1932's Vampyr by Carl Dreyer might seem at first to be a movie leaping onto the back of the success of Universal's Dracula from the previous year. But it seems Vampyr was in production before that famous Bela Lugosi vehicle hit. And besides that, the audience for Dracula might well also in many cases be the one for Vampyr, but the movies are quite different.
Dracula is a straightforward narrative using the multi-act construction of a play based on Bram Stoker's novel. Vampyr is derived from a collection of short stories by Sheridan Le Fanu and for its part often scoffs at linear storytelling, or least I got lost a lot. I first saw this movie decades ago on VHS when the market for such things was just opening and Public Domain material was coming onto the shelves at affordable prices. At a time when a VHS copy of Forbidden Planet was garnering around fifty bucks, getting a movie like Vampyr for three or so was a real bargain. Alas my copy had issues and I was not able to watch the movie through and despite some meager effort never found another.
The story invites us along on the adventure of one Allan Gray, a naive chap who just happens I guess to look like a young H.P. Lovecraft as he comes across a small village and stumbles onto a curse which afflicts it. There's a girl of course, but there's also a vampire and a vampire's assistant. At one point in this story Gray has a dream about being buried alive and in another he is able to step away from his physical body and wander around ghost like, not at all dissimilar to the gimmick Doctor Strange has used for decades. Maybe the creepiest gimmick in the movie is when shadows depart from the bodies that cast them and do all sorts of dangerous things.
I'll say no more about the story because that would ruin it and there's precious little plot to discuss. But the atmosphere of this movie, shot entirely on location and using a cast almost completely made up of amateurs is compelling despite the flaws in the version I obtained from Sinister Cinema.
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