Vampyr (1932)

(On Cable TV, July 2019) For all its qualities, Vampyr is best recommended to those who have already seen Dracula and Nosferatu among the early vampire films, because it strikes out in a direction of its own that remains remarkable (if not completely satisfying) even to modern audiences. Going for eeriness rather than more straightforward horrific qualities, writer-director Carl Theodor Dreyer, fresh off the success of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, decided to mash up a few vampire-themed short stories and to deliver something not yet seen in cinema. After equipping his camera with gauze for a soft-lens look that almost looks like a restoration error today, Dreyer shot a story that takes off from Stoker’s classic tale (what with a young man coming to a small town and a woman lying in a coma after being bitten) to deliver something far stranger than a straight-ahead vampire-fighting film. Primitive but still-effective camera tricks are used to present shadows without figures, events happening backwards and villagers behaving strangely. It doesn’t quite work for modern audiences—the deliberate lack of narrative clarity is annoying, and the stylistic quirks of the film can be difficult to distinguish from early-1930s cinematic amateurishness. Still, those very quirks are also what makes the film worth a look for fans of the subgenre—it’s clearly a forebear of more arthouse horror movie sensibilities. Very much executed in the manner of a silent film despite having a synchronized soundtrack, Vampyr is thankfully short at no more than 75 minutes—at that length, it’s worth a quick look just to see the difference with other classic vampire movies.