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VAMPYR is the type of film that grows on you...a masterpiece!

The new Siskel and Ebert up there.

" ****! "

hearthesilence wrote:" ****! "

You really shouldn't browse the internet while hammering in nails.

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I must confess this is one of my least favorite Dreyers (though I think part of that is residual PTSD from the original DVD that had the giant grey text boxes in the lower half of the screen!), but I was pondering this earlier: is this the most notable film starring a funding-mandated "star"? I know lots of low budget movies have often employed the same methodology to get not ready for primetime players into the temporary limelight, but this is the only one I can think of offhand where the limitations of the central performer don't overshadow what the film is able to do with the necessary evil of their casting.

Certainly one of the most notable for being at all good- as I recall, there are a fair number of MST3k movies and Ed Wood curiosities and the like which star people who have no business starring in a movie, but I think Dreyer's combination of extremely mannered acting and set-and-lighting forward development here mean the nothing of an actor playing the lead doesn't matter much one way or the other. It reminds me a bit of Coppola's Dracula and its use of Reeves and Ryder, in that respect.

This is sort of an interesting outlier in an otherwise fairly unbroken series of incredibly powerful and spiritual Dreyer films, running from Passion of Joan of Arc through basically the end of his career, discounting whatever Två människor is like- this one certain has some metaphysical qualities, but it doesn't have the feeling of a miracle play that characterizes Passion and Ordet, nor the overwhelming psychological intensity that seems to hold for all of his work for that whole run. It's quiet, certainly, and slow moving, but in some ways it's a fairly light movie, not something that one watches and has to sit down and process for forty five minutes afterwards, at least not for me. It's hard to put my finger on it, because it's not that I don't care for this- though I think I didn't see very much in it until I watched it with the MoC del Toro commentary- it's just that it doesn't feel like it's the only movie in the world, which something like Ordet did to an almost frightening degree, for days afterwards.

It's a shame Dreyer didn't live long enough to cast Pia Zadora

I think I know what you're talking about, Matrix, and I think the ending of Mikael and Gertrud affects me in a similar way. I need to re-watch it for the discussion, but I do love this film, and perhaps it sticks out for differences compared to his other work. One thing I feel like is missing in this film (someone correct me if I'm wrong) is a real aspect of redemption for someone that has wronged. In Bride of Glomdal, Day Of Wrath, and Mikael, some spirit or human forgives the person who had antagonized to some degree. Unlike Passion of Joan of Arc, though, we really see antagonists punished in a direct way here, that again, I can't remember in any other Dreyer film. Another thing that sticks out is that our cast of characters seems small and isolated. Gertrud, Passion, Day Of Wrath, and many other films feature whole communities, often which have laws which govern the actions of the characters...and those laws are often broken in some way which sets off the central conflict of the film. Here, it is seemingly outsiders being visited upon an outside force. And then like other Dreyer films, we have a battle of purity versus tainted, and good versus evil which plays out. But it cannot be reduced to just that, as the visual feast that is this film gives us much more.

Dreyer's use of sound (or lack thereof) is probably the most interesting part of the film. Sounds are heard off camera, and by the time the camera gets there, actions have ended or fallen silent. Sound plays tricks on the narrator, and through him: us. Visually it is a stunning film, leaving the viewer disoriented. At the end, we reach clarity and our characters step into the light (as the commentary on the Criterion helpfully points out). Just how much of the film really was a dream? Maybe it's more than just the coffin ride.

I need to rewatch this too, but in some ways I think the things that stick in one's mind a few months after seeing a film are the things that make the movie important to me- and what I remember about this one aren't character or plot beats, but moments and images, like the man being buried in pure white light at the end, or the low key creepiness of the elderly lady vampire seen far off. I don't remember motion at all, as though the film were a series of woodcuts.

I agree completely that this is a film of moments and images, but I think that's why it's a great film, not a weird one-off anomaly. Though I don't know how you'd recall this film without seeing moving pictures -- especially of the coffin ride. I need to watch this again as well, probably with one or both of the Criterion/MOC commentaries. For me, horror films are so much about mood and atmosphere, on a level that's at least equal to the narrative. And Vampyr is dripping with intensely cinematic sensations of mystery, foreboding and dread. Dreyer creates images and sounds to sustain this atmosphere that still feel fresh to me every time I see it. Like I said in the voting thread, you could pick random moments from the film and convince me they were done by a contemporary master like Sokurov.

