Ethereal and yet haunting in imagery and atmosphere, "Vampyr" is one of the great films of the horror genre though the film itself is not exclusively horror. It is more of a meditation on horror, a meditation on the spectral and the unexplained and what may or may not be visible to our eyes. There is a vampire in the film yet she does not bare any fangs nor is she monstrous in appearance. Everyone in "Vampyr" seem to be a ghostly apparition in their look and appearance - they are only waiting for the inevitable.
Muted expressions carry "Vampyr" from its first scenes of Allan Gray (Nicolas de Gunzburg), a quiet, somewhat inexpressive visitor to a mysterious inn that is as spooky as any Universal or Hammer horror film. He is the uniquely impertinent hero, meaning he has no claim to anything, has no real visible emotions and is curiously remote - he only expresses shock at some older man in his room (the father of two girls, Léone and Giselle) placing a package on a nightstand. The package turns out to be a book on vampires.
The dialogue is often terse and the actions of many of the characters inconclusive - in fact, there is no payoff for most scenes as we traditionally expect in vampire films. We only learn later who this ambiguous older woman with a cane is - the vampire of the story known as Marguerite Chopin (Henriette Gérard) - yet we assume everyone knows who she is. Is everyone under her spell? Nobody seems to fear her and we never see this "vampyr" attack anyone or bite any intended victim, only after the fact. Her purpose is inexplicable yet she somehow keeps this inn and its surroundings closed-off and there is a sense of claustrophobia. There is also some castle and a mill and the settings somehow seem interchangeable. At times, I had no idea where I was despite the mobile subjectivity of Allan parading around the general interiors and the openness of the field, depicted with hard grainy black-and-white images.
I do not expect to make any sense out of "Vampyr" - it is a uniquely more poetic exercise than Murnau's horrifying vampire masterpiece "Nosferatu," released a decade earlier. Whereas "Nosferatu" is clear and precise in its intentions, "Vampyr" is decidedly unclear and imprecise. At one point, Allan is dead yet his presumed soul leaves the body only for Allan to find his dead body in a coffin with a glass partition! To make matters even more eerie, we watch as the coffin is lifted and carried out and we see everything from his point-of-view in the coffin (these images are the most startling). It is hard to tell from the conclusion if our impertinent hero is actually dead or if he has been resurrected or if all this is a dream.
"Vampyr" is ostensibly a dream exercise, an excuse for director Carl Theodor Dreyer to mix the supernatural with the misty surroundings in some sort of internal logic of a dream. There are some hypnotic, impossibly filmed shots that have haunted me for years - the shadows of children along a river bank, the shadows of people dancing and playing merry music as the camera prowls along a series of walls, the terrifying scene of Sybille Schmitz's Léone as her face becomes demonic while staring at her sister Giselle, the flour mill that suffocates the doctor (the vampire's accomplice), and the limping soldier whose shadows acts independently. "Vampyr" may be purposely vague in meaning yet it is a tremendously moody assault on our senses, albeit in a quiet, leisurely way that sneaks up on you and curdles your blood. You might not look at shadows the same way again.
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