The Dreamlike Unease of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr

Note: This is the hundred-and-sixty-ninth in a series of historical/critical essays examining the best in film from each year. Essentially, I am watching films from the beginning of cinematic history that interest me and/or hold some critical or cultural impact. My personal, living list of favorites is being created at Letterboxd, showcasing five films per year. All this being explained, what follows is an examination of my fourth favorite 1932 film, VAMPYR, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer.

Carl Theodor Dreyer set out to make a horror genre picture the likes of which was suddenly in vogue at the turn of the 1930s, with movies like LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT (1927), THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1927), and DRACULA (1931) likely inspiring him. And he succeeded in doing so with VAMPYR, the most terrifying film yet put to screen, although he countered the generic aspects illustrated by Hollywood conventions in the process.

Universal’s paradigm-shaping vampire hit was released before VAMPYR, but Dreyer’s follow up to one of the greatest movies of all time and a distillation of silent film’s apotheosis, THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928), was conceived as early as 1929 and faced a slower production process than the typical Hollywood picture. So although DRACULA wasn’t a complete touchpoint for Dreyer, the bidding war surrounding its rights while he was beginning production in 1930 and the popularity of such tales in fiction and mediums outside of film somewhat informed his choice of subject matter.

While VAMPYR’s reckoning with the lore of its titular creatures of the night is both conventional and absolutely avant-garde, it foments existential dread in a way radically unlike DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN (1931), and other, more famous horror movie paragons of the time. Its use of found locations instead of studio sets, intentional gaps in spatial logic instead of clear continuity and navigation, and restrained and at times vague depictions of supernatural powers instead of over-the-top abilities make it clear that VAMPYR is a very different kind of movie than those whose genre it loosely shares.

You know that sensation of trying, and mostly failing, to run in a dream? That’s what watching VAMPYR feels like. In spite of the unease and outright fear it may instill in its viewers, the movie feels more dreamlike than nightmarish. This distinction is kind of a semantic one, but one that I think is important to understanding VAMPYR. A nightmare implies to me some kind of feverish, overriding degradation of self. It’s more accurate to compare the experience of watching this movie to a less violent dream, where one is often a subjective observer, on the fringes of an ethereal, often placid experience.

But with VAMPYR, which is at almost all times darkly beautiful, that sensation is given uneasy life. Credited as Julian West, Nicolas de Gunzburg (a relatively minor European aristocrat who produced the film in exchange for the lead role) as lead Allan Gray is the perfect blank space to shuttle the viewer into a number of surreal scenarios. His baleful eyes and mouth, often just slightly agape, match his lack of agency. Tony Rayns, commentator on the Criterion Collection edition of VAMPYR, wisely describes this quality as a depiction of subjectivity on the part of Gray.

It is an early intertitle (an early indication of Dreyer’s masterful silent film grammar and his initial intent to make the film in silence and with sound, not his inability or lack of a desire to adapt to “the talkies”) that sets off the main character’s motivation: simply to seek out “the boundary between the real and the unreal.” There’s no vampiric orchestration as in NOSFERATU (1922) or DRACULA, no overarching mad genius master plan as in FRANKENSTEIN. Gray is just a dreamer willing to enter liminality.

This out-of-reality space cultivated by VAMPYR is immediately established by the inn that Gray stops at right right after the introductory intertitle. Here, he encounters demonic-angelic signage, a farmer dolefully wielding a scythe at a ferry stop, a disfigured man, and in a moment that propels the student of the supernatural further into the undead plane of dreaming, a strange specter of a man. It’s not clear how it’s all connected and not just in the sense of the narrative. This inn’s rooms don’t seem to be connected in any kind of spatial convention and that’s because Dreyer, I believe intentionally, obscures the layouts of this location and every one to follow, in opposition to the artificial yet reality-presenting Hollywood style.

VAMPYR is not a film concerned with plot. There are not many explanations for its goings-on, from the exact nature of the living shadows Gray encounters at a dilapidated manor (an abandoned factory in reality) to the exact nature of an old man as vampire and/or servant. This man (Jan Hieronimko) turns out to be the village doctor and is brilliantly cast, as one of the many non-professional actors Dreyer directed for the film. Although she receives less screen time, the same goes for the titular lead vampire Marguerite Chopin (Henriette Gérard) , an old woman who never displays the super-strength or shapeshifting tendencies as others of her type in fantasy. And yet that makes her crouching over her feast later in the film, preying upon one of the daughters of the landowning strange man who visited Gray at the inn, all the more creepy.

I’m hopping around in the narrative here. And although that’s befitting the structure of VAMPYR, the movie is also strangely reliant on exposition. When the “lord of the manor” (Maurice Schutz) is killed by the gun of a shadow assassin, the package he left to Gray at the inn is revealed to be a treatise on vampiric lore. At this point, VAMPYR’s “dialogue” (spoken words are rare in the film and often heard from turned heads and off-screen voices to avoid issues in post-syncing as the film was made in German, French, and English) is predominantly images of text from this tome, explaining concepts about vampires that may be painfully obvious to our eyes trained to this particular horror movie subject. It’s the only lagging points in the film to my eyes, not necessarily because the creative lettering is aesthetically unpleasing or the information irrelevant, but because it transliterates moments of VAMPYR that could maybe have been more mind-bogglingly strange and powerful without the explanation. This was Dreyer’s concession to the making of a “horror picture,” as I see it, even as he totally dissembled the form.

Although these heartbreaking depictions of logic are inserted into the film, they do not totally interrupt VAMPYR’s subconscious, its pulsing thread of existentialism. Indeed, they precede Gray’s self-determined rescue of Giséle (Rena Mandel), who is kidnapped by the old doctor. But as he ventures out into the sunny fields (the film’s constant contrast is that of bucolic beauty and mist-shrouded mystery), three distinct threads emerge, and ultimately converge, with no explanation. Sitting upon a bench, a superimposed, ghostly form of Gray emerges from his corporeal form. This Gray #2 (which I believe Rayns also refers to him as) runs to the rundown manor-factory where he had first seen the shadow people and the doctor. When he arrives, he finds a Gray #3 boxed into a coffin, staring lifelessly upward as the screws are tightened into the lid. This is VAMPYR’s most enduring image in a slew of striking visages and vistas. The ultimate resolution of these various states of Gray’s undeath is ultimately wrought a propos of nothing; ghostly pall bearers with #3’s coffin venture past his body on the bench, disappear, and allow him to go about his way once again.

These lapses in logic, or rather deliberate deconstructions of the conscious mind for “plot,” are at the core of the displeasure a viewer may have watching VAMPYR, as many audiences at the time of its release experienced. It would be ten years before Dreyer would make another film, a short entitled GOOD MOTHERS (1942), and 11 before his next feature, DAY OF WRATH (1943). In that time, further nationalist lines were drawn in Europe and the world, but part of Dreyer’s metier was his transnational workflow, as it were. A Danish man who made his films as, either entirely or partly, French, German, Swedish, and yes, Danish, productions, his filmmaking language transcended state-associated aesthetics and generic considerations. VAMPYR is yet another example of this.

There’s not much else that VAMPYR could be described as “yet another example” of. It is a film operating within a different frame, one that could have only sprung from Dreyer’s understated yet artfully unconventional mind. VAMPYR’s strength lies not only in subverting narrative expectations, but also the visual concepts and symbolic representations that had already been considered sacred within the much younger filmmaking tradition. In trying to make a movie full of chills and thrills with VAMPYR, he created something much more insidious, much more telling about the human psyche and the horrors involved with confronting itself. After all, vampires are just products of our imagination.