"A waking dream": Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr

The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli, 1790. Image source: Freies Deutsches Hochstift / Frankfurter Goethe-Museum

Vampyr (1932), starring Julian West (Allan Gray), Rena Mandel (Gisèle), Sybille Schmitz (Léone), Maurice Schutz (the Lord), Jan Hieronimko (the Doctor), and Henriette Gérard (Marguerite Chopin); score by Wolfgang Zeller; cinematography by Rudolph Maté; screenplay by Christen Jul and Carl Theodor Dreyer; directed by Dreyer. Presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival at the Castro Theater with live orchestral accompaniment of Zeller's score arranged by Timothy Brock, performed by the SF Conservatory of Music Orchestra conducted by Brock, 12 January 2024.

With Vampyr I wanted to create a waking dream on the screen and show that horror is not to be found in the things around us but in our own subconscious. —Carl Theodor Dreyer

A traveler, Allan Gray, arrives at a remote chateau-turned-hotel in what seems to be a virtually abandoned village. He is surrounded by an atmosphere of uncertainty and dread. When he is finally able to rouse someone and is shown to a room, he looks out the window and sees a figure carrying a giant scythe ringing a bell on a jetty to summon the ferryman, like Death calling Charon.

Image source: carlthdreyer.dk

A print hanging in Gray's room shows a deathbed scene, with a skeleton holding a dagger poised over the stricken victim. And Death does indeed loom over the inhabitants of the chateau. A father and his two daughters, Gisèle and Léone, live there, but Léone is wasting away. The father has dark premonitions, and leaves a package with Gray to be opened on the event of his death—which indeed comes to pass almost immediately afterwards.

The package contains a volume on the lore of vampires and devil worship, and Gray is soon convinced that Léone has become a vampire's prey. A strange doctor who visits only at night may be the vampire's accomplice, along with a wounded soldier whose shadow seems to wander about without him. (Throughout the film shadows are seen without the presence of any substantial body to cast them.)

Events unfold with the logic of a nightmare, a feeling enhanced by the hazy soft-focus cinematography (some scenes were shot through a gauze scrim). In one of the film's most horrifying sequences, during a dream (or out-of-body experience) Gray looks into a coffin and sees himself lying dead.

Image source: carlthdreyer.dk

The point of view then switches to inside the coffin, as it is sealed by the soldier and carried to the burying ground. A glass pane in the coffin lid allows Gray (and us) the horror of witnessing his (our) own funeral.

In creating the screenplay Dreyer and his co-writer Christen Jul drew on elements from previous vampire incarnations. The vampire choosing as a victim a young woman living with her father in an isolated castle is taken from Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872). The idea that the vampire commands mortal servants who are compelled to do its bidding comes from Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). And the image of the vampire as an aged and horror-inducing figure—rather than a seductive and alluring one as in Carmilla, Dracula or John Polidori's The Vampyre (1818)—derives from F. W. Murnau's film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922).

In composing shots Dreyer also drew on visual imagery. When Gray first sees the vampire feeding on its victim, the dark figure crouching over the young woman in a nightgown recalls Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare (seen at the top of this post):

The vampire feeds on Léone.

The musical soundtrack for the film was composed by Wolfgang Zeller, who had previously scored Lotte Reininger's animated film The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) and Louise Brooks' first sound film Prix de Beauté (1930). It is not a stereotypical horror-film soundtrack; in the versions of Vampyr that I've seen previously it is often an almost subliminal presence, an aural correlative to cinematographer Rudolph Maté's ghostly, indistinct images.

It was wonderful to hear the score performed live by the young musicians of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra at the SF Silent Film Festival screening of Vampyr at the 1400-seat Castro Theater. And that experience made me hear it differently. Dreyer's film includes intertitles and has minimal dialogue, and so the music is almost a continual presence. Conductor Timothy Brock reorchestrated some sections and increased the number of strings, giving the music greater volume and richness, and also making it a more prominent element than on the recorded soundtrack.

The SF Silent Film Festival showed the German version of the film that was restored in 1999 by Martin Koerber, curator at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, and Nicola Mazzanti, head of L'imagine ritrovato laboratory in Bologna. Dreyer shot three takes of all the dialogue scenes, with the actors speaking German, French, or English in turn (the sound was post-synchronized). However, the original camera and sound negatives have been lost, and the German version is missing footage. Censors demanded cuts, and Dreyer also probably re-edited the film after its disastrous Berlin première.

Despite these issues, the film looked great, and seeing it on the Castro's vast screen, as it was meant to be seen, was a true privilege. Many thanks to the good friends who gave us tickets to the sold-out showing of this horror classic with live accompaniment, and to the SF Silent Film Festival for giving us one last great movie experience in the Castro Theater before it closes next month to reopen as a music venue in 2025.

"The sleep of reason produces monsters," Plate 43 of Los Caprichos by Francisco Goya, 1799. Image source: History of Medicine Division, US National Library of Medicine.