Vampyr (1932, Carl Th. Dreyer) (Patreon)

70/100

Kinda wish Dreyer had just made an anthology-style film based on In a Glass Darkly, free of any pretense that there's some coherent narrative linking one sequence to another. There's no reason that I can discern, for example, why Allan Gray experiences a vision of himself being buried alive, smack in the middle of frantically searching for the kidnapped Gisèle. Nor do I really understand why Gisèle gets kidnapped, for that matter. Nor why the doctor tries to poison Léone, minutes after ostensibly trying to save her with a blood transfusion. And who shot the old dude, and why did whoever shot the old dude shoot the old dude, and how did the old dude apparently know that whoever was about to shoot the old dude was about to shoot the old dude, and what are conventional murder methods like bullets and poison even doing in what's supposed to be a vampire movie (okay, a vampyr movie), and just generally huh? The opening text makes a token effort to hand-wave such questions away, describing Gray as "a dreamer for whom the line between the real and the supernatural became blurred," but there's no denying the sheer shapelessness. The question is whether and how much it bugs you, and I'm someone who e.g. thoroughly enjoyed the third season of Twin Peaks but hesitates to call it truly great because so many intriguing characters and elements seem all but irrelevant in hindsight. Gestalt is important to me, and it's in dangerously short supply here. 

However, just as a comedy can survive all manner of structural infelicities by virtue of being really damn funny, so, too, can a horror film by virtue of being super fucking eerie. Gray's premature burial may have little or nothing to do with Marguerite Chopin and her minions, but it's still magnificently unsettling to witness the coffin's journey to the cemetery from his mysteriously paralyzed point of view, catching stray glimpses of ceiling and sky. Léone's behavior doesn't exactly fit the vampire mythos (Vampyr often plays more like a pre-Romero zombie film than like a vampire film, in fact), but that doesn't stop your blood from freezing when she first awakens and breaks out that crazed half-smile, half-grimace. And the lengthy, effectively silent early sequence in which Gray explores the castle evinces much the same somnambulistic tension as does The Blood of a Poet, which had been released just a few months earlier. (The resemblance is so strong at times that I wonder whether Dreyer had somehow managed to see it. Cocteau apparently had it in the can as early as 1930.) Shadow work still looks impressive almost a century later, too, which makes me wonder why contemporary filmmakers don't have more fun with such old-school, tried-and-true methods—the only "recent" example that springs to mind is Coppola's Dracula. (Still a recent film in my head because I was an adult when it opened. You'll find out one day, young people.) Hardly a bum moment, really, if one makes early-sound-era allowances for the many "Let's read another full page of this book" interludes. But when I try to put it all together, it crumbles into dust, as if staked in the heart by Buffy the Vampyr Slayr.