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Vampyr - Der Traum des Allan Grey (1932) More at IMDbPro »

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38 out of 41 people found the following comment useful :-
A Note About the Film and Sound Quality, 15 November 2002

Author: jacksflicks from Hollywood

I can't improve on the fine reviews of the movie itself, but there are two major factors connected with the making of the film that may have been overlooked.

If by "poor quality," the reference is to the washed out, somewhat spotty look of the print, please be aware that this was deliberate. Cinematographer Matté had accidently opened a can of exposed film, and when Dreyer saw the result, he was delighted. It was just the effect he had been looking for.

"Vampyr" was originally shot as a silent. It was only later half-dubbed with voice-overs. Again, however, like the fortuitous "damage" to the print, the sparse and somewhat vague, even incoherent, dialogue contributes to the sense of dislocation which, I believe, is one of the great virtues of this genre masterpiece.

Like many, the first time I saw "Vampyr" I was put off by its obscurity and, yes, the "mutilated" video and audio. But as I saw more Dreyer and learned to stop trying to deconstruct the thing, I really began to like it. Now, I love it. If your first viewing of "Vampyr" leaves you the way it left me the first time, don't give up on it. It's on video, so buy a copy and pick your moments to watch it. You'll be rewarded.

An aside: Julian West, who played the lead, was also backer of the film and is credited, along with Dreyer, as producer. He is said to have been as spacey in real life as he was in character.

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33 out of 34 people found the following comment useful :-
Required Viewing!, 7 August 2000
Author: BaronBl00d (baronbl00d@aol.com) from NC

Brilliant! Breathtaking! This film was worth the long wait I imposed on myself to see it. It is not the most cohesive narrative about, but it has images that linger with you....haunt you. The film is basically a silent with some speaking. It tells a story about Allan Grey and how he was introduced into a vampire's conspiracy to kill two sisters. Grey is brought in for aid by their father who dies while trying to fight the infection coursing through his daughter's veins. What then follows is pure cinematic magic as Grey...opening a book that the father wrote was to be opened upon his death...begins reading the book on vampires whilst it is going on right around him. The mixture of action and the text from the book create a wonderfully eerie atmosphere and convey a feeling of dread and despair. There are many scenes in Vampyr, directed with fluidity by Carl Dreyer, that are incredibly well-done. The dream sequence in particular explores various camera angles, hitherto not used. As I said before, it is not the tightest story and it has some gaping holes in the plot that are never explained, but that really is not very important because the film succeeds as a film of haunting imagery...fear based on illusion and shadows.

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22 out of 25 people found the following comment useful :-
Beautiful, 24 June 2004

Author: kriitikko from Kirkkonummi, Finland

Simply: it's beautiful work of art. No action. No slasher scenes. There is almost less speaking then in Aki Kaurismäki's films. Master of silent movie, Carl Th. Dreyer, uses more silent film magic than any spoken voices. Movie's style is from another world. Living shadows, ghosts, vampire in the foggy wood and (of course) the famous scene where man watch himself to be buried alive. There is no way you can say what this film is true and what dream. It's like Dreyer would have put he's own dream in to the screen. Nobody have done anything like this later, perhaps because the gray light that is all the time in the film came by an accident. There is no movie like this and no way there is another horror movie like this! Vampire- movie fan can watch this with F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu. They are different film's, but strange way spooky at same way.

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21 out of 24 people found the following comment useful :-
Surrender to Vampyr's eerie, dreamlike world...., 25 February 1999
Author: Alph-2 from Sydney

With its fragmented plot, eerie imagery, and air of undefined menace this film more nearly realises the dream state than any other film I've seen.

The story, which follows a young man's discovery of vampiric doings while on a trip to the country, is secondary to the fascinatingly uncanny mood generated by the cinematography and effective use of sound and silence.

Yes, yes, it's old and unconventional, and requires either some extra concentration or complete surrender to its unique world, but the effort is worth it.

Vampyr should especially appeal to fans of cinefantastique, cinema history and maybe even the arthouse crowd.

