“Vampyr” - Carl Dreyer (1932)

Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), an eerie, one-of-a-kind horror movie distinct from the rest of his work, is of interest here for two main reasons:
Dreyer spent his entire career as a journalist and filmmaker, but he only managed to secure funding to make 14 films, only six of which were made during the forty-year period after 1926. After that year the Danish-born Dreyer moved to France, where he thought the opportunities for filmmaking might be better, but despite the magnificence of his next production, The Passion of Joan of Arc, it was not a success at the box office. And though Dreyer had immediate plans to start the production of his next film, a planned horror story, it took him several years to secure the very limited backing for that next French-based production, Vampyr.

By this time sound films had arrived on the scene, and because Dreyer opposed the use of subtitles, he arranged to have Vampyr filmed in three separate languages: English, French, and German. To accomplish this and to satisfy his requirements for linguistic authenticity, he had all the dialogue scenes filmed in three separate versions, one for each language, even though the resulting sound tracks for the dialogue were not captured synchronously, but were later dubbed in each language. Then all these separate dialogue scenes had to be spliced back into the main body of the film, so that they were all in synchronism with the rest of the sound track. After the production was complete and some sections of the film were censored by the German authorities, Dreyer then had to go back and carefully edit all three versions of the film, so that they all remained in synch. This is just one example of the idiosyncratic manner in which Dreyer constructed his productions. But before further consideration of Dreyer’s filmmaking style, it is best first to look at the Vampyr narrative.

Dreyer undoubtedly knew about the iniquitous nature of the intellectual property laws that enabled the widow of Dracula author, Bram Stoker, to bankrupt Murnau’s production company, even though his Nosferatu story was drastically different from the Stoker novel. So Dreyer, who always worked from an existing text, had to find another story to reference and on which to base his production. This ultimately turned out to be J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella “Carmilla” [1] in his collection, In a Glass Darkly. But Dreyer only used the story as a starting point, and he made his own considerable alterations in the ensuing screenplay [2]. More revealing than the original story, though, is the overall narrative theme that Dreyer eventually gave to his film. In this connection it is worth referring to remarks in my review of Murnau’s Nosferatu concerning the thematic contrast between Dracula and Nosferatu.
In the original Dracula, and also in Tod Browning’s authorised remake, Dracula (1931), the story describes a pitched battle between two almost equally matched characters: a representative of darkness, Count Dracula, and a representative of modern science, Doctor Van Helsing. In the end of that original story, Van Helsing succeeds in killing Dracula by stabbing him in the heart. So it’s something like a slam-bang adventure story, only one involving a vampire. Nosferatu, on the other hand, is more cosmic, more haunting and is much closer to the disturbing specters that inhabit our nightmares. Unlike Count Dracula, who is a suave, smooth charmer of women, Count Orlok [the corresponding character in Nosferatu] is a deformed, repulsive rat-like character, signifying pestilence. In addition, the Van Helsing character (Doctor Bulwer) is now diminished to insignificance in Nosferatu, and he is no match for Count Orlok. Orlok is not simply a resourceful adversary, but more an abstraction of horror, an unstoppable force of evil.
In Dreyer’s original screenplay, he seemed to have planned for the vampire to be more like the depiction in Dracula – a graphic and violent monster that must be overcome. But in the finished film, changes were made to make vampire adversary more abstract and distant and thus more like the Murnau and Herzog characterization of an evil force of darkness.

