Film Review
Nowadays, the fantasy horror genre in cinema is regarded with scant
seriousness and even some degree of derision. In the early days
of cinema, things were very different. Fantasy horror was a new
frontier (much as sci-fi became several decades later), a place where
imaginative avant-garde filmmakers could explore themes and techniques
that had no place in conventional films.
Consequently, these films were among the most ambitious, visually alluring and poetic of
their day, an opportunity to really push the boundaries of what was
possible. German expressionism was where the horror film was born. Robert
Wiene's
Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari
(1920) is often credited as the first horror film - and, with its
heavily stylised design and artful use of shadows and oblique camera
angles, it is certainly one of the most disturbing. This
was followed by F.W. Murnau's
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens
(1922), cinema's most famous, and arguably most chilling,
interpretation of the vampire story.
It wasn't until the 1930s that the horror film became established as a
recognised genre. The success of Tod Browning's
Dracula
(1931), starring Bela Lugosi, resulted in a series of popular
mainstream horror films from Universal Pictures, featuring
Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy, the Werewolf as well as that
perennial favourite Dracula. Many regard this as the Golden Age
of horror. Hammer would revive the classic horror genre, very
successfully, with its Gothic cycle in the late 1950s.
Carl Theodor Dreyer's
Vampyr
stands apart from all of these horror films, and is neither
expressionistic nor Gothic in its design. Rather, it employs a
subtly different stylisation, one that possesses a poetic dreamlike feel. In most other
vampire films of its era, the horror element is represented by a solid
visible manifestation of evil, Count Dracula or one of his brood.
In
Vampyr, the threat is more
abstract and is something that is felt, not seen. There is a
vampire in this film, in the guise of a strange old woman, but this is
not what provides the chills when you watch the film. Here,
evil is not a solid, tangible thing; it is an impression, a cold dark
shadow that falls across the soul.
The film was based on stories taken from Sheridan Le Fanu's book
In a Glass Darkly, including the
vampire story
Carmilla, which
would later be adapted by French director Roger Vadim as
Et mourir de plaisir (1960) and by
Hammer as
The Vampire Lovers (1970).
A propos,
Wampyr (an old
Balkan word for vampire) was the name that the writer Bram Stoker
originally had in mind for Dracula.
Dreyer made this film on the back of
La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc
(1928), which had been a critical and commercial success. When he parted on bad terms with the French
producers of that film, Société Générale de
Films, Dreyer founded his own company, with the financial backing of
aristocratic playboy and cinephile Nicolas de Gunzburg. The
latter was descended from a wealthy Russian banking family and, having
lost his entire fortune in the mid-1930s, he would emigrate to the
United States and re-invent himself as a socialite and fashion editor
on such august publications as
Harper's
Bazaar and
Vogue.
The one condition that Gunzburg stipulated in exchange for writing
Dreyer a virtual blank cheque was that he should play the leading role
in
Vampyr, under a pseudonym (Julian West). This suited Dreyer
because he preferred to use non-professional actors where he
could. In fact, he employed only two professional actors on this
film: Sybille Schmitz and Maurice Schutz. Gunzburg's obvious lack
of acting experience (and talent) works to the film's advantage - he is
a passive observer whose role is merely to provide the gateway by which
the spectator may enter the film.
Vampyr was shot as a silent film,
but just before its release Dreyer added a soundtrack which included
some sparse (and pretty superfluous) dialogue. Three versions of
the film were released, one in French, one in German and one in
English.
Today,
Vampyr is widely
regarded as a masterpiece of the horror genre and one of Dreyer's
greatest films. Yet when it was first released in 1932, the film
was a box office disaster, virtually ruining its director and preventing
him from working on any further films for a decade. The combined
strain of making this film and near-bankruptcy propelled Dreyer into a
nervous breakdown, and he ended up in a Paris hospital, the
appropriately named Clinique Jeanne d'Arc.
Vampyr is one of Dreyer's
most visually exciting films and demonstrates not only the director's
celebrated perfectionism but also his penchant for
experimentation. Instead of the fast cutting and extensive
close-ups that had defined the visual style of his previous film (
La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc), Dreyer
employs long takes involving complicated gliding camera movements, a
technique he would develop and refine on his subsequent films.
The ethereal haziness of the exterior sequences was achieved by
over-exposing the film and by placing gauze filters over the camera
lens. This, together with some atmospheric lighting and
imaginative use of multiple exposure, gives the film its distinctive
dreamlike quality.
Perhaps the most memorable sequence in the film is the one where the
main character (Gunzburg) splits into two - his spiritual and physical
selves - with the spiritual half ending up being nailed up in a coffin
and carried to its grave. This sequence includes one of the most
inspired pieces of camerawork of any Dreyer film, depicting the journey
of the coffin from the perspective of the still conscious body within
it. There are two other sequences of note - the impaling of the
aged vampire woman and the gruesome death of her human ally (the
sinister village doctor) in a flour mill. Both scenes score
highly on the scare-o-meter, and both had cuts imposed upon them by the
German censors when the film was first released.
What makes
Vampyr virtually
unique as a horror film is that when you watch it you really do feel
that you are experiencing something akin to a dream. It takes us
away from the world that we recognise as our safe, cosy reality, where
everything is ordered, predictable and explainable, and deposits us in a
strange ill-defined landscape that instantly awakens our most primitive fears, a place where
symbols of death abound and where shadows walk by themselves. In making this film, Dreyer wanted to
show that true fear derives not from the things we see around us, but
from our own subconscious.
Vampyr
is indeed the stuff of dreams, or rather, nightmares...
© James Travers 2007
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Next Carl Theodor Dreyer film:
Vredens dag (1943)