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26 out of 35 people found the following comment useful :-
Along with THE SHINING and THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, the greatest horror movie ever made - shudder., 26 April 2000

Author: margarita nikolaevna (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from moscow, russia

A conventionally Gothic vampire movie? A Surrealist dreamscape? A Borgesian labyrinth? A study of identity and its dissolution? A Christian parable about innocence and evil? A dramatisation of the mind? Too many horror films are unworthy of the name. They may have genuine scares and surprises, but their horrors are comfortingly contained in genre, in a recognisable place, with recognisable characters - the source of the horror is either crushed or resuscitated for the sequel, and if you actually await the return of a horror, it's not very horrible (honorable exceptions include THE SHINING, REPULSION).

If you were to use one word to describe the director of DAY OF WRATH and ORDET, it would not be generic. And yet many of his admirers are slighttly embarrassed that he followed his shattering, spiritual masterpiece THE PASSION OF JEANNE D'ARC with a Victorian potboiler. The ingrediants are depressingly familiar to anyone who's seen even half a dozen horror films - a Westernised foreigner (played by the film's aristocratic financier; this is not it's only point in common with Cocteau's THE BLOOD OF A POET) with an interest in the supernatural visits Eastern Europe; he stays in a decaying mansion-turned-inn where mysterious events occur, involving girls in trances, vampires and mad doctors.

The problem with most horror films is that they are too neat - their forms do not embody a content filled with decay, dismemberment, sensation, confusion, ambiguity, inexplicability. Anyone in love with Dreyer's formal purity will be shocked by how 'messy' VAMYPYR seems. Much of this may be the fault of the poor print I saw - a bleached frame that makes the credits illegible (although Mate's filtered blinding lighting is one of the sources of the film's unease); disjointed editing that suggests an ornery distributor's hand; the feel that this print is actually an assemblage of different prints - German language scenes alternate with dubbed English ones, the music seems to halt with jarring regularity.

Normally this kind of vandalism is simply unacceptable to any work by a master, but somehow this butchery adds to the film's enigma. The film IS a Surrealist dreamscape - the mansion has no social reality, it is a rarefied space through which wander dreamlike characters. The images frequently have no narrative basis, but together create a chilling oneiric atmosphere - the bellringer with the scythe; the repeated motif of active shades; the waltz of the shadows, one of the most remarkable, unaccountable scenes in all cinema.

The film is also a labyrinth on many levels. Its hero is not one in the active, heroic sense - he wanders as if 'impelled', he is always looking on, or too late, and when he finally tries to act he succumbs to possible evil, the blood seeped out of him, his wholeness divided, until he finally watches from his own funeral. He spends most of the film walking, through corridors, stairs, doorways, out in the sheds and meadows, always framed, minimised, going nowhere, as in a maze, right back to where he started from.

The gliding camerawork, complex and astonishing still today, unthinkable in the stagy, clumpy early days of sound cinema, makes the fixed house, decor, genre seem fluid, unstable, alive. The film's structure is labyrinthine too - narrative traits begin and are quickly dropped, or simply don't make sense, becoming non-sequiters. The 'reality' of the film is thoroughly undermined - we have difficulty separating the real and the imagined/dreamed, the innocent and the guilty. Plot, linear, frequently evaporates into unconnected imagery, circular, a series of motifs. The film itself, Dreyer's first sound film, features little dialogue, and is in many ways shot like a silent, with intertitles, stylised acting, and flickering, chiaroscuro imagery, further making ambiguous the status of what we see, the music and sound effects being vital.

Unlike most horror films, VAMPYRE does not move towards explanation of mystery and resolution of rupture. On the contrary, it is increasingly baffling, and if the big house in horror movies is often a signifier for the mind, then what we are watching is surely a visualisaiton of madness and breakdown. And yet the vampire plot itself seems to suggest peace and redemption to at least one of the sufferers. Whatever the meaning(s) of this quite extraordinary and beautiful film, you can bet the le Fanu novel isn't a patch on it.