The story itself is at once simple and also enigmatic. It barely has an identifiable structure, meandering as it does from one improbable scene after another, but we could subdivide it into a few basic sections.
  1. It begins with Allan Gray (spelled "Grey" in the French and English versions), a young man given to fantasies about ghosts and spectres, coming to stay at an inn in the village of Courtempierre. At night the locked door to his room is unaccountably unlocked by an old man who solemnly proclaims that “she must not die” and then leaves a bound pack on the table with the note, “to be opened upon my death”. Gray goes outside and finds a chateau, where he sees a number of phantasmagoric sights: shadows dancing to mysterious music, and a suspicious-looking man who later turns out to be the village doctor.
  2. Gray then wanders outside to a manor, where he sees the old man who had visited his room earlier being killed by a gunshot. He rushes inside to help and meets the old man’s two daughters, Giséle and Léone, the latter of whom is seriously ill, and the elderly servant couple of the manor, who urge him to stay with them. Shortly thereafter, though, Giséle and Gray see Léone walking outside in the yard, and when they run out to her side, they find Léone unconscious on the ground with fresh bite wounds in her neck. When she regains consciousness in bed, she gives a momentary predatory glance at her sister, as if she is somehow possessed. Gray then opens up the package that the old man had given him and discovers that it is a book about vampires, which he begins reading. He learns that the vampires feast on human blood and can force people they bite to become their enslaved minions.
  3. The village doctor seen earlier comes to treat Léone and says that Gray must donate some of his own blood to treat her blood loss. After the blood transfusion, Gray becomes weak and falls asleep, during which time the doctor, cooperating with a mysterious old blind woman seen earlier at the chateau, seems about to poison Léone. But Gray regains consciousness just in time to rescue Léone, while the doctor flees the scene. Gray chases outside, but after a fall, he appears to fall into a dream and has an out-body-experience, during which he witnesses a scene in which he, himself, is buried in a coffin by the doctor and the hideous old blind woman. He finally wakens from his dream and rushes to rescue Giséle, who had been tied up by the doctor as the next victim. But the doctor again gets away.
  4. The elderly servant of the manor now runs across Gray’s vampire book and begins reading more of it. He discovers that a vampire can only be killed by an iron stake driven through its heart, and he also learns that the vampire in their region must be a woman buried in the local Courtempierre cemetery by the name of Marguerite Chopin. Gray and the servant go to the cemetery and open up her grave (where she appears to be well preserved) and drive a stake through her heart, after which she immediately transforms into a skeleton before their eyes. Then there is cross-cutting between the doctor, who is hiding out in the village mill, and Gray, who gets into a rowboat with Giséle to make a river crossing in the fog. The doctor in the mill becomes accidentally trapped in a flour bin, and the old servant puts the mill machinery into operation, burying alive the doctor with flour. Meanwhile Gray and Giséle manage to find the other side of the river and walk out into the sunlight and salvation.
The vampire in Dreyer’s film, then, turns out to be a mysterious old blind woman who is rarely seen and does practically nothing, even when she is on screen. So the focus is not really on an evil antagonist and how to thwart a clearly recognized threat, but rather a depiction of a dystopic environment contaminated by something evil. Everything is somehow askew, as in a nightmare. Few people actually find Vampyr to be truly scary, but it is the nightmarish quality and sense of dread that puts Vampyr squarely on the side of the Nosferatu films, as opposed to Dracula.

Some aspects contributing to the mystery (or perhaps to the viewer’s annoyance) are associated with some unexplained and unmotivated events in the film’s story. In several cases these problems are caused by all the changes and compromises that Dreyer had to make in order to accommodate the constraints of his limited budget and shooting circumstances. This led to missing scenes and inconsistencies that may make the film more mysterious but are not in fact the result of artistic intention; they are simply shortcomings. For example, early in the film when Gray meets the doctor at the chateau there is a mysterious exchange between the two of them about dogs and a child, which have not been seen in the film. To the viewer this is utter mystery, but in fact there was an important scene in Dreyer’s original script about a young boy chased by dogs controlled by the old blind woman, that for some reason he cut from the film. It is this scene to which the curious conversation refers. To get a feeling for some of these changed elements, I refer you to Peter Swaab’s excellent discussion concerning differences between the original script and the final film [3]. But even setting aside those shortcomings, there are still a number of unexplained and unmotivated events in the film that were apparently intended by Dreyer and are part of the eerie atmosphere of Vampyr, of few of which we can enumerate:
  • In the early scene in which the old man (the master of the manor) enters Gray’s room, he somehow manages to open the door (with its key securely in the lock) from the outside. How? Then an unearthly light appears in the room before he enters. What do these events signify? And why is he later shot and killed?
  • What lies behind the dancing shadows seen by Gray in the chateau? Is this just a dream?
  • In the original script Léone dies at the end, but in the film she appears to recover from her illness after the vampire is destroyed. Her last appearance on the screen seems to show her eyes half-open and still breathing. So her fate is not clearly spelled out.
So overall, there are many things that are unexplained, even taking into consideration all the alterations forced upon Dreyer, and this brings us back to Dreyer’s enigmatic style. In my view that style is certainly expressionistic. Paul Schrader refers to Dreyer’s style as transcendental [4]. Acquarello insists that Dreyer’s style is humanistic [5]. And Peter Swaab claims that Dreyer was heavily influenced by the Surrealists that he met in France [3]. Maybe they are all right, in a way, but you can see that multiple interpretations may apply.

