凡赫辛博士着手调查好友强纳森命案的幕后真相，发觉这显然是吸血鬼所为。他发觉一本日记，里头把矛头指向德古拉伯爵。当他循线追踪时，发觉德古拉在跟踪强纳森的未婚妻露西，并以自己的催眠魔力折磨她的精神状态。眼前只有凡赫辛有能力将她从德古拉的可怕魔力中拯救出来。Dreyer’s first sound feature, VAMPYR is an archetypal induction of the blood-hankering undead onto the celluloid screen (but not in its stereotyped appearance), made in a time when the story is foisted to unspool predominantly through title cards with minimal dialogs (sound recording is still a nascent embryo in Europe then), the film’s chiefly non-professional cast serves as props rather than fully embodies flesh and occurrences are sometimes painstakingly tardy in their paces.Yet, Dreyer’s modus operandi prospers in the somber, eldritch and never-wracking mise-en-scène, dispersed with thanatological symbols (the Grim Reaper in the beginning betokens its mythos), enhanced by a dream-like soft-focus tactility, and most extraordinarily, Dreyer’s legerdemain of coaxing shadow and light into his narrative, a coup de maître where a soldier emerges with his seemingly discrete shadow denotes the mystic separation and unification of body and soul. During the thick of its vampyr-myth debunking sequences, our protagonist, the spiffy young man named Allan Gray (played by the French scion and later illustrious magazine designer Nicolas de Gunzburg under the alias ofJulian West, who invests the movie with his own money to secure his dabbling into filmdom, which is his only screen credit) is afflicted by anout-of-body experience and witnesses a burying ceremony of his own body, swapping between camera’s (subjective/objective, body/soul)viewpoints, the film reaches its most eerie, preternatural actualization of a blurred vision between real and unreal. German actress,Sybille Schmitz, whose real-life tragedy inspires Fassbinder’s VERONIKA VOSS (1982), leaves behind an indelible image as the mostly bed-ridden vampyr-bitten girl, by dint of Dreyer’s stock-in-trade expressive close-ups. Poetic justice prevails in its simplistic ending (why the girl’s father who is in possession with the book doesn’t try to extirpate the scourge if he is presumably equipped with the know-how? A title card explanation would be apposite), but the scene wherethe evil village doctor impelled to receive his comeuppance potently flags up Dreyer’s ingenious flight of fancy, and this time, without being curtailed in the religious solemnity and rigidity, Dreyer’s VAMPYR soars with its top-drawer German expressionist idiom and avant-garde techniques that have timely reappraised the cachet of afilm maudit.referential points: Dreyer’s DAY OF WRATH (1943, 7.5/10);Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s VERONIKA VOSS (1982, 7.2/10)
