Vampyr (1932) Review

Vampyr (1932)

Vampyr follows Allan Gray, whose obsession with the occult leads him to a small village that holds a dark, blood-sucking secret. 

For a film that came on the tale end of the infancy of spoken motion pictures, Vampyr bridges the gap between silent and spoken, and gives us one of the spookiest, early entries into what horror with sound would come to be. Atmosphere and sound are everything here, creating a menacing mood of despair and baited breath. There is an air of undefined menace that realizes the dream state better than most any film to follow (except for maybe Scrooged), as if Dreyer had filmed a genuine nightmare, full of eerie energy and haunting imagery that comes off rather unsettling in its simplicity. 

Now, despite spare dialog and a reliance on Wolfgang Zeller’s brilliant score to convey emotion that recounts the silent era, this film does feel surprisingly modern. It’s groundbreaking use of shadows and visual effects and trickery reveal this to be peak Expressionism. The way they combined light and darkness to match the tones is among some of the finest early black and white visual art ever. Structuring it as a nightmare allowed the crew to really experiment with effects, all coming to a head with the extremely impressive double exposure work that lead to Grey’s out of body experience, viewing his own death from multiple angles, in what is probably the most interesting bit the movie has to offer. 

We’re also given a pretty good cast here, in Henriette Gerard, Maurice Schutz, Rena Mandel, Sybille Schmitz, Jan Hieronimko, and Nicolas de Gunzburg. Oddly, the lone dull spot was Gunzburg, who felt a bit lost, if never the character he was supposed to be playing. The smaller performances from Gerard, Hieronimko, and Schmitz however, were really well done and evoked deep feelings of wicked terror. 

Based on a novel by Sheridan Le Fanu, Vampyr, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, is a cryptic, mysterious, and at several times, mind-boggling hybrid of early horror conventions and German Expressionist motifs, making way for a misunderstood horror film that was well before its time.

9.2/10