directed by Carl Dreyer
Carl Dreyer, director of the landmark Passion of Joan of Arc, tries his hand at atmospheric horror with 1932’s Vampyr and the result is an arresting tone poem. Visionary filmmakers are particularly well-suited to the horror genre. Like the folklore from which so many spine-tingling tales spring, stories involving the supernatural, the unconscious and the specter of Death tap into the primordial fears and nightmares of the
viewer. A great director can cast a hypnotic spell on his audience—lulling you into a deep-dream state where images impact on a primal level. Kubrick’s The Shining, Murnau’s Nosferatu, Hitchcock’s Psycho, Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom are just a few of the many classic horror films elevated by the hallucinogenic power of a sibylline storyteller.
Add Vampyr to that pantheon. Although Vampyr lacks Passion’s claustrophobic intensity and narrative power (most movies do), it retains Dreyer’s characteristically artful camera work and painter’s eye for composition. His images are endlessly inventive. Early on, he sets an eerie aura with portents of doom—a peasant holding a scythe, tolling a bell, shadows moving without bodies, a dug-out grave. The simple story of a wanderer under a perhaps hypnogogic spell takes on mythic proportions when given Dreyer’s dramatic and symbolist-oriented treatment. The rest of the film plays out like a fever dream—simple, lucid, yet chock-full of foreboding signs and visions. At one point, Dreyer even employs what I’ll call a ?coffin-cam—shots from the viewpoint of a man trapped inside his own coffin, looking up at the trees and buildings as he’s carried to his grave.
Vampirism has always resonated with Catholic themes and imagery—the concept of drinking blood to achieve eternal life has explicitly liturgical overtones. Like a Black Mass, however, vampirism is Catholicism distorted, twisted, and turned topsy-turvy. Dreyer takes care to tie the folklore of vampirism to that of devil worship—Lucifer is the vampire’s associate, one title card reads—and thus sidesteps the modern tendency to glamorize evil and its practitioners. Nonetheless, Dreyer’s film succeeds on the purely visual rather than thematic level—its images prove indelible.