Vampyr - Der Traum des Allan Grey (Not Against the Flesh) (Adventures of David Gray) (Castle of Doom poster & wallpaper

Henriette Gerard, Jan Hieronimko, Julian West

A mysterious, somnambulistic young man wanders into a village where a castle owner's daughters are endangered by an elderly vampire and her associates.

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82% liked it

3,704 ratings

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100% liked it

23 critics

Unrated, 1 hr. 15 min.

Directed by: Carl Theodor Dreyer

Release Date: May 6, 1932

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DVD Release Date: May 13, 1998

Stats: 286 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (286)

  • webalina
    October 14, 2009
    webalina
    This is without a doubt one of the coolest films I've ever seen. Carl Dreyer weaves a film that seems more dream -- or more likely nightmare -- than film. A loose storyline about vampirism ties together visuals that are mesmerizing. Included are a shadow that walks around without...( read more) its owner, and a POV shot of a man's funeral -- from INSIDE the casket. Dreyer is one of the great directors and this film is evidence. Not to be missed.
  • columbiatch
    August 18, 2009
    columbiatch
    Probably my 2nd favorite Dreyer, this succeeds where Nosferatu kinda falls flat in creating this morbid, dreamlike atmosphere through all these strange editing and ethereal lighting and awesome dolly shots and crazy POV shots and doppelgangers and Keatonesque performances, not to...( read more) mention the mostly silent film aesthetics with very little dialogue in which the horror plot is secondary to its mood and texture.
  • ceWEBrity
    October 27, 2008
    ceWEBrity
    Perfect Halloween-time viewing for the patient film fan. This is as thematically complex, artistically ambitious, and visually gripping as anything made in the last decade. It's obviously very aged, but so rich and unique that it doesn't matter much at all. A real hidden treasure.
  • bort16
    September 12, 2008
    bort16
    CT Dreyer was one of the masters of impressionistic and art cinema. His Passion of Joan of Arc is widely considered to be the first film made as art for the sake of art. Owing a debt of course to the Eisenstein montage, his style and use of non-sequential cutaways has been highly...( read more) influential on countless filmmakers. His sense of style and imagery exuded a sense of dread and menace preternaturally. It seemed only fitting that Dreyer would tackle a horror film. So, in 1932 (though shot in 1930) he released Vampyr. A very loose adaptation of a novel by Sheridan Le Fanu, Dreyer set out to implement a terrifying story, but a terrifying atmosphere. The plot is a loose one, and alone not necessarily anything special. It has holes and uncertainties, and existed merely for a vehicle for Dreyer's imagery. Allan Grey, a believer in the supernatural who blurs the line between reality and lore, arrives in a small village. Immediately upon arriving, no time is wasted on getting down to creepy business. Shadow's move independently of their casters, a strange man holds a scythe and rings a bell. An old blind man lurks the hallway, and strange voices argue in the distance. Grey discovers the local doctor's bed - a coffin. On his first night at the inn, a man comes into his room telling him not to die, and leaves him a package to be opened upon his death.
    Grey, impulsed to help this man without knowing why, goes to his mansion home, where he lives with his daughters - one of whom is very sick, possibly the victim of a vampire - and a few servants. Grey witnesses the old man killed by what appears to be one of the shadows. He opens the package, and finds it is a book on vampires.
    As the house is stalked by shadows, Grey and an old servant discover the town's history of a vampire, and that they will attempt to have their victims commit suicide.
    This is all captured in what is essentially a a silent film with fleeting moments of dialogue. Most of what we need to know we learn from title cards or reading the pages of the vampire book. The look of the film is dark and shadowy, with occasional flashes of white - the color of the body drained of blood. The film was shot on location, places Dreyer found while scouting. Today the print is fairly poor - even on the Criterion and Masters of Cinema editions. But that is likely the best it will ever be seen give the damage that has accumulated over the years. Another reason why the picture looks rather strange is that Dreyer had the filmstock flashed before shooting to give it a hazy dreamlike look. (For anyone who doesn't know what flashing is, this just means that it was first exposed to low levels of light).
    What many may take for granted today is that Vampyr was quite a remarkable special effects picture for when it was shot in 1930. Not necessarily difficult effects, but extremely clever. The dancing shadows that appear on the wall during a tracking shot are quite interesting for example - captured actually not in a single shot but by 2 shots with a hidden edit. Another interesting trick in the film involves a sequence during which Allan Grey is split into three subjective realities: 1) sitting on a bench falling asleep; 2) a ghostly haze emerging from the sleeping Grey, who wanders; and 3) Allan Grey in a coffin, discovered by the ghostly wandering Grey. Dreyer reportedly simply used gauze filters on the camera and then some editing magic to capture the scenes.
    The end result is one of a stunningly haunting and menacing imagery. Dreyer's cutaways frequently have nothing to do with plot, but merely serve to enhance the frightening atmosphere. When discussing the film in preproduction with cinematographer Rudolph Mate, Dreyer reportedly said (I'm paraphrasing here) "Imagine we're standing in a room, a normal room like any other. Now imagine someone tells you there is a corpse hidden behind that door. You can't see it, but the room has somehow changed. That's the feeling I want to capture."
    Vampyr at times suffers from its plot. Moments seem arbitrarily tacked on at times, and the end feels like it may have been rushed. For these reasons I struggled with how to rate the film. I had a similar dilemma with Robert Bresson's L'argent. With both films I eventually decided that what the film was trying to say and feel was the important factor. Just as L'argent was a photo essay on the evils of money, Vampyr is about expressing menace through image, not story. And it does feel like there is a corpse hidden somewhere in Vampyr.
  • jplong39
    August 23, 2008
    jplong39
    Captivating dream--like film that completely discards reality and convention. Nearly every shot is breathtaking in atmosphere and originality, every character is mesmerizing, and every gesture and camera movement memorable.
  • dfduncan
    November 17, 2009
    dfduncan
    This is a brilliantly conceived horror film that was beautifully executed within the limits of the medium back in 1932. Filmed at the end of the silent era it contains the stilted, posed style of acting that was the accepted standard of that time. The story is slow by modern stan...( read more)dards and is frequently hard to make sense of -- I have no idea what some parts of it meant. But it is a very creepy story that constantly maintains suspense without recourse to any trite gimmicks.
  • BillyRevenge
    October 24, 2009
    BillyRevenge
    Creepy and very very very weird!! Doesn't make any sense! But that's whats good about it. It's like watching a dream. Or did I mean nightmare....
  • sleepykiss
    September 19, 2009
    sleepykiss
    One of my faves. Very suspenseful for a 1932 vamp flick.
  • enduringkubrickfan
    September 6, 2009
    enduringkubrickfan
    Not as atmospheric as I thought it would be. And a little more complex than I thought this would be (and this movie is not complex). Still a masterpiece in any light and years ahead of its time in vision and direction. SEE IT!
  • JasonDennis91786
    August 19, 2009
    JasonDennis91786
    I found this film hard to judge. I've seen Dryer's three most famous films, and this is easily worse. All of Dryer's films have similar elements, but in Vampyr the worst of them comes to light.

