Vampyr


Vampyr is a 1932 Gothic horror film directed by Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer. It was written by Dreyer and Christen Jul based on elements from Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 collection of supernatural stories In a Glass Darkly. The film was funded by Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, who also played the starring role of Allan Gray, a student of the occult who wanders into the French village of Courtempierre, which is under the curse of a vampire. Most of the other members of the cast were also non-professional actors.
The film presented a number of technical challenges for Dreyer, as it was his first sound film and was recorded in three languages. To simplify matters, he decided to use very little dialogue in the film, and much of the story is told with title cards, like a silent film. The film was shot entirely on location, and to enhance the atmospheric content, Dreyer opted for a washed out, soft focus photographic technique. The soundtrack was created in Berlin, where the characters' voices, the sound effects, and the score were recorded.
After having its release delayed by nine months, allegedly so the American films Dracula and Frankenstein could be released first, Vampyr was released in Germany, where it opened to a generally negative reception from both audiences and critics. Dreyer edited the film after its German premiere, and it opened to more mixed reviews in France. The film was long considered a low point in Dreyer's career, but modern critical reception has been much more favorable, with critics praising the film's disorienting visual effects and atmosphere.

Plot

Late one evening, Allan Gray, a wandering student of the occult, arrives at an inn close to the village of Courtempierre, France, and rents a room. He is awakened from his sleep by an old man, who enters the locked room and leaves a small rectangular package on the table with "To be opened upon my death" written on the wrapping paper. Feeling drawn to investigate, Gray takes the package and leaves the inn.
Gray follows the shadow of a soldier with a peg leg to a disused factory, where he sees the shadow reunite with its body, and witnesses other shadows dancing. He also sees an old woman who seems to hold sway over the shadows, and encounters an old man with a mustache, who shows Gray the door.
Following some more shadows to a manor house, Gray looks through one of the windows and sees the lord of the manor, who is the man who gave him the package, get shot by the shadow of the soldier. Gray gets the attention of an old servant, and they rush to the lord of the manor, but it is too late to save him. Giséle, the lord of the manor's younger daughter, is there when he dies, but her sister, Léone, does not leave her bed, as she is gravely ill. A coachman is sent to get the police, and the old servant's wife invites Gray to stay the night.
In the library, Gray opens the package and finds a book inside about horrific demons called vampires. As he begins to read about how the creatures suck blood and gain control over the living and dead, Giséle says she sees Léone walking outside. They follow her, and, when they catch up, see the old woman from the factory bent over Léone's unconscious body. The old woman slinks away, and Léone, who is discovered to have fresh bite wounds, is carried back to bed. The carriage returns, but the coachman is dead.
The village doctor visits Léone at the manor, and Gray recognizes him as the old man with a mustache that he saw in the factory. The doctor tells Gray that Léone needs a blood transfusion, and Gray agrees to donate his blood. Exhausted from blood loss, Gray falls asleep. Meanwhile, the old servant has noticed the book and begun to read it. He learns that a vampire can be defeated by opening its grave at dawn and driving an iron bar through its heart, and that there are rumors that a vampire was really behind a previous epidemic in Courtempierre, with a woman named Marguerite Chopin being the prime suspect.
Gray wakes up sensing danger and rushes to Léone's bedside, where he stops her from drinking poison that the old woman had the doctor bring to the manor. The doctor flees, kidnapping Giséle, and Gray follows. Just outside the factory, Gray trips and has an out-of-body experience, in which he sees himself dead, sealed in a coffin with a window, and carried away to be buried. After his spirit returns to his body, he notices the old servant heading to Marguerite Chopin's grave. They open the grave and find the old woman perfectly preserved, until they hammer a large metal bar through her heart, at which point she becomes a skeleton. The curse of the vampire is lifted, and, back at the manor, Léone suddenly recovers.
The ghost of the lord of the manor appears to the doctor, causing him to run away and the soldier to fall to his death down a flight of stairs. Using information he gathered during his out-of-body experience, Gray finds and unties Giséle. The doctor tries to hide in an old mill, but the old servant, seemingly aided by an unseen force, locks the doctor in a chamber where flour sacks are filled and activates the mill's machinery, which fills the chamber with flour and suffocates the doctor. Giséle and Gray cross a foggy river in a boat and find themselves in a bright clearing.

