Thursday, October 24, 2024

1930's HalloWatch: Vampyr (1932)



Watched:  10/23/2024
Format:  Max
Viewing:  First
Director:  Carl Theodor Dreyer

Apparently when this movie came out, people were just *mad* at it.  Like when you read that people freaked out about Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and rioted*, when Vampyr (1932) was shown, it seems the good people of Vienna wanted their money back and subsequently rioted. Berlin just boo'd the picture.  And it kind of went from city to city, earning a terrible reputation.

But imagine just dumping David Lynch or Tarkovsky on people who think they came to see Universal's very palatable Dracula.  

That said, this movie is *great*.  And that's with the viewing I did which was of a stitched together restoration of a film no one really wanted to see again after 1932 and was more or less lost.  

In theory, based on the work of Sheridan le Fanu, it's really it's own thing, nodding to bits of his collection of works entitled In a Glass Darkly, which contains the novella Carmilla - upon which my fave rave, The Vampire Lovers, takes inspiration.

The film is creepy enough, just based on the concepts.  A young man comes to a small French town and is visited by an older gentleman in the middle of the night (in the film's first real tell about how weird it will be), who leaves him with a package marked "open in the case of my death".  Soon, he's seeing disembodied shadows running around, a mysterious doctor, a mysterious older woman... and then witnesses the murder of the older gentleman through his window.  And then it gets weird.

Likely the thing that threw people off about Vampyr is that it's mostly vibes.  The plot is mostly straightforward, but so sparsely explained - but then, somewhat nonsensical - and the film laden with bizarre imagery, that it's a lot.  The camera in this movie *moves*.  Constantly.  In a way I don't know I've really seen in other films from this era.  Shots are often dolly shots, taking the viewer along with the camera, keeping things from ever really settling or being certain.  But it's also director Dreyer's fist talkie - and yet it's a silent film in form and function.  The dialog that exists is sparse and largely inconsequential.  The bits we do need to absolutely know are shown as pages of a book on vampires our hero is reading, using the language of the silent-era title card.  

Light comes from unknown sources, shadows exist that shouldn't...  the pacing is glacial while events pile up swiftly.

The basic idea comes to light that a terrible old woman who was long thought dead has come back as a vampire and has infected the town, with minions willing and otherwise.  And she wants the two sisters - daughters of the mysterious man we see murdered.  And it will take some tenacity and astral projection to solve this mystery.

So - you can see how this went over for an audience that wasn't necessarily big horror or fantasy nerds, and who weren't there for an art film.  And that's what they got.**

 Look, this is not the scariest movie I've ever seen, but it's wildly effective.  Kind of like - when you hear Sheryl Lee scream at any given point in Twin Peaks, or try to sort out what's happening in Solaris  It's not scary as in "I jumped!", it's unnerving and unpleasant and demands you are put in an alternate viewing stance than you might be used to.  

The cast is strange as hell.  Star "Julian West" - who looks like the love child of Jimmy Stewart and John Dall - was actually a German aristocrat who would flee Germany and wind up as a major fashion editor in the US, inspiring the likes of Calvin Klein.   Most of the rest weren't actors - just folks Dreyer picked up, including the crucial roles of the doctor and Giséle.  And while the performance of actor Sybille Schmitz is great as she begins to turn into a vampire - she seems to have been pro-Nazi,*** and we frown on that here at The Signal Watch.

Anyway - Next Criterion Flash Sale, I'll likely pick this one up.  It seems like a crucial bit for the collection.



*a good story but, likely, an apocryphal one
**decades ago I took a friend to see Peter Jackson's pre-LOTR movie, Heavenly Creatures.  As the title card came up, she said "I thought you said 'Heavenly Christmas'" and things went downhill from there.  I assume this was *everybody* seeing Vampyr in 1932.
***she killed herself in 1955, a drug addict.  Apparently Fassbinder made a thinly veiled movie about her.




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