Vampyr
with Margie Lewis, Erik Friedlander, David Kitt, Catherine Sikora
1932 I 72mins I Carl Theodor Dreyer I Germany & France
1932 I 72mins I Carl Theodor Dreyer I Germany & France
“I wanted to create a waking dream on screen and show that horror is not to be found in the things around us but in our own subconscious,” said Danish film-maker Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose adaptation of two stories from Sheridan Le Fanu (Carmilla and The Room in the Dragon Volant) was initially conceived as a silent movie. Sound was added during production, but the film’s trance-like images could stand on their own as a visual poem in which the action seems to take place on the cusp of dreams and reality.
Apart from German actress Sybille Schmitz, who plays the vampire’s chief victim, and French actor Maurice Schutz, who plays her father, the cast was non-professional. Baron Nicolas de Gunzberg, who provided finance for the film, also took the leading role under the pseudonym Julian West. He plays a roving occult investigator called Allan Grey (David in some versions) who arrives at an old inn by the side of a river and explores a nearby castle where an evil doctor appears to be helping a vampire prey on the lord’s two daughters – one of whom is bedridden, suffering from a strange sickness, while the other is being held captive. Grey reads a book on vampirism and acts as our surrogate in this curious realm of crooked staircases, off-kilter corridors and Freudian keys and doors, a world where men’s shadows take on a life of their own and skeletal hands grasp bottles of poison.
Dreyer shrugs off conventional linear narrative and takes an experimental approach, plunging us into a waking nightmare that isn’t so much black-and-white as it is misty grey. When cinematographer Rudolph Maté (who would later direct films such as the noir thriller DOA) showed Dreyer some frames made hazy by accidental exposure to light, the director had him place a layer of gauze in front of the lens to replicate the effect for the rest of the film.
Many of the images from this movie have passed into horror iconography: an old man standing by the river tolling a bell with a scythe over his shoulder; Grey’s dream of being buried alive; the evil doctor suffocating in flour dropped from the mill above. It’s hard to spot where nightmares end and reality begins. This really is a film that exemplifies the idea of dreaming with our eyes open.
Supported by the Goethe-Institut Ireland