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15 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :-
Dreyer's spectral masterwork, 18 May 2003

Author: Daryl Chin (lqualls-dchin) from Brooklyn, New York

"Vampyr" is unlike any other movie ever made, and certainly unlike any other "horror" movie ever made. It's a spectral masterwork in which poetic audiovisual allusions create suggestions of events, as in the scene where the shadows get up and dance, or the ghostly scene when the vampire strikes her victim. It is a film of atmosphere, of light and shadow, played out on themes of death and rebirth.

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18 out of 22 people found the following comment useful :-
An outstanding borderline surrealist nightmare., 8 October 2001
Author: juggalo71 from Philadelphia, PA

It is understandable that many take issue with Vampyr due to an absence of conventional moviemaking factors that make an average film watchable. However, I believe that this is more a problem of the viewer than one with the filmmaker, and it all begins with whether or not one watches expecting to be frightened in a generic horror flick manner. This is not a scary movie; it is one that fundamentally blurs the lines between dreams and reality. It is not a silent film or a talkie, but something in between, and that fits in perfectly with the idea of it being an experience much like a bad dream. There are few professional actors (two, in fact, and neither would be considered the leading actors), and long takes that would drive a Hollywood film editor to distraction. They are selected more for their appearance and natural manner than for any exceptional gift as an actor/actress, and it is my belief that that adds more than detracts from the experience. The reactions of the characters are far more visceral and simple than in most films of this depth, and it helps create the mesmerizing, hypnotic effect few movies can create. It is designed, I believe, to be seen in a dark room, preferably alone and late at night, just prior to going to bed. If the viewer is a little sleepy, so much the better: for the true power of the film will only be revealed as you dwell on it afterwards while you struggle to go to sleep. Then,and only then, will the full might of Carl Theodore Dreyer's vision be revealed.

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19 out of 24 people found the following comment useful :-
Not your usual romp with the un-dead, but for a particular brand of movie-geek, there are some extraordinary things going for it, 29 August 2004

Author: MisterWhiplash from United States

Carl Theodor Dreyer will always be a household name among directors for me after viewing his Passion of Joan of Arc, one of the most emotionally wrenching, stylistically groundbreaking, and thoughtful of religious treatises. There not only did he reveal the eye of a cinematic genius, but he also had Renee Falconetti, one of only several people to truly pull off a performance by using the eyes to talk more than the voice. So, I read up on Dreyer and found that he also directed several sound films after the tragedy that was the butchering and loss of Joan of Arc. One of them was this film, a piece of experimental horror/mystery dealing with the supernatural, the occult, the damned- Vampires.

The story at times becomes a little too hard to follow, even beside the point that the film is meant to be surreal or nightmarish or what-have-you. What I did make out of it was that a man named Allan Gray (Julian West) somehow gets lured by his own curiosity comes upon a chateau where an old man (Maurice Schultz, one of the finest hair/face-styling jobs I've seen in an old-style horror movie) and his two daughters reside. Inter-cutting between excerpts of a book detailing the ABC's of vampire facts, bizarre and sad occurrences go on in the chateau, both to Alan and one of the daughters.

I suppose saying that the film at times veers off into haunting imagery is almost a compliment, but for some audiences this could be a turn off. On top of the fact that the film contains fewer lines than in any other vampire film I can think of, the whole tone and look of the film is, not to put a snob touch on it, unique. This would not likely be the kind of film to hang out with adolescent friends and drink beers to (that kind of film in the genre would be From Dusk Till Dawn). The one minor flaw in the film as well is, unlike Joan of Arc, the performances are less than brilliant, outside of the girl in the bed and at times West (Schultz, while believable in the look of the character, is a little too 'shocked' in most scenes).

