TITLE: Vampyr
RELEASED: 1932
DIRECTOR: Carl Theodor Dreyer
WRITERS: Carl Theodor Dreyer and Christen Jul
CAST: Nicolas de Gunzburg, Henriette Gérard and Sybille Schmitz
Vampyr was Carl Theodor Dreyer’s first sound film and remains one of the strangest landmarks of early horror cinema.
The French-German production follows Allan Gray, a traveller drawn into a world of sickness, shadows and vampirism after arriving at a remote inn. Dreyer loosely drew on stories from Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 collection In a Glass Darkly, which also contains Carmilla.
Review of Vampyr 1932
Vampyr feels very different from the Universal horror films being made in Hollywood at the same time. Dreyer uses hazy photography, sparse dialogue, strange shadows and disorienting images to make the film feel less like a conventional story and more like a waking nightmare.
Nicolas de Gunzburg, credited as Julian West, plays Allan Gray with an appropriately distant quality. Like many of the film’s performers, he was not a professional actor, which adds to the uneasy atmosphere rather than taking away from it.
The result is an eerie and unusual vampire film whose influence reaches far beyond its relatively simple plot. Its connection to Le Fanu also makes it an important early step in the screen history that would later lead to more direct Carmilla adaptations and Hammer’s Karnstein films.
Read more: Explore Carmilla films and the lesbian vampire tradition on Spooky Isles.
