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.