VAMPYR (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1931)

Most of the best horror films, for a host of reasons, have come from Germany: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919), Nosferatu (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922), Jonathan (Hans W. Geissendörfer, 1970—this, from West Germany). From both Germany and France, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (Vampyr—Der Traum des Allan Grey) is probably the finest horror film ever made.

Dreyer had already collapsed the difference between historical reality and its fictional representation in his portrayal of Jesus and his disciples in the beautiful opening segment of Leaves from Satan’s Book (Blade af Satans Bog, 1919), from Denmark, and in his portrait of Jeanne d’Arc’s trial in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), from France. But Vampyr, for three reasons, is very different. Like Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921), it fully enters a magical world, in its case, a realm of sinister enchantment. Moreover, its images and sounds across a spectrum of fictional and nonfictional, and objective and subjective, suggestions is correlative to its attempt to bridge the worlds of sound and silence. The film’s additions of sound effects and spoken dialogue, both sparse, interrupt and unsettle its silent or eerily quiet dreamlike realm, helping the film to realize its central theme: humanity’s anxieties as a result of (our species presumes) its peculiar awareness of its own mortality. The dreaminess of Vampyr suggests more than an anxious dream, however; on one level, it is a desired or somehow willed dream whose aim is to relegate elements of anxious reality to the realm of dream so that the possibility exists of waking up and having these elements dissipate and dissolve. The film implies, then, a permanently objective world the fear of whose loss requires the landscape of a dream as a kind of safety hatch or escape route. The blend of elements is so complete that, throughout much of the film, there is, simultaneously, a quiet sense of stability and a disquieting sense of instability and loss. Vampyr exists within a dream, but, within that dream, it exists at the crossroads of possibility and impossibility, loss and the hope of defeating loss, subjectivity and objectivity, nonfiction and fiction. Not coincidentally, it is the grayest film among all black-and-white films.

The film opens with sound: the low, ominous strains of Wolfgang Zeller’s musical theme, perfectly suited to the theme of mortal anxiety. It immediately posits Vampyr as a sound film but then visually opens as a silent film, or as a throwback to silent films, when a long title card appears, identifying the hero of the about-to-unfold adventure as young David Gray, whose study of evil and vampires from past centuries has rendered him a “dreamer, for whom the boundary between the real and the unreal has become dim.” (The dream state of Gray’s existence is reinforced by a subsequent reference to his “aimless journeyings.”) In effect, we the viewer relate to this title card, and the one that follows establishing the setting, the village of Courtempierre in the nineteenth century, as though they are documents: documentary guideposts. This will later connect to a huge document about vampirism portions of which we will intermittently read over Gray’s shoulder, as it were, as Gray himself reads it. On one level, this is an attempt by Dreyer to bring credibility to the fantastic, as Lang attempts to do by other means in Die Nibelungen. On a more pressing level, though, this is an attempt to use an element of silent films in order to stabilize the new anxiety-ridden territory of sound cinema (this was Dreyer’s first sound film)—anxiety that is correlative to, and perhaps even representative of, anxiety related to human mortality. That the object of Gray’s study is vampires makes the point perfectly, for vampires—the undead—are projections of this anxiety of ours over our finite condition. The peculiar nature of this printed language, however, is to encapsulate the anxiety that the language would seem to counter, much as, when a patient reads about a terminal illness he or she has, with the aim of mastering fear through knowledge, he or she may nevertheless be reinforcing the original anxiety. Facts about illness do not necessarily dissipate the fact of the approaching death. Attempts at objectifying often deepen a soul’s subjectivity. To say the same thing in another way: One does what one can to reduce one’s level of anxiety, but in reality, in certain situations, there is nothing one can do. The one possibility that is open is to go through the motions of doing something. Our fear of death stubbornly resists transcendence.

In the authentic kind of cinema in which Dreyer engaged, images take primacy over language, whether the language is spoken or written. After the two title cards, the film per se materializes; but it materializes in a kind of dematerializing way. Carrying against his shoulder a long-handled net, Gray appears walking up a hill with the sea in close proximity. Although he is fully dressed and dry, the shot is framed so that the “dream possibility” arises that Gray has just walked out of the water, and, in any case, because of what we have just read about his being a “dreamer,” we immediately associate the water with the unconscious—a common symbolism predating Freud’s naming of the unconscious. The complexity of the image speaks to the complexity of the film’s tack: Gray is on land, which implicitly means he is firmly in reality, but the water, coupled with the butterfly net he totes, renders the image dreamlike, casting Gray symbolically adrift. He is, recall, an aimless journeyer.

The next images find Dreyer renewing this tack—as, indeed, will the entire film. Having mounted the hill, Gray arrives at the inn where he will stay. This is grounded in reality, for the event implies the mundane arrangements that must have been made in advance so that Gray would have a place to stay while in Courtempierre. Such arrangements counter the idea of a dream by suggesting a continuity of behavior on Gray’s part. What we see next, though, counters the countering. Gray is at the door of the inn, but he finds no way of getting in. He knocks and calls to no avail; just when it seems that the implied “arrangements” have dissolved into nothingness, as things precisely do in a dream, a bespectacled woman opens an upstairs window, calls to Gray, and appears downstairs to let Gray in. Dreyer’s choice to keep the camera on Gray rather than follow the young woman downstairs (the shot of Gray at the door is from inside the inn), though, deliciously holds us in suspense as to whether the innkeeper will in fact let Gray in or simply vanish. (Who knows what might happen in this film?) Meanwhile, a man who is carrying a scythe descends the hill and rings a suspended bell, with the water again in close view. The scythe, which traditionally is something that the figure of Death might tote, identifies the man whose face is invisible to us because the camera is at his back as Gray’s reverse or contrary image: old instead of young, going down the hill that Gray has just ascended, and carrying the solid scythe instead of Gray’s airy net. The tolling bell, too, replaces Gray’s hello-ing, and, because of its visual juxtaposition with the sea, suggests the loss of human lives. Although the scene, and indeed the entire film, is wondrously light, there is an unmistakable presence here of human fear of death. This is reinforced to a stunning degree by a shot of the man, indeed old and now obliquely facing us with his scythe, shown against the quickly flowing water that now appears much closer than we have thus far seen it. We almost feel that it might carry us away.

The ridiculous plot of Vampyr, with its conspiracy to enslave a man and his daughters by a vampire and an evil doctor out of Caligari, comes from Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s story “Carmilla” in In a Glass Darkly. The film’s immense value owes little or nothing to its debased literary source. It’s the magical quality of the film that matters, such as in those shots, in shadowy silhouette, where a man is digging a grave and we see, in reverse motion, the earth sail through space to the spoon of the shovel. What matters most is the “not-quite-rightness” of the world that David Gray navigates, which achieves its culmination when he witnesses the movement of his casket towards burial, with himself, open-eyed, in it. It is the blending of anxious fantasy and objective reportage, subjectivity and objectivity, fiction and nonfiction that makes Vampyr cinema’s preeminent (if uncredited) evocation of Edgar Allan Poe, the nineteenth-century American newspaperman and fantasist whom critic Harold Bloom has unwisely dismissed.

Vampyr’s script is by Dreyer and Christen Jul. Dreyer’s inspired cinematographers—like Dreyer, they have tapped into their dreams—are Rudolf Mâté and Louis Née.