But what the film has going for it are two main elements- Dreyer and Joan of Arc cinematographer Rudolph Mate. Despite the film, when being viewed today on video and DVD, having a low-quality transfer with specks and scratches and all, nearly every image and camera move is perfect. For this kind of film, Dreyer takes an approach that lends the story and characters to another plane- these are people caught in the grip of a force that only has one purpose, to kill in a controlled state. Certain scenes are like terrifying little masterpieces of gothic torture- the droplets of blood falling onto the ground from the bed; the coffin point of view of the world; the close-ups; the way Dreyer moves around the chateau and outside; the creepy, somehow appropriate over/under exposure of shots. Overall, this is definitely a horror film with a an artist that doesn't sell himself short of the goods in his arsenal.

Vampyr is recommendable, if for nothing else (however the story seems like it would be easier to figure out on a repeat viewing, it would lessen the effect it leaves the first time), for the sheer vision. Although it has dated, Dreyer's take on the myths and terror of a group of citizens held in the grip of a vampire's grip is a technical landmark, and one of the early essentials alongside Nosferatu and Dracula. The dreadful score by Zeller is a good touch as well. A

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9 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
Visually stunning: The artistic representation of a nightmare, 9 February 2006

Author: José Luis Rivera Mendoza (jluis1984) from Mexico

"Vampyr", one of the first horror movies with sound, is the work of the highly influential danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer. After directing the monumental "La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc" in 1928, Dreyer decided to make this modest film based on the novel "In a Glass Darkly" by Sheridan Le Fanu; while this is indeed his first movie with sound, it was conceived as a silent film, and the movie contains very few dialog.

I must admit that as many, I was left with a big question mark in my face as the story was progressing; but the apparently disjointed storyline do make sense, as it is worked as a surreal experience of the lead character, it is as if Dreyer had filmed a nightmare, complete with the haunting images and eerie atmosphere.

The movie is about a traveler, named Allan Grey (Julian West), who gets involved in a nightmarish plot when the owner of the inn where he is staying asks him for help to save his family from what he believes is a vampire. We follow Allan Grey in his surrealistic trip to madness as he finds out more and more about the supposed vampire that haunts the manor turned inn.

The highly inventive camera work is truly outstanding, the combination of light and darkness is among the finest work in a black & white film and alone makes the movie worth a look; the movie not only has the structure of a nightmare, it also looks like one. The Gothic manor and the lonely rural exteriors increase the haunting atmosphere and the beautiful images Dreyer conceived are the work of a genius.

The structure of the script may be complicated, but it shows its influence over David Lynch and other filmmakers with similar surrealist story lines and dreamlike sequences. It is probably not a masterpiece of the likes of the aforementioned "Passion" or the more well-known "Day of Wrath" (Vredens dag, 1943), but "Vampyr" shines with its own light as one of the finest horror movies of that period.

The only real flaw in my opinion, was that the lead actor, Julian West, was probably not the best choice for a lead role, as his acting seems unnatural and not believable. I'm not sure if this was intended that way or had more to do with the fact that West produced the film, but it is my only complain about "Vampyr".

This modest masterpiece is a must see for any horror fan or anyone who likes silent movies. It is a nightmarish trip to the darker parts of the subconscious mind. 8/10

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9 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
A Vampyr that needs resurrecting, 7 July 2006

Author: FilmFlaneur from London

The major figure of Carl Theodor Dreyer is one of a select group of directors deemed 'transcendental' along with the likes of Ozu and Bresson. Paul Schrader and other critics identify them as those filmmakers who habitually suggest spiritual intensity by ordinary means. Characteristically austere, often using non-professional talent in their films, they find universal truths through a gradual un-dramatic revelation of interior life. All this means in this context is that one would think such directors far away from the flashy supernaturalism and ghastly melodrama normally making up so much of the traditional horror film, a genre where its the extraordinary providing the revelation for the audience, not the mundane. But then one remembers that both Dreyer and Bresson made memorable versions of Joan of Arc, where their representing of terrifying events showed how disturbing an emotionally stark and restrained approach could prove. And, in 1932, about as the first great Universal horror cycle was getting into its stride in Hollywood, Dreyer made his Vampyr.

