‘Why does the doctor always come at night?‘
Nosferatu is taking all the headlines right now, what with its acclaimed 2024 remake still lingering like an insidious shadow on a stairwell wall, but it’s not the only groundbreaking and influential vampire film to come out of the silent era. Vampyr was technically produced at the start of the sound era, and it does technically feature both sound effects and dialogue, but the way it is shot, acted and presented places it firmly in the silent era still (unsurprising given that the film’s director, Carl Theodor Dreyer, also directed one of the most acclaimed silent films of all time in The Passion of Joan of Arc). Let’s get weird…
Not much of a plot for this one, folks. Allan Grey (Julian West) is a drifter obsessed with the supernatural who finds himself in the French village of Courtempierre one lonely afternoon. Upon arrival, shadows dance on the wall, a soldier with a peg leg appears and then promptly disappears, and there are lots of human skulls dotted around the place. Honestly, you can’t move for human skulls in Courtempierre. There is also a woman, Léone (Sybille Schmitz), who is slowly turning into a vampire.
Vampyr is much more dreamy than Nosferatu. Taking place mostly in the daytime, Dreyer creates a surreal, ethereal effect that has more in common with the early surrealist films of Luis Buñuel than it does with the German Expressionist nightmares that inspired Nosferatu. In many ways, Vampyr is a pretty unique vampire film. It does feature a stricken woman, a hapless male protagonist and a blood transfusion, but that is where the similarities to other vampire films of the time end. Indeed, this film was pushed back from its original release date to allow for Universal’s Dracula to come and go, and the two films couldn’t be more different. Part of the uncanny atmosphere comes from the fact that most of the cast were not professional actors (this is the only film credit for many of them). Perhaps most notably, Julian West, the lead actor, only managed to bag such a prominent role by agreeing to fully finance the film as long as he was able to star- a baller move by anyone’s metric.
Vampyr lurks in a strange hinterland between silent and sound movies, horror and more artistic fare. Its lack of definition is part of what makes it unique, however, and at a slender 75 minutes, it should be essential viewing for any vampire obsessives out there.
