![]() In 1932, the New York Times’s film critic was not impressed. Vampyr, he declared, was ‘one of the worst films’ he’d ever seen, but added grudgingly that director Carl Dreyer could always be relied upon to be ‘different’. ![]() ![]() And Vampyr is different, a film like no other. Dreyer spun his cinematic nightmare from two stories from a Sheridan Le Fanu collection. It stars Nicolas de Gunzburg (a Russian aristocrat who bankrolled the film, appearing under the alias Julian West) as an occult-obsessed young man who visits a French village haunted by a vampire. The lord of the manor dies and his young daughter is gravely ill, bite wounds to her neck. His intention, said Dreyer, was ‘to create a daydream on the screen and to show that the horrific is not to be found around us, but in our own unconscious mind.’ And Vampyr is often compared to a waking dream, full of strange hallucinatory images that strike dread in audiences even today. In lesser hands, the wild theatrics and camp stylings of Ken Russell’s story of religious persecution and demonic possession in seventeenth-century France would turn The Devils into no more than a fleshy, hysterical romp. ![]()
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