Well, I don't disagree that it's a great film- I think I ranked it in my top 10 or 20 in the 30s list I submitted- it's more that it's weirdly different from the other Dreyer films I love, and achieves what it achieves in a wildly different way than they do. Thinking more about it, it's perhaps not accurate to say it doesn't feel like a film that moves at all, but one that feels like it was filmed underwater, where all the movement has a certain woozy, dreamlike quality to it, and somehow feels as though it might just be an optical illusion. The sound has a distanced quality, too, like a less agressive Lynch; I know that people speak in the film, but I can't for the life of me remember it it happening- in my head, it's all creaks and moans and quiet steps heard from a distance, the sounds one hears when one is trying to go to sleep in an unfamiliar house. It does achieve a quality of horror, but it does so strangely; the only movie I can think of that has a comparable, sort of numbed affect is Carnival of Souls. It certainly wouldn't have surprised me to learn that the movie was about a character who had died in the first ten minutes,

matrixschmatrix wrote:it's weirdly different from the other Dreyer films I love

Well it is a genre film after all. I'm curious--can anyone think of any horror films that are more conventionally Dreyer-esque than this one turned out to be?

I don't know -- Bergman's The Magician? Of course, I'm not sure I buy that there's anything Dreyer-esque. The Passion of Joan of Arc isn't like any other film of his or anyone else's. Neither is this one. His last three are more like one another than any of this earlier mature work, but still very much their own singular experiences.

Incubus seems to be part of that Dreyer/ Bergman land though I find Dreyer's style to be so constantly shifting that to conceive a Dreyer style is difficult for me.

warren oates wrote:I don't know -- Bergman's The Magician? Of course, I'm not sure I buy that there's anything Dreyer-esque. The Passion of Joan of Arc isn't like any other film of his or anyone else's. Neither is this one. His last three are more like one another than any of this earlier mature work, but still very much their own singular experiences.

That's a good point. When people talk about Dreyer's style, they generally mean the style of the last three films. So they should really be talking about Dreyer's late style. Stuff like Passion and Vampyr don't really resemble those later films; they're aggressive on a formal level: visually energetic and avant garde. (Note I love Gertrude more than any other Dreyer film I've seen).

Vampyr's weakness is its second act. The stuff in the house, tho' full of striking camera movements, tends to drag. The two acts on either side have an open quality, drifting among locations and encountering bizarre sights at random (Allan Gray's walk after that first night may as well have been a conveyor belt tour just for the sheer contrast between things discovered and the lack of direction leading to them). The acts bookending the film are phantasmagorias whose events seem limited only by the filmmakers' imaginations. Yet that second act is locked into a single location with a set number of people with the action proscribed by the genre. My attention flags during this section. There are few surprises; we're just waiting for others to discover what we already know.

I continue to love how ineffectual a demonologist our friend Gray turns out to be. He's the most passive hero I've ever seen in a vampire film. He stumbles onto most of his discoveries (usually without knowing their import), spends much of the second act in a stupour and the third in a dream(?), fails to put the pieces of the mystery together despite the book on vampires being left in his care, and really only helps the caretaker dispatch the villains. And even his heroic actions come at the direction of others (being told to run after the wandering Leone; being told about the poison trap) or are ineffectual (trying to save the master of the house from death). Despite being the one immersed in demonic lore, he seems adrift in a world whose rules he can't comprehend or alter.

The villains aren't redeemed presumably because there is no redeeming the already dammed. It's not possible. That said, Leone is redeemed at the end, her soul saved from certain damnation. It's quite a move to have the primary victim die at the end of a vampire movie.

A few more thoughts, now that I have re-watched:

Most interesting to me are these lines from the opening and second text sequences:
"He became a dreamer for whom the line between real and supernatural became blurred."

And

"Fear of things he could not name haunted his restless sleep."

While I do not mean to suggest that the events are all imagined, Dreyer seems to be implying something that I can't make out. The blood-drawing scene as well as his first trip across to the household where the murders happen have a strong air of dreaminess.

One of the most striking aspects of the film is the camera as an observer. Frequently the camera loses sight and direction of the actors, as if it's a presence eavesdropping on the events with us.

Sausage is right about the second act being a bit of a momentum-killer, but I'm wondering if we are just feeling the effects of a slightly dated horror film. Dreyer's films are big on feeling. Pent-up emotions and moments build for release. This happens in his earliest feature The President and is mastered in his last three big features. I think the underlying feeling we should feel is terror, and that perhaps the things that would have terrorized in 1932 just don't terrorize today. The spiritual, magic touch of the second-to-last and last scenes of Gertrud and Ordet, and even Day Of Wrath are built upon timeless love stories, with both redemption and betrayal as timeless factors affecting the viewer.