    A lot of people are confused as to whether this is a silent or sound film. Vampyr ...( read more)is a sound film, but it might as well be silent because it is constructed just like one, as far as editing is concerned. This film being at the nascence of sound in film either had a horribly done soundtrack or is the victim of a poor restoration. In either case, the sound is quite poor. The acting, while stilted in all of Dryer's films, is even more so in Vampyr and unlike in Ordet or Day of Wrath, it does little to add to character. In those films, the actor's wooden qualities highlighted their inner paralyzations. In The Passion of Joan of Arc, the paralyzing power of Maria Falconetti is quite frankly frightening. In Vampyr, there is little beneath the surface of the characters, and the obvious posing merely seems to be bad acting.

    The story is barely present (not to mention, cliche, being a vampire story) and carries little in the way of conflict, the most obvious shortcoming being the almost complete lack of an antagonist. There are only about twenty lines of dialogue and even then they are very simplistic, as if cave dwellers were doing the conversing.

    Also, I was shocked by the poor technical quality of the film overall. This could be the fault of the restoration, but even given a better restoration, the film is extremely primitive for its time. The Passion of Joan of Arc had excellent picture quality and was made before this. Vampyr looked worse than German silent horror films ten years older, i.e. Nosferatu. Present were many shortcomings of the early silent era, most obviously the poor excuse for depicting "night time."

    Now for what is good. There is some excellent mise-en-scene symbolism and a few points of excellent cinematography that are very interesting though not perfectly integrated into the plot line. In one scene, the (alive, I think) lead's soul wanders into the evil doctor's office to find himself a corpse in a casket. Then a lid is put on him, but with a window to his face. Finally, caretakers haul the casket to his grave and we watch from the corpse's point of view, though the scene ends before burial and the live hero continues the story from there. These avant-garde scenes are interesting, but they do little to benefit the plot or add to the audience's enjoyment or understanding of the movie. They are pieces of trivia, quite frankly. Daunting extreme close-ups of dead and dying faces can only go so far, and only a little farther in a horror film.

    I reserve the right to raise my rating if I see a restoration of better quality, but for now, I have to go with a thumbs down. I was quite disappointed, considering this director gave us what I consider the best silent film ever made.

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