61. Vampyr (1932)

Directed By Carl Th. Dreyer

Synopsis

Man arrives in creppy village. Creppiness ensues. Man is buried alive in flour.

Review

It is not often that horror meets artsy in films, but this is an example of that. In my previous Dreyer review, of Joan Of Arc, he got a 10. The same isn't happening today. There are several possible reasons why I was underwhelmed by the film; firstly, it takes quite a while to take off. The creppiness is there but you aren't really getting it until later. The most important problem must however be a result of the DVD version.

The DVD version by Image Entertainment is simply horrible. Not only does it not have any special features whatsoever, except for a completely unrelated short animation film by some Russian guy, but it has the most horrible subtitling job I've ever seen. Half the speech is not subtitled, and my grasp of German is flimsy. When it is subtitled it is in Gothic font, not only tacky but hard to read, set in a blackbox that sometimes takes almost half the screen. Fortunately the film does not have a lot of dialogue, or we'd be royally fucked. Even if you understand German, the sound quality is so poor that you will have problem distinguishing what is being said. Not only that but there was no restoration done to the print shown, it is full of scratches and the formatting means people's heads are at times cut off the screen.

All this obviously affected my enjoyment of the film. I am however trying to judge the film in it's own sake. And one thing must be said, it is positively nightmarish, and in fact it is one of the best simulations of what a nightmare feels like in the movie screen. It is freaky, it is slow, it is tense and it is full of strange, almost surreal imagery. Comparisons could be made to Buñuel's films, it is however much more structured as a story than any surrealist film, and it is not nonsensical. But the importance of death is there, with constant underlying sexuality, from the insane victim in her bed to the hostage tied up in the Doctor's house...And you have to love the whole sequence where you see the world through the eyes of a dead man looking through a window in the casket. Actually one of the strongest points in the film is the point of view. The camera work mimics a first person view, making you extremely well aware of the sorroundings, frequently panning inside a room from one point of interest to another one. Also the use of shadows is unlike anything before in cinema.

You can buy the horrid DVD version from Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

Here is the whole film:



From Wikipedia:

Dreyer turned to private financing from Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg to make his next film as the Danish film industry was in financial ruin. Vampyr (1932), is a surreal meditation on fear. Logic gave way to mood and atmosphere in this story of a man protecting two sisters from a vampire. The movie contains many indelible images, such as the hero, played by de Gunzburg (under the screen name Julian West), dreaming of his own burial and the animal bloodlust on the face of one of the sisters as she suffers under the vampire's spell. The film was shot as a silent but had dialogue added later through dubbing.