As Leore sits in her bed, and the vampire takes over her, there are several moments of absolute terror that one should feel. Yet by the end of the film, when she is redeemed...there is something other Dreyer films have that this one just doesn't seem to. She says "my soul is free", but the terror and agony that make that freedom so profound just didn't seem to be there for me.

I've seen The President criticized on this forum for (rightly) being a bit melodramatic and over the top. Dreyer is at his best stirring emotions just beneath the surface, which eventually erupt in grand fashion. Perhaps Vampyr, like The President, just shows Dreyer re-learning his craft. As I mentioned above, the dialogue isn't quite where it would be with Dreyer. The way his dialogue interacts with the visuals makes it so spectacular, and in Vampyr, it's not really there yet. In fact both the dialogue and the text on screen is a bit expository.

Which is why the film is at its best as it traverses the landscape, wanders through halls, and takes us on a truly psychedelic journey of horror. Make no mistake, the film may not be the masterpiece as grand as Gertrud/Ordet/Day of Wrath, nor may it be as amazing as Joan or Mikael, but Dreyer does enter the sound era with a film that certainly befits him.

I know we should focus on the "restored" German version, as on the Criterion (or in my case MoC) release, but I'm interested in the variant editions of this film, especially as I got to know Vampyr - or something approximating to it - in two of these.

Like other Horror-struck lads in the 1960s and '70s, I knew Vampyr initially as a genre film directed by some guy called Dreyer who had apparently made a few other decent movies. Following the high recommendations in William K Everson's Classics of the Horror Film, I bought a five-reel British 8mm abridgement of Vampyr, retitled Castle of Doom. I knew this was nothing like the original release version (for example, it begins with shots from the coffin ride) but it was then the only way for me to see more than those tantalising stills.

William K Everson wrote:For the United States release, and to cash in on the horror market, it was cut down drastically, re-shaped, fitted out with a lurid voice-over narration, and retitled Castle of Doom... it received sparse distribution, and was seen by few people.

My print was mute, so lacked the voice-over narration (perhaps a blessing) or any sound, returning Vampyr to the silent mode in which it was shot (though not of course presented). Another anomaly was that, since my projector did not have a 24fps option, I had to view it closer to the lower frame rate at which it was evidently shot. Viewing the standard sound prints, I think it's quite obvious that the projection speed generally is faster than the camera speed (just as for many late silents released with a synchronised track) and that has a striking aesthetic effect, making the frequent camera movements glide all the more smoothly, for example. But, in the 1970s, I was seeing the film more slowly than intended, the matching of camera and projection speeds giving it an unsuitably naturalistic quality.

Incidentally, at this time I was already familiar with Griffith's A Corner in Wheat so it seemed to me Dreyer had cribbed his flour-mill climax from that, whatever his claims about being inspired by the locations!

My next encounter with Vampyr was from a lone Channel 4 broadcast (about 20 years ago) of the Rohauer print - at least I believe it to be so, partly because C4 showed many Rohauer editions then, though it's odd that RR did not plaster his name on it as usual. Amazingly, the continuity announcer introduced it as "a lousy print" but neither photographically nor in terms of damage does it seem to me greatly inferior to the later "restoration" (especially after allowing for analogue transmission and VHS recording). Incidentally, it's also only about a minute shorter (both at 25fps PAL speed).

The chief characteristic of this edition is that, while it uses the German soundtrack, all the titles, intertitles, texts and of course sub-titles are remade in English - and these are littered with literally dozens of typos, the funniest of which is the reference in the cast list to the female role of "the cemetery bag" - which I presume was meant to be "hag" (though "bag" is also a derogatory name for women, as in "old bag," in the UK at least).

Nevertheless, this version is perhaps of passing interest as we learn in the restoration notes:

Martin Koerber wrote:Nothing seems to remain of the English version, except for the part of it that was used in the compilation of all versions that Raymond Rohauer distributed as Vampyr...

I'm not sure which part(s) are taken from the original English version, however. I'm fairly confident the lengthy texts from the vampire book were remade decades later as they share the same propensity to typographical errors we see in the other anglicised elements. Possibly from Dreyer's English-language original is the wording on the wrapping of the book, "To be opened after my death" and, even more likely, the inscription on the coffin, "Dust thou wast - to dust shalt thou return" which miraculously changes to German on its next appearance in this version.

