful as an unnerving Gothic Horror journey.

There are a few issues, I’ll admit. We’re two years into Talking Pictures, and director Tod Browning does not seem sure how to use sound in his movie other than for dialog and sound effects. You know that famous organ piece that everybody thinks is from Dracula? "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor"? Yeah, that's not in this. (I think people are confused since it does appear in Fantasia.) Over the opening credits we get some music from Swan Lake, and later there is some diegetic music at an opera. Otherwise, there is no score. This is legitimately unsettling, especially when Dracula is creeping the streets of London biting women. It's like the soundless space destruction in Gravity, there's an unnatural quality to it.

But that does not stop the movie from dragging in places, especially the third act. As the story becomes less about Dracula, moves away from his spooky castle, and more about the good Londoners, we lose a lot of energy. The heroes mostly lacking in personality. If you’re somebody who mocked Keanu Reeves or Winona Ryder’s attempts at Britishness in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, they're doing much better than the original actors. In 1931, they counterparts did nothing to disguise their American accents. The one even remotely interesting exception is the champion of modernity, Professor Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan), who is given at some eccentric quirk of charisma.

On the other hand, the simplicity of the effects adds to the movie. Dracula’s bat form is clearly a puppet on strings, it is very silly to modern eyes. Yet, in one sequence we cut from a sleeping Lucy (Frances Dade) over to a flapping bat in her massive open window. And there’s something deeply terrifying about this unreal, immensely large bat framed in the open night, approaching our innocent and doomed heroine. To complete the horror though, we get a close-up on Lugosi lunging towards the sleeping woman. We don’t see fangs, but the empty darkness we see inside his opening maw might be even more disturbing.

In human form though, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula is fully deserving of iconic status. This is one of those rare moments where an actor was born to play a character. He’s such a powerful, theatrical presence that even the hero characters are over-awed by his charisma. Lugosi’s piercing hypnotic stare reminds me of pictures of Rasputin. His clawed-hands make little dances in the air as he reaches out of his coffin. There’s a reason the movie keeps giving him tight close-ups with a light shining on his face, so his eyes can dominate the audience. Much of his dialog has become iconic of the Dracula character itself. “I bid you welcome.” “What music they make.” “I never drink… wine.” This is an actor who can be cute with his little threats and also a horrifying unforgettable silhouette of pure evil.

The underrated incredible performance Dracula has to go to Dwight Frye as Renfield. Renfield in this version has an expanded role from the novel, replacing Jonathan Harker as the one to travel to Castle Dracula. And you want this Renfield on screen more. He’s as terrifying as his master at times, with bulging eyes and gleeful manic energy. In fact, I’d argue Renfield is the main character of Dracula, the character that falls the farthest into evil and humiliation, but still retains some humanity by the end. He's certainly the character with the most dimension.

Dracula is an immensely important classic. Better writers than me have sung this movie's praise and in the future, even better writers will have their take on it. As long as we love movies, Dracula will be with us.

Next time: Dracula’s Daughter, the 1936 direct sequel, and first dip into queer themes - and certainly not our last.

31 Days of Horror Reviews 2022: Master Post!

Do you smell it? Of course you do. The air has grown crisp. The trees grow weary. The coffee reeks of cinnamon and cloves. It is SPOOKY SEASON once again! 

I don't know about everybody else, but I'm in the mood for some blood, some death, and plenty of thirst. The theme for 2022's Spooky Month is VAMPIRES. I'll watch thirty-one classic, underrated, simply really weird vampire movies and report back my findings day by day. We start tomorrow with, what else? We gotta go with one the OGs, the Ur-Vampire movie, Dracula (1931).

Why vampires? Well, personally if I had to become any class of the various cinematic ghouls, they're what I'd pick. Werewolves have many of the same weaknesses but with fewer interesting powers. And no offense, they probably smell a lot worse. Zombies definitely smell worse, yet are much more durable. Still they lack a certain charisma and sensuality and more importantly, are much less intelligent. Vampires are above all else, cool.

Even back to the very beginning of the vampire genre, these masters of the undead were meant to be scary, sure, but they were compelling. They were stars, baby. Count Dracula, in almost every form, is enigmatic and fascinating. Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker's classic novel might be Mina's good boy she can take home to Daddy, but he's no Daddy, if you get my meaning. Dracula is a Daddy.

A Nosferatu is a horrible cursed being that threatens the very foundations of polite society. It also comes with a suite of inconsistent yet still pesky weaknesses: sunlight, religious icons, garlic, maybe even running water if you're a really unlucky vampire. You gotta live in a coffin. Maybe you need to drag around the grave soil you were buried in too. You gotta eat people. It seems like a lot of work. Yet, in all these movies, no matter how conservative their morals, no matter how much the explains it away the vampire's power as "mind control", people still are tempted. Good gentlewomen leavie their windows unlocked for Dracula when their men aren't looking. You can hate the vampire, you can be disgusted by the vampire, but admit it, you're just a bit horny for the vampire, aren't you?

Anyway, I have ninety years of vampire fiction to work through from all the over the world. This creature has been reinvented, deconstructed, and reconstructed a thousand times. I want to see the vastness and experience all flavors from Bela Lugosi to Bella Swan.

This post will also serve as the master link to all the reviews for my own convenience starting with Day 1 on October 1st, which is tomorrow: