Vampyr is a strange, troubled movie. It was the follow-up to The Passion of Joan of Arc, one of silent cinema’s great masterpieces by Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dryer. Vampyr came out during a time when movies were changing. Dreyer had thought about it as a silent film inspired by the collection of ghost stories on which he based the movie. This DNA is evident in its limited dialogue and movement-oriented directing style. Its overall result is a mixed bag. There isn’t enough narrative here calling it an engaging horror story. Rather it feels like an interesting mood piece that reminds one of Halloween and old creepy houses.
Allan Gray (Julian West) is a young man interested in the supernatural. He travels about Europe studying magic and lands at an inn in Courtempierre, France. It is just a calm rural community. Allan was woken up by an old man who got into his locked room on his first night in town. Leaving a package on his desk, the old man included a note that says “to be opened upon my death.” This grabs Allan’s attention and he starts looking for answers. Along the way, he sees wandering spirits at night within the village, an elderly lady who seems to have power over them all and a sinister person with curled moustaches. In the end, our hero opens one of these packages and finds inside it a volume describing one among such vampire monsters which feed themselves with blood from their victims as well as bigger riddles are unveiled.
When entering Vampyr, I was anticipating the retelling of a familiar Dracula story that influenced Nosferatu. But that’s not how things went down in the movie at all. It is instead, an analysis of horror tropes that have been rehashed into weakly developed narratives. A film like Skinamarink might compare to it best today. The pictures you’d expect are there door opening by itself, shadow moving on its own apart from its human and lonely path through the woods at night man walking. It’s this manner in which Dreyer chooses to shoot this picture that makes it feel like a midnight fantasia; we’re looking beyond what can be seen and touching on other things beyond matter.
The less revolutionary part of Dreyer’s work is the evil vs. good, heaven vs. hell setup. Dreyer was an ideological conservative in the Danish tradition. He was born out of wedlock to a maid and abandoned for adoption by his biological father, a married farmer. Taken to orphanages for two years before being adopted by a couple who were distant emotionally but held tenaciously onto Christian practices. Dreyer said he didn’t believe in revolutions; instead, he preferred gradual change occurring within social structures and politics over time. In Vampyr, we observe that the doctor is portrayed as evil while the nuns are represented as models of purity and hope. The film does not leave any room for surprise since this section moves in a very linear manner.
The framing of these ideas takes the film into a whole other realm. The black and white nature of the universe is extruded through a lens of abstraction. Every image is so striking and esoteric that whether this is literally happening to Allan or it’s all his dream becomes unimportant. Sleep and nightmares have seeped into the waking one, and now we’re all along for this strange ride. At one point our protagonist must enter a dream where he becomes a ghost who can see his own corpse because it’s the only way he gets answers to seemingly impossible questions. There are also moments in this film that I can’t summarize or describe beyond me.
The very last scene shows that Dreyer had something in mind for his whole movie. Two shots: the man our hero and woman he has saved in an ideal forest walking into a bright light; then, one can see gears of mill machinery rotating. This is Dreyer’s declaration about modernity and its link to our lives. Are they wandering off from the machines that defeated their enemy, and are now living with nature? Or does it mean that the dream-like quality of reality is merely covered over by machinery? We watch the end of a dream where all parts are moving. Cinema at its most basic comes about through the use of machines and is a dream.
This is an extremely unusual horror experience. I don’t think this would be for everyone, as it goes against all the popular narrative structures but it’s unique. For instance, the film concentrates on themes of good triumphing over evil through communication and also how pictures interact with our subconscious minds. It was released to audiences that didn’t like it either in Europe or America after being postponed for Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein. To some people, including myself, this whole thing might have seemed hypnotizing and captivating; to others it was just ridiculously stupid. Maybe I didn’t love it but Dreyer remains a filmmaker who continually amazed me with his visual explorations beyond what cinema can hold. He had a certain perspective on the world which he managed to take out of his mind and onto celluloid.
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