This (presumed) Rohauer edition seems to use the censored German print for the cemetery staking and the doctor's demise, so I'm unaware of which sections are taken from the French version. Incidentally, I find the staking sequence more effective in the shorter cut - it involves so many hammer blows in the uncensored French print (included as a "deleted scene" by MoC) that the vampire killers seem more like roustabouts pitching a circus tent!

Just had a quick look through the existing threads on this film, and wanted to draw attention to Itfontaine’s particularly good post here in the MoC thread, and the discussion that followed – the issues surrounding de Gunzberg’s performance, and the point of view adopted by the camera, came up there as well.

Drucker wrote:One thing I feel like is missing in this film (someone correct me if I'm wrong) is a real aspect of redemption for someone that has wronged. In Bride of Glomdal, Day Of Wrath, and Mikael, some spirit or human forgives the person who had antagonized to some degree. Unlike Passion of Joan of Arc, though, we really see antagonists punished in a direct way here, that again, I can't remember in any other Dreyer film. Another thing that sticks out is that our cast of characters seems small and isolated. Gertrud, Passion, Day Of Wrath, and many other films feature whole communities, often which have laws which govern the actions of the characters...and those laws are often broken in some way which sets off the central conflict of the film.

Two really interesting points here. As I'm about to argue, the confusion of the boundaries between heroes and villains in Vampyr might help to address your first comment, although as has also been pointed out in this thread, it is important to remember that Dreyer is adhering to certain genre conventions here. Your point about communities in Dreyer's films is a very astute one, and I think on the whole it relates to his interest in the upsetting or subverting of entrenched, received ideas. Again, as I'll touch on below, I think that Vampyr is treating this idea in a more oblique way by making its hero a demonologist and putting him (and itself, as a film) in the thrall of archaic ideas, voices and forces from the past making themselves felt in the present - a common theme of Gothic texts, but one which resonates in Dreyer's work in various ways.

Watching this again, I kept thinking of Dreyer’s famous statement about his intentions in the film (just found this online but it’s in My Only Great Passion):

Carl Dreyer wrote:Imagine that we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly we realise that a dead body is standing behind the door. In that same moment, the room in which we sit begins to change, and each everyday thing in it looks different, the light and the atmosphere have changed, and things become what we perceive them to be. This is the effect I want to produce in my film.

One interesting feature of Vampyr’s screenplay is its extremely detailed approach to describing each setting, the objects to be found in a room, its atmosphere, its degree of cleanliness, etc.. This isn’t surprising coming from Dreyer, and the above quotation could easily describe his approach in any of his other films. Think of the ‘everyday things’ by which his sets are so meticulously populated, and the way in which they accumulate various kinds of meaning and emotional resonance: the pictures on the walls in The President and Ordet, which come to stand for the weight of previous generations, the dead still intruding upon the world of the living in the form of deathbed promises and rigid orthodoxies; the artworks strewn about the Master’s house in Michael, at first seeming to represent a fertile, liberated creative environment, but coming to resemble relics in a mausoleum, testifying to Zoret’s alienation from the rest of humanity as he crawls towards death; the comfortable bourgeois ‘stuff’ in Gertrud which, we gradually realise, constitutes a kind of prison for her, a world of insubstantial distractions from which she ultimately escapes into that spare, unearthly apartment in the final scene; the forest idyll in Day of Wrath that suddenly turns chilling when Anne and Martin realise that firewood is being gathered for the pyre that will burn Herlof's Marte; the magnificent, expensive sets of Joan of Arc, which Dreyer does not allow us to see and which therefore take on the same degree of dull insignificance which Joan herself ascribes to them, so that as Dreyer puts it, ‘things become what we perceive them to be’, in this case ceasing to exist when we fail to perceive them; and of course the home of Viktor and Ida in Master of the House, in which every object is inflected with the husband’s abuse in the first act, but is then gradually carried over into the re-made context of the happy home towards the end.

The most obvious parallel, within Dreyer’s work, is probably with Ordet, where the idea of the ‘dead body on the other side of the door’ is literalised, and has a complex effect on our perception of Borgensgaard as we spend time more and more time there. I wouldn’t want to go into more detail, in case anyone reading this hasn’t seen that film yet... But one other important point to make about the above quotation, in relation to Vampyr, is that the dead body is probably best understood as a symbol of mortality, rather than a literal dead body about whose literal past and future we are supposed to care. That is, the questions of who killed this body and how it got there are not the main points of interest. Rather, the focus is on the effect that the proximity of death/mortality might have on the world of the living, the process of negotiation between life and death, the blurring of the boundaries between those two states, and so on.

