Vampyr (1932)

Many who have seen Vampyr will remember--misremember--it as a silent movie. There is spoken dialogue, to be sure, but very little, nearly all of it inconsequential, and much of the film's brief running is taken up with still shots of a book about vampires. It would be very easy to guess that the film was a hold-over from a silent project, and that very little was done to bring it up to the expectations of a talking picture.

As we have been taught to do with early horror films, the proper thing indeed is to gush over the "atmosphere" presented here. Much of this atmosphere is unintentionally masterful and weird, such as the entire thing (a vampire film, I remind you) being shot in broad daylight. The first scenes are precisely Kafkaesque: sparse, claustrophobic, shadowy, and peopled with halting and confused villagers. The latter half of the film is incoherent, and no one will find the "horror" suspenseful--the titular vampire is a slow-moving old woman. The saving point of the second half is a long "burial alive" dream sequence that is suffocatingly slow (and, from a modern point of view, refreshingly unexplained).

What can we learn from this film? For one, even this too-late development of the silent film was remarkably anti-theatrical. There is hardly 40 seconds of this film that could be staged. Compare this with the Hollywood Dracula (Tod Browning) of the previous year, which began as a Broadway play. [Sidenote: evidently the technically superior version of this Dracula is the spanish-language version simultaneously produced by Universal Studios, which has, from what I've seen, far more dramatic and engaging camera work.] Vampyr: only 70 minutes long, anti-climactic, confusing, and reliant on long stretches of explanatory intertitles, barely knows what it is to be a MOVING picture, much less a talking one. But its ambition is less to be a filmed record of Aristotelian drama than to be *illustrative*. A few indelible, recurrent still images dominate the film: the man with the scythe (above), the hero's face under glass, a distorted feminine grimace, and an angel's silhouette.

While I cannot recommend Vampyr, with its narrative incompetence and long boring stretches, as entertainment, nor--for Dreyer was certainly on the "wrong side of history"--for its influence, the film asks an important question: why is it that we do not ask our horror films to any longer resemble, exactly and uncannily resemble, our bad dreams?