One thing horror can do very well in genre is mess with our perceptions. One thing the films I've focused on this past week have in common other than having a link to horror is how they distort our reality of how we actually see things. Things are exaggerated or reinterrpreted as if we are watching a dream. What we expect from reality is undermined. Film has the power to distort our senses and boggle our minds better than any artform which is why horror is such a compelling genre for the cinema, yet how often we take it for granted.
In 1932, famed Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer made a different kind of horror, something that today would probably be scrutinized for not following the conventional patterns of the genre. "Vampyr" is less a comprehensive film, than it is a daring experiment, it stretches the boundries of horror and creates a complete though sometimes reckless film.
When I say reckless I do not mean to put the film down, on the contrary, Dreyer made bold and surprising choices with his film that put it in a class by itself.
The baffling plot of "Vampyr" is an exercise in subjective point of view. We follow a young man named Allan Grey, a student of the occult, as he encounters one fantastic event after another. One of the first images he sees is a shoreman who evokes the image of death. He lodges with a family who has an ailing daughter, we soon learn that a local aged woman is in fact a vampire and may be the cause of her sickness. What Allan is experiencing has been argued as sort of a heightened reality, or his own imagination since he is obssessed with this dark world.
You may judge for yourself when you see the film, much of the film is seen through Allan's point of view as he sees many shadow images on a white wall, all of which don't seem to have an owner. We do however follow one peg-legged shadow as it reconnects with its human form in one of the most memorable moments of the film. Dreyer refuses to explain what we are looking at and why such things are happening. It's almost like he uses the horror genre as a springboard in order to show these images.
Though Allan is our main protagonist, we are under the impression that this may all be his overactive imagination, but sometimes the film switches focus, and Allan is no longer in the picture. In a wonderful audio commentary that comes in the recent criterion release, film scholar Tony Rayns argues that the film may be all about subjectivity. After watching the film myself, my own theory is that Dreyer is trying to test our perceptions. "Vampyr" is the kind of film that challenges the audience in wondering what are we in fact looking at. This is not conventional horror by any means, it dares to go further than even innovative films such as "Nosferatu" even did. "Nosferatu" at least had a narrative structure, that followed a certain pattern, Dreyer instead moves around with narrative in a very playful and experimental way. In a lot of ways I would say "Vampyr" is the forerunner of filmmakers such as David Lynch who also stretched narrative structure in different ways. In that way "Vampyr" is in a class by itself among horror films, it cannot be categorized as anything else, yet it can also not be thought of as a standard.
Carl Theodore Dreyer is a director I am not much accustomed to as of yet. He was not a polific director, mainly due to financial problems with his films. "Vampyr" was not successful in its initial release, probably due in part by some of the reasons I mentioned above. Becomes of the film's failure, Dreyer would not go on to film another movie for ten more years, and he would only make a small handful more before his death in 1968. The power of his original voice can be seen all over "Vampyr", which is why it is remembered today as a truly innovative work.
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