Vampyr (1932)

Rating: 4 Stars (out of 4)

Master Bloodsucker

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Buy Vampyr on DVD.

In the month before Halloween I try to see as many horror movies as I can. There's no other holiday that's better for movies. Christmas has maybe a dozen good movies, but Halloween has hundreds. How to choose, though? Some prefer to rank movies by scare factor, which eliminates older films that have lost their power to shock. Some prefer the classics -- the groundbreakers -- which eliminates some clever newer films with humor and creative gore effects. And some prefer less gore and more suspense, bringing them to the Hitchcock films. But Vampyr (1932) is not only a horror classic. It's a great film in any genre.

Vampyr is by Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, who made perhaps a dozen films but who will be remembered for five, at least in the US: The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr, Day of Wrath (1943), Ordet (1955), and Gertrud (1964). I haven't seen any of these other films. Thankfully, the Voyager Criterion Collection is releasing a new DVD of The Passion of Joan of Arc this year, instead of the muddy, cruddy video version that has been available up until now. So I'm far from an expert.

But I can tell you that Vampyr is a masterpiece, one that gave me the chills. I saw the new Kino video version, which restores every frame of the film, and even shrinks it slightly, forming a black frame around the picture so that not a grain of film goes unseen. The subtitles are done in a strange gothic lettering, which are designed to cover up older subtitles (in German, I think) from this particular print. Vampyr is technically a sound film, but most scenes are silent with a music score. In this version, the hero is named David Gray (although he has been called Allan Grey in other cuts of the film over the century). David Gray is played by Julian West (a stage name for Baron Nicolas de Gunzberg -- a nonprofessional actor and film enthusiast who helped finance the film).

David Gray checks in to a creepy hotel. The titles tell us that he is a dreamy young man who has studied the occult, and who tends to mix reality and fantasy. He checks into his room and goes to bed. An old man enters his room and warns him that "she must not die." He leaves a package for him "to be opened after my death." Gray gets out of bed and experiences a series of strange events. He sees shadows of a man with a peg leg (the shadow finds its owner and rejoins it) and of a party. He meets an old man with a mustache (Jan Hieronimko) who asks, "do you hear that?". Gray replies that he hears children and dogs. The old man tells him with a sinister stare that there are no children or dogs here. This whole sequence reminded me of David Lynch or Luis Bunuel and gave me the creeps.

Of course the old man with the package gets shot at this point (he was doomed--he may as well have been waving around a picture of his wife and kids). Gray runs to help and meets the rest of the inhabitants of the hotel. It turns out that the man with the mustache is a doctor, and that one of the young daughters of the hotel owner is sick with some kind of strange malady. Gray opens his package, which turns out to be a book, and begins reading all about vampires. He has a dream where he leaves his body sitting on a bench and then finds himself in a coffin with a window in it. There's even a point-of-view shot from inside the coffin! He wakes up and realizes that the vampire is really an old lady, the wife of the doctor ( Marguerite Chopin). Gray helps drive a stake into her heart and she turns into a skeleton. The doctor runs into a flour mill and is buried under a pile of flour. And David Gray floats away on a boat with the pretty sister of the afflicted girl.

The story (adapted from two stories by Sheridan Le Fanu) is pretty slight, but it's presented in such an extraordinary way that you've never seen anything else quite like it. The whole film has a white, diffused, dreamy look. (Francois Truffaut once wrote an essay called "The Whiteness of Carl Dreyer".) There are several shocking images besides David Gray's funeral dream. When he first checks in to his hotel, he takes a look around by candlelight. He examines a painting in extreme close-up, looking at the figures in it one by one, until he comes to a skeleton. When the old man comes into his room, Dreyer and cinematographer Rudolph Maté spot a light near the floor on the opposite wall from the door--not where one would expect. The effect is that the room gets darker as the door opens wider. These are just two very small moments in the greater scheme of things. Some of these things are trick shots that have been imitated many times over the years, but others are atmospheric shots that have never been duplicated.

Cinematographer Maté also worked with Dreyer on The Passion of Joan of Arc and, after Vampyr, moved on to Hollywood to work with: William Wyler on Dodsworth (1936), Howard Hawks on Come and Get It (1936), King Vidor on Stella Dallas (1937), Leo McCarey on Love Affair (1939), Alfred Hitchcock on Foreign Correspondent (1940), Alexander Korda on That Hamilton Woman (1941), Sam Wood on The Pride of the Yankees (1942), Zoltan Korda on Sahara (1943), Ernst Lubitsch on To Be or Not to Be (1942), and Charles Vidor on Gilda (1946), doing a brilliant job of lighting Rita Hayworth. He then went on to direct the great Hollywood film noir D.O.A. (1950). This is an outstanding body of work, but he was never allowed to experiment again like he did with Dreyer. The work he did in "Vampyr" was one of a kind.

Dreyer found himself on an unwanted ten-year hiatus after the failure of both The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr. It wasn't until 1943 that he made Day of Wrath, and it wasn't until 1948 that that film was released in the US.

Vampyr is usually ranked low in Dreyer's filmography, probably because of the horror stigma. All through history, critics and fans both have pigeonholed filmmakers into the horror genre and pigeonholed horror films as inferior to more noble efforts. To use the classic example, James Whale--who made 25 films--will always be remembered for his four horror films. Likewise, Val Lewton, David Cronenberg, Roger Corman, and George A. Romero will probably never receive the respect they deserve. Wes Craven, after 25 years of making horror films is attempting this year to make a straight drama (Music of the Heart), and his transparent ploy will no doubt be received with scoffs. But Combustible Celluloid is nothing if not a sacred-cow buster, and I'll say that -- horror film or not -- Vampyr is a masterpiece of world cinema.

DVD Details: This 1998 DVD from Image Entertainment is one of the early prototypes of the format and suffers from a few technical flaws. The subtitles are not optional, and there is no main menu, only chapter selections. The DVD's bonus, an exceptional "animated" short by Ladislas Starewicz, The Mascot, simply comes at the end of the feature instead of occupying its own place on the disc. Even so, it's great to have Vampyr on DVD at all, and it's very much worth seeking.

See also: The Passion of Joan of Arc, They Caught the Ferry and Carl Th. Dreyer: My Métier.

Starring: "Julian West" (Baron Nicolas de Gunzberg), Henriette Gerard, Jan Hieronimko, Sybille Schnmitz, Maurice Schutz, Rena Mandel
Written by: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Christen Jul, based on a story by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Directed by: Carl Theodor Dreyer
MPAA Rating: NR
Language: German with English subtitles
Running Time: 72 minutes
Date: October 13, 1999