My overall point here is that this film’s fixation on death, as an intangible presence suffusing the material world, can be related to Dreyer’s persistent fixation, throughout his work, on the investment of material things with intangible meanings of various kinds.

However, having acknowledged that Dreyer’s films are constantly gesturing towards that intangible, transcendent level of meaning, it’s also important to emphasise that these films remain pointedly ‘trapped’ on the material level. Even in Vampyr, there is a recurrent hesitancy about crossing over the boundary between the natural and the supernatural: yes, we see the bodiless shadows running, climbing, working and dancing, but by definition they seem absent rather than present, vague hints at a reality we cannot access, and one which encompasses far more than the rather boring tale of Marguerite Chopin. She commands the shadows to be quiet, but even this seemingly authoritative gesture indicates that the shadow-spirits exist independently of her, and are not automatically under her control.

And yes, there are the overtly supernatural goings-on in the climax of the film, but these too are elliptical and deeply obscure. The ghost of the murdered father appears in a window, but framed in such a way that for a moment one might almost think it was the face of the witch, who has just been killed, and is now vengefully dragging her accomplices with her into Hell; and then when the doctor is trapped in the room while Peg-Leg tries to open the door, we just see flashes of light and the silhouette of the parrot. Here is what the original screenplay says at this point:


‘In surprise [Peg-Leg] steps back a pace, and through the window above the door he sees a flickering light moving to and fro in the room. In his bewilderment he remains rooted to the spot. Then he hears a sound resembling that of a mother crooning a gentle lullaby over her child, or of a doctor trying to reassure his patient during an operation. At the same time one senses beneath the ingratiating and affectionate tone something threatening, hard and almost ironic – a threat of revenge.’


This brilliantly creepy notion of the soporific, reassuring/threatening voice was obviously abandoned at some point, because all we have on the soundtrack now is a noise suggestive of rolling thunder, as though the room beyond the door has become engulfed in a raging thunderstorm – the heavens erupting on earth. This is a much less interesting way of suggesting a violated or blurred boundary.

I love the idea of imposing a comforting sound on this scene, which would therefore become disturbing in its very incongruity. Both the scenarios suggested in the screenplay – the mother lulling her baby to sleep, the doctor reassuring the (partly anaesthetised?) patient – describe a process of easing a vulnerable, passive creature from one state to another. What is most fascinating here, though, is the proposed dissonance (the tone is ‘almost ironic’) between what we hear on the soundtrack and what is actually going on. The mother is actually about to strangle her baby; the patient is about to be killed by the doctor. We see almost nothing; what we hear is misleading; reality is always just beyond what we can perceive.

And of course, there’s the ending, where Allan and Gisèle cross the river – a location which, from the beginning of the film, alludes to the river dividing life from death in classical mythology – and are last seen escaping from the mist-shrouded forest into a mysterious sunlit realm. Rather than showing us anything of that bright world to which they seem to be headed, the film closes on a shot of the cogs in the flour mill grinding to a halt. Primarily, that image signals the death of the villain. But here too there is a troubling ambiguity about what exactly has happened and who is responsible for it. The screenplay indicates that the manservant sets the machinery in motion in the flour mill (so he’s basically a murderer, right?), and refers to this as ‘his trap’, but also says that the enraged doctor ‘threatens the silent and invisible pursuers who are incarcerating him in this white terror’. It seems that the manservant is collaborating with the benign spirits, but the extent of his responsibility here remains uncertain, especially since in the film we never see him do anything more than look on impassively while the doctor is buried.

In short, this resolution leaves a number of loose ends dangling, and in its vagueness it maintains the dreamlike tone that prevails throughout the film. When we see the cogs grinding to a halt, juxtaposed with (and coming straight after) the final shot of Allan and Gisèle, the effect is not so much to create a sense of finality and closure, but rather to suggest the troubling interdependence of these two narrative threads. Literally, it is the doctor who has died beneath those cogs, but through the magic of intercutting Dreyer makes that image of finality and death the ‘full stop’ to Allan and Gisèle’s journey, not the villain’s. It’s sort of the opposite to what we get at the end of Intolerance, where the three tragic endings are capped and redeemed by the happy ending of the modern story (a happiness that is arguably suffused with the specifically religious sense of redemption provided by the Christ story) – an effect that Dreyer had already reproduced, in a different way (and without intercutting between the different narratives), through the redemptive conclusion to the fourth, modern segment of Leaves From Satan’s Book.

