[Film Review] Vampyr (1932)

Vampires have graced and menaced the silver screen since the medium’s inception. Audiences have long been fascinated with vampires, whether they be the feral, rodent-like title creature of silent classic Nosferatu (1922) or the suave, charming star of Universal’s Dracula (1931). Carl Theodor Dreyer’s masterful Vampyr (1932) straddles the line between silent and sound pictures, using the visual language of the former to amplify the terrifying atmosphere of the vampire film and bring its horrors into the new age of sound cinema. 

Allan Grey (Julian West), “a dreamer,” travels to the village of Courtempierre while studying demons and vampires. He encounters a man (Maurice Schutz, credited as The Lord of the Manor), who gives Allan a package to be opened upon the Lord’s death. When Allan finds the Manor on his travels and witnesses the Lord’s death at the hands of an assailant (Georges Boidin, credited as The Limping Man), he opens the package to find a book called The Strange History of Vampires. As he reads, he discovers that the Lord’s young daughter Léone (Sybille Schmitz) has fallen victim to a vampire, and he becomes determined to stop the evil before it kills her as well. 

Vampyr is a marvel of early cinematic ingenuity. Nimble camerawork and crisp editing maintain a steady sense of unease, and astonishing special effects set an eerie mood of phantasmagorical threats lurking in every corner. Rudolph Maté and Louis Née’s cinematography is justifiably legendary, capturing every nuance of light and shadow in an intriguing dance that highlights the liminality at the heart of the film’s narrative. Now-iconic shots, such as a man with a scythe ringing a bell or a sign for an inn silhouetted against a dusky sky, let the viewer know early on that this is a world of in-betweens; life and death, night and day…this story takes place in the unnameable places betwixt these concepts. 

Dreyer, who directed and co-wrote the film with Christen Jul, based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly, once again shows his skill at emphasizing character. Just as in his masterpiece, 1928’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer uses clever framing and striking close-ups to emphasize the horrors his characters face. When Léone tells her sister Gisèle (Rena Mandel) that she wishes she could die after being bitten by the vampire, her despair is palpable. When she starts to feel the bloodlust come upon her, though, her face morphs from that of a distraught victim to that of a spider watching a fly; the malicious hunger as she tracks Gisèle across the room is one of the most chilling shots in horror cinema, made even more frightening by Dreyer’s decision to maintain a tight close-up of her twisted face. 

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Another close-up that demonstrates Dreyer’s mastery comes late in the film, as Allan has a vision of being buried alive by the vampire’s henchmen. A glass partition in the coffin lid that allows him to see out with unblinking eyes also allows the viewer to take in his death mask in an extended sequence that shows Dreyer’s ingenuity. The scene, intercut expertly by editor Tonka Taldy, shows Allan’s face from within the coffin and from above it, followed by long sequences of Allan’s view as he is carried to the graveyard. The viewer sees a ceiling, and then the face of the terrifyingly duplicitous Village Doctor (Jan Hieronimko) looking down upon Allan remorselessly, and then the sky as Allan is inexorably carried toward his eternal curse. It’s a suffocating, claustrophobic sequence that proves Dreyer as a horror legend.

Shadows play a huge part in this liminal horror story. Henri Armand’s special effects still hold up 90 years later, as shadows move about independent of their masters and the forces of evil mock the laws of physics. Allan witnesses shadows playing by a river bank and dancing in a room with no bodies to account for them. The Limping Man sits on a bench, and the viewer watches his shadow come and do the same thing at an impossible angle; the pièce de résistance comes when the Limping Man stands up again and his shadow follows at the correct angle, bringing the natural world back into focus for a brief moment. 

Allan is a curious man, and the camera is just as probing as he is; it pans back and forth to emphasize his viewpoint, lending his curiosity to the viewer as we try to make sense of this nightmarish world. West sells Allan’s wide-eyed thirst for knowledge, and he plays well off of Hieronimko’s thorny, closed-off doctor. Mandel gives Gisèle an air of otherworldly despair, and Schmitz’s Léone beautifully captures the dichotomy between the innocence of her soul and the poisonous nature of the vampire’s curse. Henriette Gérard is cold and determined as the vampire, seeming amused at times but mainly intent on procuring the next feeding of blood. 

Wolfgang Zeller’s music similarly walks the line between hope and despair. Jaunty dance music plays as Allan watches the shadows dancing against a wall, and the score jumps as effortlessly as the editing does between playful and ominous. There’s a sweetness to the music that accompanies the finale as the vampire is defeated, but there is also an undercurrent of terror that emphasizes just how insidious the vampire’s power is. Just like its stunning cinematography and the film’s emphasis on shadows, the score explores the liminal spaces in between hope and hopelessness. 

Vampyr is a fascinating transitional film that tells the story of the journey from silent film to sound, but it is far more than a mere historical curiosity. It is an astonishing achievement in horror cinema and a vampire tale for the ages. Its exploration of the liminal — of the boundaries between light and shadow, life and death, day and night, good and evil — is gorgeous and masterful in its execution. Tense, eerie, and beautiful, Vampyr proves that vampire cinema is as immortal as the creatures that have captivated film audiences for over a century. 

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