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| Images courtesy of Eureka Entertainment |
Danish maestro Carl Theodor Dreyer, considered among the
greatest filmmakers in cinema history, had just come off of his 1928 silent
historical drama The Passion of Joan of Arc which is still widely regarded
as the director’s finest hour as a purely visual storyteller. A major critical success despite scissoring
by censors, it is perhaps best remembered for Renée Jeanne Falconetti's all-time
acting as the titular Joan of Arc who was not a trained professional actress
yet nevertheless Dreyer elicited a terrific performance out of her. Despite positive press, Dreyer nevertheless
experienced difficulty in trying to mount production on his next intended
project titled Vampyr, a loose adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872
collection of short horror stories In a Glass Darkly.
Co-authored by Dreyer and Christen Jul, Dreyer’s gothic
horror vision sought financing outside of the studio system, landing on French
magazine editor Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg to both finance and star in the
central leading role of the film. Telling
the story of a French student of the occult named Allay Gray (Gunzburg) who
stumbles upon the French village of Courtempierre which is under the influence
of vampirism, it was the director’s first sound feature (reportedly recorded in
three different languages) and much like The Passion of Joan of Arc Dreyer
resorted to ‘street casting’ of non-professional actors for a kind of
proto-neorealist effect. While hastily
working within the sound era including foley effects, occasional dialogue and
an original score by Wolfgang Zeller, Vampyr is still very much operating
in the vein of the silent era as an expressionist, increasingly surrealist
exercise in atmospherics over plot devices.
The first thing one notices entering Dreyer’s netherworld of
Vampyr in addition to the period production design is Polish-Hungarian
cinematographer Rudolph Maté’s luminous and fluid camerawork shot in the rare
ratio of 1.19:1. For a time when
dolly-tracking or panning or lifting the camera from one angle up to the next
was limited, Maté’s camera is alive and occasionally hyperactive when it isn’t
mannered and slowly methodically traversing about the room. There’s a wealth of wild superimpositions and
hyperkinetic editing techniques employed both by Dreyer and his co-editor Tonka
Taldy creating effects where a vampire is staked through the heart and mid-shot
their body fades and dissolves into a skeleton.
The set design and decoration leaves viewers unsure of what plane of
reality they’re in as the protagonist enters creepy rooms filled with infant
baby skeletons. A recurring image of a man
donning a scythe seems to forecast a doom that’s almost medieval. And as with The Passion of Joan of Arc,
there’s much emphasis on the thousand-yard gaze of the protagonist and some of
the side characters including a truly creepy moment where a possessed woman
grins evilly bug-eyed at the camera.
More of a gothic exercise in pure cinematic unease than a
conventional piece of narrative storytelling, Vampyr arrived on the
heels of Dracula and Frankenstein and was reportedly held off the
marketplace so as to not get lost in the shuffle. Despite this, Vampyr which was closer
to the surrealist artistic abstractions of Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou
than conventional horror storytelling ala the Universal Monsters empire and as
a result was a critical and commercial failure.
Considered to be a low point in the director’s career with a majority of
critics lambasting it as either ‘ridiculous’ or ‘hallucinating’. Still, there were those who compared it more
favorably to F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu which also was a slow
elongated and mannered exercise in uncanniness.
Looking at Vampyr now though with its evocation of malevolence
and the unnatural, graphic depictions of the dead and coffins, the film feels less
like Hollywood horror and more like an unearthed artifact presided over by
occult forces of evil.
For decades, Vampyr only existed in truncated
versions with damaged picture and sound as the original negatives have
reportedly been lost. Released under
numerous reedited and redubbed versions including titles like The Strange
Adventures of David Gray, the film found new life via The Criterion
Collection who struck a new transfer of the 1998 David Shepard restoration on
DVD before updating the package to Blu-ray again in October 2017. Years later in 2022, Eureka Entertainment put
together a new 2K digital restoration of the film with the oversight of the
Danish Film Institute in a rebuilding of the film that took more than a decade
to complete. For its 90th
anniversary, the Eureka Entertainment disc (though region B locked) is now
considered the definitive home video release of the film and also includes both
restored and unrestored mono tracks. Also
including an extensive booklet and numerous documentaries ported over from the
Criterion in addition to an audio commentary by Guillermo Del Toro, Vampyr
while perhaps not Dreyer’s strongest work is most certainly among his most
evocative and thoroughly unsettling pictures and as a staple of horror it
remains one of the most underappreciated by genre fans young and old.
--Andrew Kotwicki