For an early sound film, the viewer may be somewhat surprised to see the considerable amount of prowling camera movement in Vampyr, both in terms of panning and tracking. But this can be attributed not only to the inventiveness of Dreyer (and that of his his cameraman, Rudolph Maté, who had worked on The Passion of Joan of Arc and who would later direct the noir classic D.O.A.), but also to the fact that the film was shot "MOS" (without sound synchronization), which gave Dreyer the latitude to carry out those camera movements. Another curious aspect of Dreyer's mise-en-scène is his penchant for setting interior scenes that are spare, often with starkly white walls, and yet contain a few very specific and oddly arranged artifacts. The architectural minimalism serves to accentuate the specificity of the characters. The visual composition is coupled with a relatively heavy emphasis on closeups (particularly, the wide-eyed reaction shots of Gray), many of which are unmotivated and reference no established point of view, which are consequently disorienting to the viewer. The visual emphasis on Gray’s reactions continually puts the viewer in his position of trying to construct something coherent out of material that is intrinsically incapable of total coherence – much in the way that we, ourselves, may try to make sense out of our own nightmares in the morning.

Another element of interest is the acting. The only professional performer was Sybille Schmitz, in the role of Léone, whose own private life turned unfortunately macabre: she later had drug problems, went mad, and finally committed suicide. Nicolas de Gunzburg, using the stage name, Julian West, played Allan Gray and was also the producer of the film. His relatively sensitive and effete demeanor represents something of a male ingenue, and this colors the mood of the film throughout. Dreyer, like Mizoguchi, always had a fascination and sensitivity for the feminine role in human interactions, and there has been considerable commentary concerning Dreyer’s own past and how this may have affected his own psychological makeup (again, see Swaab [3] for more). Like Kenji Mizoguchi, the feminine role is not an abstraction for Dreyer, but is always a very physical presence in his films. Yet it is far distanced from the typical male fantasy of a feminine abstraction. Falconetti’s androgynous presence in the title role of The Passion of Joan of Arc is physical and unshakeable, but its strength is different from the masculine way in which strength is often characterized. It asserts a purity and sincerity that reflects an inner fortitude. Indeed, Mizoguchi’s focus on and representation of women has often been compared with von Sternberg’s, but perhaps Dreyer and Mizoguchi are more closely aligned in this respect. Von Sternberg’s women are idealized and viewed from the man’s perspective. But throughout Dreyer’s career, his women, like Mizoguchi’s, are grounded in the physical world, and yet have some strangely “spiritual” dimension, too.

In the last analysis we can not say that Vampyr is one of Dreyer’s great films. Like The Passion of Joan of Arc, it, too, was a financial failure, and Dreyer was to lapse into a decade of obscurity, which included a mental breakdown in 1934. Today, Vampyr seems like a piece of broken pottery that can never be fixed. The history of lost and damaged prints make reconstruction of the original intentions difficult (although heroic efforts have been made), but in fact the film may have been broken from the very beginning. What remains today, however, is still of interest for those fascinated with Dreyer’s unique manner of cinematic expression.

  1. Sheridan Le Fanu, “Carmilla”, in Writing Vampyr, (2008) The Criterion Collection, New York.
  2. Carl Theodor Dreyer and Christen Jul, “The Screenplay” in Writing Vampyr, (2008) The Criterion Collection, New York.
  3. Peter Swaab, “'Un Film Vampirisé': Dreyer ’s Vampyr”, Film Quarterly, 62:4, (2009), http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/pdf/10.1525/fq.2009.62.4.56.
  4. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style In Film (1972), Da Capo Press, New York.
  5. Acquarello, “Carl Theodor Dreyer”, Senses of Cinema (2002), http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/dreyer.html.

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