David Gray, a man obsessed by the occult and no longer able to distinguish reality from fantasy, is awakened by a strange man who has entered his room. The man, who turns out to be the lord of a nearby manor house, is panicked about death, and leaves a book about vampirism. Later, Gray goes to the manor, finding the man mortally wounded, and determines that a vampire is at work and is after the lord’s daughter.
Released the year after Dracula and Frankenstein, but looking like it was made ten years before them, Vampyr is only technically a talkie. Filmed as a silent movie, the few lines of dialog were put in during post production and most serve no purpose. The story, what there is of it, is advanced through the used of intertitles (those cards that pop up between shots in silent films). Sometimes, they relate the text of the vampire book David Gray is given, while at others, they give information which should have been shot (one states that Gray walked across the park; as this is a movie, walking across the park is the sort of thing I’d expect to see, not read).
Writer-producer-director Carl Theodor Dreyer didn’t care about story, or about character, but was going for a mood. Events occur, then other events occur, with little connection between them. At times, he succeeds in creating a beautiful gothic world, particularly in an early shot when a man with a scythe rings a bell for a boatman to take him across the river. Shadows that move on their own, and a sequence where Gray, locked in a coffin with a glass window, rides in the back of a cart, effectively create an eerie atmosphere. But Dryer can’t keep the mood going. With nothing building on previous events, nothing matters and time just passes.
While initially a failure, Vampyr has caught on with critics who have always loved to discount horror except when it can somehow be classified as something else. In this case, they classify it as “a surreal dream.” As a dream, they can ignore the standards usually used in evaluating a film. And as a work of surrealism, it can be valued artistically above the monster films meant for the masses.
While overvalued by critics, is it worth seeing? Yes, but just barely. As a movie, it fails in almost every way, with stiff acting (the performers weren’t professionals) joining the lack of a coherent story and the failure of consistent mood. But it does have the occasional image that will stay with you. Those images would be moving still photographs. Too bad that isn’t the way Dreyer presented them.
The surviving prints of Vampyr are in terrible shape. The English dubbed versions are all lost (Dreyer dubbed the film in three languages; as the lines were added in postproduction, there was no original language). The cuts that exist are scratched and filled with static. The English subtitles, which only show up for half of the dialog, take up a substantial portion of the screen and are written in an ornate font that pops up with a black background. Whatever tone the film has established is destroyed whenever they appear.