VAMPYR Movie Review

Vampyr, Ou L'Etrange Aventure de David Gray
Vampyr, Der Traum des David Gray Not Against the Flesh Castle of Doom
The Strange Adventure of David Gray The Vampire

Not to be confused with German director F.W. Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu (a marvelous film as well, yet different in just about every way), Danish director Carl Dreyer's 1932 Vampyr is the agonizingly creepy tale of a female vampire's determined pursuit of her victims. Designed with the familiar but uncomfortable logic of a dream, Vampyr—based on J.S. Le Fanu's 1872 story “Carmilla,” which also inspired Bram Stoker to create Dracula—is less concerned with the particulars of vampirism than with the terrors of the pursued; the process of death is continually imagined by the vampire's potential victims, and they obsess on darkness, defeat, and burial. All of this is achieved through the astounding, hallucinatory cinematography of the great Rudolph Maté (who later, in Hollywood, would photograph a vision from a different kind of dream—Rita Hayworth in Gilda) and through the deliberate and inexorable pacing that provides no escape and no sliver of hope in the ghoulish, decaying landscape. (In 1965, Dreyer told Cahiers du Cinéma that he and Maté found the key to Vampyr’s visual style when a light accidentally hit the lens and fogged one of the takes. After looking at the result, they repeated the “mistake” on each day of the shoot to achieve the same otherworldly effect.)

NEXT STOP … Nosferatu (1922), Dracula (1931), Nosferatu (1979)

1931 75m/B GE FR Julian West, Sybille Schmitz, Henriette Gerard, Maurice Schutz, Rena Mandel, Jan Hieronimko, Albert Bras; D: Carl Theodor Dreyer; W: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Christen Jul; C: Rudolph Mate; M: Wolfgang Zeller. VHS KIV, NOS, SNC