Cast

  • Nicolas de Gunzburg as Allan Gray, a young wanderer whose studies of occult matters have made him a dreamer. Gray's view of the world is described as a blur of the real and unreal.
  • Maurice Schutz as the Lord of the Manor, Giséle and Léone's father, who offers Gray a book about vampirism to help Gray save his daughters. After his murder, he returns briefly as a spirit and takes revenge on the village doctor and a soldier who had helped the vampire.
  • Rena Mandel as Giséle, the younger daughter of the Lord of the Manor, who is kidnapped by the Village Doctor late in the film.
  • Sybille Schmitz as Léone, the older daughter of the Lord of the Manor, who is in thrall to the vampire and finds her strength dwindling day by day.
  • Jan Hieronimko as the Village Doctor, a pawn of the vampire. He kidnaps Giséle late in the film.
  • Henriette Gérard as Marguerite Chopin, the vampire, an old woman whose hold extends beyond her immediate victims. Many villagers, including the doctor, are her minions.
  • Albert Bras as the Old Servant, a servant at the manor house. When Gray is incapacitated after donating blood to Léone, he finds the book on vampirism and, aided by Gray, ends the vampire's reign of terror.
  • N. Babanini as the Old Servant's Wife
  • Jane Mora as the Nurse
  • Georges Boidin as the Limping Soldier with a peg leg

    Production

Development

began planning Vampyr in late 1929, a year after the release of his previous film, The Passion of Joan of Arc. The production company behind Joan of Arc had plans to make another film with Dreyer, but that project was dropped, which led Dreyer to decide to go outside the studio system to make his next film.
Vampyr was made under difficult circumstances, as the arrival of sound to film had put the European film industry in turmoil. The French film studios lagged behind technologically, and the first French sound films were shot on sound stages in England. As Vampyr was Dreyer's first sound film, he went to England to study the new technology, and, while there, he got together with Danish writer Christen Jul, who was living in London at the time.
Wanting to create a story based on the supernatural, Dreyer read over thirty mystery stories. He found a number of re-occurring elements, such as doors opening mysteriously and door handles moving with no one knowing why, which helped him feel that, "We can jolly well make this stuff too". The success of the stage version of Dracula in London and New York in 1927 contributed to Dreyer's assessment that vampires were "fashionable things at the time", and he Jul created a story based on elements from Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly, a collection of five stories first published in 1872; Vampyr draws from two stories in the collection: Carmilla, a lesbian vampire story, and The Room in the Dragon Volant, which is about a live burial.
Dreyer found it difficult to decide on a title for the film. Early titles may have included Destiny and Shadows of Hell, and, when the film was presented in the March 1931 issue of the film journal Close Up, it was referred to as The Strange Adventure of David Gray.

Pre-production

Dreyer returned to France to begin casting and location scouting. At that time, in France there was a small movement of artistic independently financed films, including Luis Buñuel's L'Âge d'Or and Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet which were both produced in 1930. Through Valentine Hugo, Dreyer met Nicolas de Gunzburg, an aristocrat who agreed to finance Dreyer's next film in return for playing the lead role in it. Gunzberg had arguments with his family about becoming an actor, so he created the pseudonym "Julian West", a name that would be the same in all three languages in which the film was going to be shot.
Most members of the cast of Vampyr were not professional actors. Jan Hieronimko, who plays the village doctor, was found on a late night metro train in Paris. When approached to act in the film, Hieronimko reportedly stared blankly and did not reply, but he later contacted Dreyer's crew and agreed to join the film. Many of the other non-professional actors in the film were found in similar fashion in shops and cafés. The only professional actors in the film were Maurice Schutz, who plays the lord of the manor, and Sybille Schmitz, who plays his daughter Léone.
Many of the film's crew members had worked with Dreyer on Joan of Arc, cinematographer Rudolph Maté and art director Hermann Warm among them. Dreyer and Maté contributed to the location scouting for Vampyr, but Dreyer left most of the scouting to an assistant, who he instructed to find, among other locations, "a factory in ruins, a chopped up phantom, worthy of the imagination of Edgar Allan Poe. Somewhere in Paris. We can't travel far."
In the original script, the village doctor was intended to flee the village and get trapped in a swamp. Dreyer later related that, while looking for a suitable mire, he and his team passed a house where "strange white shadows danced around the windows and doors". They discovered it was a plaster mill, and, wanting to try to capture the same effect of air full of white powder in the film, decided to change the film's ending to take place in a flour mill.