SVS: “Vampyr”

As someone who tends to avoid scary movies… …OK, as someone who stays as far away from the horror genre as humanly possible (because SCARY), coming up with a thematically-appropriate film for today is a bit tricky. My first instinct, for example, was to recommend a film more fittingly associated with an entirely different holiday: the weirdly-toned and mesmerizing stop-motion classic from Tim Burton and Henry Selick, The Nightmare Before Christmas. (Which is streaming on NETFLIX INSTANT, for those who are curious. Or who prefer their Halloween Christmas-y. Or the other way ’round.)

Then, I considered the hilarious Arsenic and Old Lace, but it’s not particularly available in streaming form (unless you’re willing to rent it from AMAZON($) and others). Besides, it’s not scary, so that seemed a bit “Letter-Not-Spirit-ish” to me.

But then I remembered a scary movie that I’d a) watched in the past, and b) actually enjoyed. So, this is me doing something I might never do again: recommending a horror movie.

Legendary director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr is streaming on HULU PLUS and AMAZON($). (And on YOUTUBE for free, though the quality’s not quite there.)

Director Carl Theodor Dreyer fuses fantasy and reality in this landmark tale, which ranks among cinema’s greatest horror movies. Holiday reveler Allan Gray (Julian West) takes a room in an eerie European village inn and is awakened when an elderly gent lets himself in, leaving a parcel inscribed, “To be opened in the event of my death.” Gray later witnesses the man’s murder, opens the package and realizes a supernatural killer is on the loose.

Hypnotic. And terrifying. Really and truly. But not aggressively so, which is probably why I was able to watch it without running from the room in tears. The visuals are haunting, though. (Seriously. I’m still haunted by some of them, years after watching it for the first time.) And if they look a bit fuzzy, that’s because Dreyer was absolutely taken when “cinematographer Maté showed him one shot that came out fuzzy and blurred. This washed out look was an effect Dreyer desired, and he had Maté shoot the film through a piece of gauze held three feet (.9 m) away from the camera to re-create this look.”

We’re talking about a Criterion release here — at least if you decide to go the Hulu Plus route — which means there are all kinds of cool extras. Like the clip above. And this essay by Danish-based critic and film historian Mark Le Fanu, “Vampyr’s Ghosts and Demons:”

Vampyr was made at a time when the technology of sound was still at a quite early stage of its development, and the aesthetics of the film still belong in obvious and important ways to the silent epoch. There is no harm in that: by the end of the twenties, the vocabulary (so to speak) of silent film had reached, internationally, an extraordinary level of refinement and sophistication.

…

It would be wrong to imagine that Dreyer was uninterested in speech. On the contrary, later films of his show, among other things, a complete mastery of the medium of sound. But in Vampyr, Dreyer intuited, correctly I believe, that, concerning atmosphere, the crucial contribution would continue to be made (where it had always been made in the days of so-called silent film) through the medium of music. And, in fact, Wolfgang Zeller’s delicately eerie score is one of the film’s quiet triumphs.

Interested in a more horror-friendly approach? Try Tom McDonald, who cut his teeth on horror and has been writing fun and/or scary stuff all month. (Also of interest, FilmmakerIQ.com’s encyclopedic post, “A Brief History of Horror.”)

Attribution(s): All images and stills are the property of The Criterion Collection and other respective production studios and distributors, and are intended for editorial use only.