It is interesting to compare Dreyer's great work with that of Murnau, the only other great director who made a broadly comparable title. Both the German director and the Dane took their inspiration from literary horror classics. Murnau based his Nosferatu (1922) on Dracula while, for his inspiration, Dreyer too turned to an English author: Sheridan le Fanu and his novel Carmilla. But the evil thrill of Nosferatu is that it takes place in a concrete 'reality' of sorts, ghostly special effects notwithstanding. By contrast Vampyr is a strange, dreamlike film, one virtually silent or subdued, despite its soundtrack. Moreover it mainly exists in variable prints, the poor state of which merely adds to the strange dislocatedness of unfolding events portrayed. Dreyer's terror lies in a world of shadows, surreality amplified by some remarkable cinematography, the roots of nightmare ever subtle, where camera movement can excite as much dread and anticipation as any vampire out clawing at a victim.

Vampyr's story, such as it is, tells of Allan Grey (Julian West), a man studious of vampires. In a small French town, he takes a room at an inn. His sleep is interrupted when a strange man (Maurice Shutz) comes into his room speaking disturbingly about death, then leaves a small package with instructions that it should be opened upon his death. Allen gets out of bed, and prowls around the inn and its spooky surroundings in search of an explanation. Eventually he wanders onto a nearby estate where he finds the mysterious man living with his two daughters. A vampire has bitten one of his daughters, and the house is shrouded in death...

Once seen and felt, the peculiarly eerie atmosphere that characterises Dreyer's work is never forgotten. Indeed, Vampyr's influence arguably began at once, for a similar tone of silent mystery pervades some scenes in White Zombie, incidentally one of Bela Lugosi's best, made just the same year - another film which made in sound which often plays like a silent. Like Vampyr, White Zombie includes several wordless sequences which are startlingly eerie and atmospheric. (Both this and present film are much better than Tod Browning's famous version of Dracula also made at about the same time, which these days seem positively wooden by comparison.) And, years later, Ken Russell was to mimic the premature burial sequence of Vampyr, glass windowed coffin and all, in his uneven Mahler while arguably a similar, dreamlike, touch can be found in the work of the French horror auteur Jean Rollin, who in the 1970s made of soft tinted vampirism almost a genre of its own.

Of his original film Dreyer said, "I wanted to create the daydream on film… to show that horror is not a part of the things around us, but of our own subconscious mind." To help achieve this, he and his cameraman Rudolph Mate shot much very early in the morning and frequently through fine gauze - a creative decision increasing the sense of mystery surrounding events. The resultant shimmer and softness which fell over scenes suggests the supernatural confusion felt by the hero, and add a spooky disconnectedness to events. Allied to this, as already noted, this is a work where one is acutely aware of camera placement and movement, of shadow and light. Dreyer's sensitive direction means that the lens becomes a lurking accompaniment to Grey's, and therefore our, unease.

Main actor Julian West, who also financed a lot of the picture, makes a suitable impression; part of the mood in what is his only significant film. Forty years later he again appeared again on screen, but with less impact. In retrospect nothing could compare to his appearance here, his pale, Lovecraftian features perfectly in tune with the gloomy goings on. His anonymous freshness as an actor makes of him an everyman, a dramatic unknown fitting in exactly with the director's preferred casting with the undemonstrative and normal. And unlike Nosferatu's celebrated settings of castles, doom laden ships and spectral carriages, Vampyr's unease is primarily set amidst the domestic: an inn, a to-do private home or in common place out-buildings.

Dismayed by distracting subtitles, often faded visuals and poor soundtrack elements, admirers of Dreyer's masterpiece have long cried out in vain for a restored version, especially now that the later films of the director have been reissued. Even such earlier silents such as the lesser, decidedly more obscure, Master Of The House (1925) have lately arrived with a five star treatment on disc. Whether or not this lapse is due to a fatal absence of original materials I am not sure, but fans of one of the very finest horror films, and a rare one by a great director to boot, will not be satisfied until this Vampyr at least is resurrected and given the new life it deserves.

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