A Classic Bites Back: 'Vampyr'

| Print Post This | Like (0) | Comments (0)

IN THE LATE 1920s and early 1930s, moviegoers had some choice in their vampires. They could watch Lon Chaney's toothy demon in "London After Midnight," Bela Lugosi's caped bloodsucker in Universal's "Dracula," or the ancient crone played by stone-faced Henriette Gerárd in Carl Theodor Dreyer's "Vampyr."

Chaney's creature was a blockbuster — the film, alas, has since been lost — and Lugosi's Count has proved massively influential. But "Vampyr" was booed off screens in Europe and hardly showed in America, so Dreyer's interpretation of the living dead remains fairly esoteric today.

Rather than feasting on the blood of the innocent, Dreyer's vampire commands a dark legion of the living and the dead, scheming against humanity while inspiring sinister goings-on.

The first half of "Vampyr" documents the creature's unholy presence in a small village, where ownerless shadows carouse the alleyways and reflections of no one dance on the surface of a pond. The vampire has beguiled a young village woman, and the protagonist (played by Baron Nicolas De Gunzberg, who financed the film) is charged with protecting her.

As it progresses, "Vampyr" proves a relentlessly disorienting film, rarely giving a sense of place or much in the way of plot. Instead, it enthralls visually. And because Dreyer leaves nearly all of these unearthly phenomena unexplained, the film seems both realistic and intensely dreamlike. According to Criterion's lavish two-DVD edition of "Vampyr," the film's harsh critical reception drove Dreyer to check himself into an asylum, and it was nearly a decade before he put his name on another film.

Criterion's new set is beautifully packaged, of course, but is also something like a short seminar on the film. Along with the crisp 1998 remaster, the set gathers essays and commentaries that place the movie in the context of Dreyer's attempt to move from silents to sound films, and also within the history of vampire films, in which "Vampyr" is an anomaly.

Its mythology is so different from our conception of vampires as fanged neck-biters, it makes this film unique and all the more unsettling.

Written by Express contributor Stephen M. Deusner
Photos courtesy Criterion Collection