Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932)

Carl Dreyer, one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived, a pioneer of what would later be called the "art film," and the writer/director of such astonishing masterpieces as The Passion of Joan of Arc, Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud, made one of the eeriest, dreamiest, and strangest horror films in Vampyr. It's a film that seems both older and decades newer than its 1932 release date, and though it shares a few small affinities with Dreyer's other films and the vampire genre, it stands apart from both as its own weird object. (Some kinship can be found with Dreyer's horror/comedy/public service announcement short film They Took the Ferry, another delightfully strange detour for Dreyer.)

Vampyr, in its first third, seems to be a mostly plotless collection of surreal images and nightmare logic, which is more than fine with me, but a narrative slowly and seamlessly emerges from the darkness. Even as the narrative takes shape, the images remain rooted in dream. It's a mysterious, unsettling film.

We begin with a young man obsessed with the occult named Allan Gray (Nicolas de Gunzburg under the pseudonym Julian West) arriving at an inn in a seaside French village named Courtempierre. He sees a lot of strange things, one of which is an old man coming into his room at night and giving him a cryptic message about not letting a woman die and presenting a letter that must not be opened until the older man's death. Allan wanders from the inn to an abandoned building full of strange shadows moving on their own. These shadows lead him to a large country manor. He looks in the window and sees the lord of the manor, who is the same man who entered his room at the inn. A shadow shoots and kills the lord. Allan tries to save him. The attempt is unsuccessful, but the servants and a daughter of the lord ask him to stay. The other daughter has been bitten by a vampire, and Allan becomes a part of the fight to save her and prevent her from turning into a vampire as well as an unwitting pawn in the vampire's human servants' attempt to turn her.

This plot description sounds conventional on the page, but it's only a thread connecting the incredible images. Allan's search for the manor makes little narrative sense until he reaches it, the thin gauze covering the camera lens creates a suspended-in-nightmare look, the locations are both visceral and surreal, the extremely sparse dialogue creates a hypnotic silent-film feel, and the mostly unprofessional cast appear haunted, frozen. Everything is a little off from the way other movies work.

Dreyer, a Dane who mostly used Denmark as the source for his locations and casts, filmed Vampyr in the French countryside with an international cast discovered on the streets of Paris, with the exception of two professional actors, Sybille Schmitz as the sister bit by the vampire and Maurice Schutz as the lord of the manor. Gunzburg, a Parisian who was an heir to his Russian noble family's fortune, agreed to finance the film in exchange for the leading role. Fortunately, he had an amazing face and dreamlike gait that suits the film perfectly. He used the name Julian West because his family strongly disapproved of acting. He later moved to the United States, becoming a fashion journalist and mentor to Calvin Klein.

Vampyr, Dreyer's first sound film, was dubbed into French, German, and English in an attempt to hit as many large markets as possible and was one of his only films to be conceived with commercial profits in mind, though Dreyer's creative approach remained defiantly his own. Oddly, the film was received negatively by critics, especially in Germany, though time has been kind, with most film historians and critics in the present regarding it as another Dreyer masterpiece. I think it's great, too.