Vampyr

Danish director Carl Dreyer’s (The Passion of Joan of Arc) first sound film was shot silent with music, effects, and scant dialogue added in post-production. Thanks to Martin Koerber, Deutsche Kinemathek, and Cineteca di Bologna, the film was restored and debuted at Il Cinema Ritrovato in 2021 with the original score by Wolfgang Zeller orchestrated by composer/conductor Timothy Brock for live performance. Brock writes: “Dreyer’s film demands a lot from his composer, serving as a lyrical narrator in a film with practically no sound or dialogue. It is the exact opposite of Browning’s Dracula made just one year earlier, which is all dialogue and sound, but no original score. Wolfgang Zeller (1893-1967), whose cinematic roots lie in Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 Prince Achmed, was well versed in the musical language of silent cinema. The score intensely accompanies 71 of the 73 minutes of Vampyr, feverishly stressing Dreyer’s dark landscape with compelling lyrical and ethereal passages, as well as incredibly effective recitatives which suspend the music, allowing the film to embrace Dreyer’s first endeavor in sound. However the sparse lines of dialogue only serve as practical sound effects —like a door creak, or a raven’s caw—and does little to move the story forward. It is the music that carries that task. In fact, the majority the sound-effects were performed by the orchestra themselves, and is written into the score.”

“If you’ve never seen a Dreyer film and wonder why many critics regard him as possibly the greatest of all filmmakers, this chilling horror fantasy is the perfect place to begin to understand.”—Jonathan Rosenbaum

“It’s deeply unsettling stuff balanced on the cusp between silence and sound, waking and sleeping, arthouse and horror.” —Mark Kermode

“For his surprising venture into horror, the Danish director avoids following the lead of his only peer in the genre, F. W. Murnau, in “Nosferatu” (1922)—he avoids showing a monster at all (no fangs or bat wings or pointy ears). Instead, Dreyer offers a meticulously rational story (loosely based on tales by Sheridan Le Fanu) of a vampire curse that spreads on contact from person to person like a plague. The story is centered on a man who enters a vampire-poisoned household; Dreyer depicts the man’s terror and confusion in the face of the deadly curse using a hallucinatory repertory of images, featuring shadows and reflections, distorting angles and multiple exposures (and, though I didn’t count, seemingly even more shots of ceilings than in “Citizen Kane”). What’s more, Dreyer elicits stunned and eerie performances from a cast composed almost entirely of nonprofessional actors. “Vampyr” is perhaps the most effective and most radical Surrealist movie ever made.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker