What a difference a print can make. For years Vampyr was only available on DVD in lousy transfer from a substandard source material. The Criterion Collection's new print made me feel like I hadn't seen the real movie before. It's one of Dreyer's great works.
Like the films that would precede and follow it, The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath, Vampyr is more of "experience" movie than the traditional narrative horror picture, although the DVD commentary informs me that it was made at least partially to compete with Universal's success with Dracula and Frankenstein. The threadbare story concerns Allan Grey (Julian West), a traveler to an unnamed rural European country who begins to have what at first appear to be hallucinations, but later are confirmed to be vampires and other spirits in league with Satan. He observes a dying young woman named Gisele (Rena Mandel) struggle for life. If she makes it through the night, she can die in peace, if she goes while the sun is down, she is damned as a vampire.
There are a lot of – and I do not mean this in a negative way- scene of Grey wondering around an experiencing weird things. Obviously intended as an everyman for the audience to identify with, West has a distinctive acting style and a non-European, nearly Latino look to him that makes what could have been a very boring character interesting to watch throughout what is a very slow paced movie.
Make that extremely slow paced. Vampyr is definitely not the horror movie you want to schedule in your Halloween marathon between Dracula A.D. 1972 and Dawn of the Dead. This is a picture that really needs to be seen on a big screen, preferably on a weekend when you have slept in. Dreyer is successful in conjuring a sleepy, dreamlike atmosphere, but at times this is so effective that you feel that you might enter dreamland yourself.
But falling asleep would mean missing some amazing cinematography from Rudolph Mate. There were many shots that made me wonder how Dreyer and Mate were able to technically achieve them will the technology of 1932. The seem to be impossible without a Stedicam.
And, with the possible exception of Otto Preminger, I am not sure that there is any director who so successfully uses a sense of space in his films. With this film, the audience never gets a idea for the geography of many of the sets. Its as if they inhabit the frame as opposed the room or location that the character is literally supposed to be in.
I cannot deny that Vampyr is a difficult movie, and I am sure that many who view it will find it boring or pretentious. If you get in the right mood for it, however, you will disappear into a gothic dream of death and mysticism.
Vampyr (1931)