Year Of The Vampire: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr Is A Waking Dream Inside A Coffin – /Film

Released in 1932, the year after Universal's "Dracula" with Bela Lugosi, "Vampyr" was on the frontlines of the earliest vampire movies and it held the embryos of future genre titles within its 73-minute runtime. This was Dreyer's first sound film after the silent classic "The Passion of Joan of Arc," and with it, he and co-screenwriter Christen Jul adapted parts of Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 short story collection, "In a Glass Darkly," including the final tale, "Carmilla," which received more straightforward treatment in 1970 with Hammer's "The Vampire Lovers."

Here, the figure of the vampire is no longer just an outside threat, but rather one that might eat away at families from within. "The Wurdulak" notable for being the one time "Frankenstein" star Boris Karloff played a vampire would draw on a similar tradition in 1963. We also see the seeds germinating for vampirism as a form of teen rebellion in Dreyer's film.

Gray is the prototypical paranormal investigator, trolling for action like one of those ghost hunters you'd see on a reality show where they have to manufacture excitement out of uneventful events. The shadows leading him around are perhaps external manifestations of his own fancies, but eventually he does witness a real murder.

The victim is the Lord of the Manor (Maurice Schutz, who co-starred in "The Passion of Joan of Arc"). Before his death, said Lord happened to come puttering into Gray's room at the inn, much to the confusion of our hero, who was, as we've established, in bed at the time: half-awake, half-alive. Without identifying himself or explaining what he was doing, the Lord left a parcel there, to be opened upon his death, and it turns out this pregnant parcel holds the secrets of the "strange history of vampires."

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Year Of The Vampire: Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr Is A Waking Dream Inside A Coffin - /Film