In Vampyr, the image of redemption (Allan and Gisèle walking into the light) is, I would argue, brutally curtailed and nullified by the image of the cogs. All these characters are symbolic figures in a dream, all figments manifesting a single consciousness, and the death of the doctor is also the death of Allan and Gisèle; their movement from darkness into light is also a plunge into the suffocating white terror of the flour mill; the benevolent supernatural forces that have enabled them to escape to freedom (signalled in the screenplay by the fire lit on the shore and the hymn-singing children guiding the protagonists to safety – foreshadowing Day of Wrath’s witch-burning fire and creepy Vredens-Dag-singing kids, ushering Herlof’s Marte into Hell...) are also the malevolent supernatural forces that have hounded the villain to his death (doesn’t the mist in the forest look a bit like clouds of flour, spilling over from one location into the next?).

Allan Gray’s dream, earlier in the film, has already done a wonderful job of confusing the dividing lines between his death and that of the witch. He sees himself being put in the coffin, then is himself inside the coffin, being carried towards the churchyard to be buried (alive? like the undead Marguerite Chopin? like the doctor buried alive in flour? like Leone, damned while she is alive but redeemed to eternal life in the moment of death?), then wakes up, goes to the churchyard and helps to uncover the witch, exhuming her live body to transform it into a dead, decayed one.

One important effect of the cuts Dreyer made to the film is to render the narrative inexplicable, preventing us from defining or placing boundaries around the action. But just as, in his final film, Dreyer pared down Söderberg’s play to make the character of Gertrud more opaque, further ‘beyond’ our understanding, so in Vampyr this ambiguity extends to the characters, even to the point of confusing the distinctions between them or, in the hero’s case, the distinctions between the various selves within one character (he’s on the bench, then a transparent self splits off, leaving the self on the bench also transparent – then the mobile transparent self watches a non-transparent but immobile self in a coffin – then that self watches from inside the coffin, passing by the still-transparent self on the bench, which ceases to be transparent at the precise moment when the pallbearers fade away...). You could tell this story pretty straightforwardly and make it coherent and comprehensible, but this film repeatedly goes out of its way to de-stabilise our grasp on the narrative and our emotional or moral investment in the characters’ actions and destinies. It is truly dream-like in this sense, because it often demands an emotional response that seems out of kilter with the ‘surface content’ of what we are seeing.

Which brings me to the text-heavy second act of the film.

Mr Sausage wrote:Vampyr's weakness is its second act. The stuff in the house, tho' full of striking camera movements, tends to drag. The two acts on either side have an open quality, drifting among locations and encountering bizarre sights at random (Allan Gray's walk after that first night may as well have been a conveyor belt tour just for the sheer contrast between things discovered and the lack of direction leading to them). The acts bookending the film are phantasmagorias whose events seem limited only by the filmmakers' imaginations. Yet that second act is locked into a single location with a set number of people with the action proscribed by the genre. My attention flags during this section. There are few surprises; we're just waiting for others to discover what we already know.I continue to love how ineffectual a demonologist our friend Gray turns out to be. He's the most passive hero I've ever seen in a vampire film. He stumbles onto most of his discoveries (usually without knowing their import), spends much of the second act in a stupour and the third in a dream(?), fails to put the pieces of the mystery together despite the book on vampires being left in his care, and really only helps the caretaker dispatch the villains. And even his heroic actions come at the direction of others (being told to run after the wandering Leone; being told about the poison trap) or are ineffectual (trying to save the master of the house from death). Despite being the one immersed in demonic lore, he seems adrift in a world whose rules he can't comprehend or alter.

Yes, dramatically speaking this section is dead in the water, and can be a chore to sit through if you’re not in the mood. It made a lot more sense to me when I finally saw a decent edition (the MoC version), and was able to see the inserts of the Vampire-book as Dreyer intended them to be seen. Not only did he make this book himself and subject it to wonderfully detailed, authentic ‘ageing’ processes, he apparently spent two whole days filming its pages, blowing on the candles next to the camera to create the flickering light (this is according to Casper Tybjerg’s visual essay). He also vehemently objected to the proposal that these shots be presented as standard intertitles on the Danish version, arguing that the book was itself a ‘performer’ in the film, an actor just as significant as (and, it must be said, considerably more expressive than) the main players in the drama.

In the screenplay, there is no suggestion that Allan Gray is interested in demonology or the occult:

'He wants to spend his holiday in solitude, which is why he has come to this remote region in search of peace.'

