VAMPYR (75)

Directed by: Carl Dreyer (1932)

Starring: "Julian West" [Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg], Sybille Schmitz, Maurice Schutz

The Pitch: A young man staying at a remote country inn suspects he's surrounded by vampires.

Theo Sez: To be honest, I yawned a couple of times during this near-abstract fantasy (one of the perils of watching films like this on video, where they can't work their magic properly), but a lot of it is astonishing, like a synthesis of ERASERHEAD and Edgar Allan Poe. It's entirely dreamlike, an impression reinforced by its being somewhere between a Silent and a Talkie (there's hardly any dialogue, but when people happen to talk they actually talk), moving in a splintered, somnambulistic logic between dimensions : our hero ventures out of his hotel at night and is suddenly in a world where Time runs backwards and shadows have a life of their own, wandering around independent of their masters - then back indoors to the sound of a child crying, and cryptic phrases overheard from behind a closed door. Despite the title, not a vampire film per se - there's exactly one shot of a sinister man hovering above a reclining female figure - but a battle between good and evil that's also (as in DAY OF WRATH) between natural and supernatural, or perhaps un-natural : the climax cross-cuts between the hero and heroine in an idyllic forest glade and the villain in a flour-mill full of huge mechanical cogs, buried alive under a cascade of flour (Nature's revenge?). Ian Fleming fans may be reminded of the death of Dr. No, and it certainly wouldn't be a surprise if Fleming had this in mind - it's the kind of film that gets under your skin, its images hard to shake : spectral and unearthly, with a kind of erotic foreboding. The long, lingering close-up of the vampire woman sitting up in bed, looking this way and that, is a classic case of threatening Other seen as a kind of sexual hunger.