He is simply on holiday – and this was evidently how the character was conceived during shooting as well, as we first see him arriving at the inn with fishing gear slung over one shoulder, and a rather nice, tasselled man-bag over the other (eerily similar to Karel’s ill-fated bag in The Party and the Guests...). So the idea that he is a scholar of the dark arts must have developed during or even after the shooting, and been incorporated into the film's first intertitle. The book that Allan later inherits from Gisèle’s father is referred to in the screenplay as a ‘diary’. The script repeatedly says that ‘a page from the diary is shown’, but doesn’t go into detail about its contents – somehow it helps to explain what’s happening in the chateau. Presumably, the original idea was that the father had been recording his own investigations into the sinister goings-on in Courtempierre, and now Allan and the manservant are able to retrace his steps up to and beyond the point where he was rubbed out by the shadow-spirits.

So why replace the diary with a published work on vampire lore, and why change Allan Gray from an unsuspecting schmuck on a fishing holiday into a morbid demonologist? Notice what that first intertitle says about Allan’s studies: they deprive him of the ability to distinguish between dreams and reality, between life and death. What happens to him at the inn? He sees a framed picture of a man being visited in bed by death. Then he is visited, in his sleep, by a phantom that enters his room by supernatural means, casts an unearthly light on the tacky wallpaper, and leaves a book that is only to be opened after he (the phantom) has crossed over into death. And what does this book turn out to be? Not someone else’s diary, but one of Allan’s own books – exactly the kind of thing he likes to read. And what does Allan do while people are being shot and poisoned and Vampirified all around him? He sits down to read his book, and finds in it an accurate and detailed reflection of the reality he is living through. Then there’s a strange displacement, where Allan is rendered unconscious by the blood-transfusion process and dreams of death holding the bottle of poison, while the thunder and lightning to which the doctor will later be subjected rages in the background (the screenplay gets very weird here, and seems to suggest that Allan’s own blood speaks to him in a dream, urging him to kill himself) – and during all this, the manservant picks up where Allan left off in the book, before coming to wake Allan up so he can save Leone from the poison...

All of this is a dream or waking fantasy in Allan’s head, in which he can transition seamlessly from one figure to another, inhabiting multiple identities at a time, and in which the normal rules of time (and narrative pacing, and narrative logic) can be suspended. The book-reading scenes remind me not so much of, say, Hutter’s reading in Nosferatu, as of the passages in Ishiguro’s brilliant, Kafka-esque novel, The Unconsoled, a dream narrative in which the dreamer-protagonist can be in a desperate hurry to get somewhere within the next thirty seconds, and yet still find time to stop and listen to an hour-long monologue from a character who may or may not ambiguously represent aspects of himself, his son, his parents and his wife. That's what dreams are like. And of course what Allan finds in the book corresponds precisely to what is happening to him now – this is just another clue to how self-contained and self-perpetuating this whole experience is.

Seen in this light, as fragments of a delirious dream-fantasy rather than as a clumsy narrative device, the seemingly endless shots of the vampire book do become more absorbing. It helps if you embrace their soporific effect and lose track of time; it helps even more if you turn the subtitles off and just take in the images, the slow camera movements, the subtle lighting effects, the blackened spots on the book. We don’t really need to know what the words say, beyond understanding that they tell the characters what they need (and want) to hear. But we do need to know what the book stands for: a voice from the past, archaic lore demanding to be applied to the present, morbidly fixated on liminal states, death and damnation, and itself existing in a liminal state, at once a possession of the murdered father, a volume from Allan’s library, and an object that seems to compel the attention of the manservant by an almost supernatural force, slowly drawing his gaze towards itself, arresting his attention with the first line, ‘As soon as the Vampire feels his victim is completely under his control...’, drawing this rather clichéd ‘down-to-earth’ subordinate into the web of demonological intrigue and fantasy.

Dreyer’s film begins with an unnecessarily long intertitle, superimposed on an image of a giant spider’s web: the film in some sense begins as a written text, and holds us trapped in its highly ‘textual’ web throughout, to a quite infuriating degree. One could draw parallels with The President, whose narrative is framed by shots of an opening and closing book, suggesting the bound, inexorable, cyclical nature of the narrative; or The Passion of Joan of Arc, where the trial transcript ostensibly signals authenticity, but in fact is surpassed and transcended by a visual ‘record’ of Joan’s passion that consistently goes beyond what the mere text of her dialogue with the judges could ever convey. I think Vampyr mingles these two effects. Its fixation on ‘text’ indicates both the entrapment of Allan Gray in his morbid studies, which have taken over his mind, and the way in which the texts he has studied spill over from the page into his real life, or at least into what he perceives as his real life.

sloper wrote:Seen in this light, as fragments of a delirious dream-fantasy rather than as a clumsy narrative device, the seemingly endless shots of the vampire book do become more absorbing. It helps if you embrace their soporific effect and lose track of time; it helps even more if you turn the subtitles off and just take in the images, the slow camera movements, the subtle lighting effects, the blackened spots on the book. We don’t really need to know what the words say, beyond understanding that they tell the characters what they need (and want) to hear. But we do need to know what the book stands for: a voice from the past, archaic lore demanding to be applied to the present, morbidly fixated on liminal states, death and damnation, and itself existing in a liminal state, at once a possession of the murdered father, a volume from Allan’s library, and an object that seems to compel the attention of the manservant by an almost supernatural force, slowly drawing his gaze towards itself, arresting his attention with the first line, ‘As soon as the Vampire feels his victim is completely under his control...’, drawing this rather clichéd ‘down-to-earth’ subordinate into the web of demonological intrigue and fantasy

As someone who likes poring through old books, even ones in languages I don't know, in order to enjoy a similar atmosphere of the archaic and esoteric, I appreciate those book excerpts, tho' I can't say I ever felt dislocated or pulled into an a-termporal dream-state by them (interesting point, tho'). I'm glad you pointed out that the book was originally conceived as a diary, because it does get absurdly specific at times, to the point of identifying the specific vampire haunting the specific region the characters inhabit. It actually makes the crucial element of these kinds of scenes--deduction--irrelevant since it spells out the necessary connections.

Thinking about it, the book doesn't so much compel the past into the present as pull the present into the past since it comes across as a description of the very events occurring in the narrative. The old book, which kicks off the supernatural events proper, seems to pull Gray into its world (which fits with the theme of Gray being Quixotic, in the sense of having an imagination driven wild by books--also a late addition), forcing him, a person from the present, to reenact events from the distant past. One could well read the movie as being about a person forced to inhabit a story!

Reminds me of that horror conceit of characters finding the work-in-progress of a horror author and discovering it contains exact descriptions of everything the characters had experienced up to that point (and perhaps beyond).


Also, is Vampyr the first example of a character hearing a creak or other noise coming from some part of a strange house and going to investigate?

Mr Sausage wrote:Also, is Vampyr the first example of a character hearing a creak or other noise coming from some part of a strange house and going to investigate?

It's a shame Dreyer didn't think to have him strip down to his underwear first, like a proper horror movie.

Thank you Sloper, for a great take on that early-text piece about Allan Gray having trouble distinguishing dreams from reality. It was something that stuck out to me but I really had nothing to add about it. As I watched the film, it seemed hard to really believe that the character could possibly be imagining the whole scenario as it went on and on and on. But connecting it with the end, which is much more plausible as a dream than as Allan Gray as some sort of savior to this woman, does allow one to read the whole film as more a less a series of dream sequences of a man letting his imagination run wild!

I find Sloper's suggestion of the past intruding on the present intriguing, not least because at this point, Dreyer's films are getting up there in age themselves. The traditions of the past can seem stifling from a modern perspective, but presumably for reasons that our ancestors held dear (just as we today have convictions that we hope will stand the test of time). Is Dreyer taking sides here, proposing a rejection of the past, or merely acknowledging how it hangs over everything that we do? Perhaps in his other films more than this one, does he find fault with the past itself or with how people in the present dishonor it by twisting it to fit their own ends?

"How people in the present dishonor it by twisting it to fit their own ends", Swo, is definitely the nail on the head for me. Like Griffith, Dreyer's films often are centered on both 1) innocence of good characters and 2) the hypocrisy of others. Joan of Arc is an example where both contrast perfectly in Dreyer's film. Master Of The House being another one.

I don't think Dreyer ever truly picks sides of old versus new. To me, the past in his films is a tool of those in power. In Master of the House, isn't the Master dishonoring the past by not honoring his wife? At the same time, the young couple in Ordet, if I remember correctly, are violating their own family's "past," and the other family's elder is seen as irrational (I haven't seen the film in 4 years, so sorry if i am mis-remembering).

The head of the other household in Ordet definitely comes off as a viciously doctrinal traditionalist, but that feels more like it's part of the film's critique of organized religion and the way it blots out faith than anything to do with the battle of old vs. new.