#A vampire death dream movie movie#

(The original subtitle of the film was Der Traum des Allan Grey - how interesting, in light of a nightmarish film, to note the morphological and possibly etymological connections between the words 'dream,' 'drama' and 'trauma.') And so goes the rest of Vampyr, continually blurring dreams and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, life and death under the circumstances, the name 'Gray' begins to make a lot of sense. It emerges that Courtempierre is besieged by a vampire and her minions who goad innocent people into suicide in order to enslave their now eternally damned souls. A few shots later, when a mysterious older man in a smoking jacket drifts into Gray's room, it's unclear to Gray whether it's a dream or not - and Dreyer makes sure that we don't really know whether it is either. As the introductory intertitle puts it, the shiftless Gray had become 'a dreamer for whom the line between the real and the supernatural became blurred,' thereby setting the tone for the whole film. The film's protagonist, Allan Gray, wanders into the small French town of Courtempierre, a real place where the film was shot entirely on location, and checks into an inn. But what makes Vampyr dream-like and, say, Scarface from the same year not dream-like, isn't just a sense of the fantastical, but subtler aspects such as discontinuity, disembodiment, and distortion.

In a way, all movies are like dreams in that the viewer is borne along on an audio-visual narrative that he or she cannot control.

#A vampire death dream movie movie#

The movie is very dream-like, and not just because all the action takes place in one night. You always know when something seems dream-like, but precisely what makes it that way? I was thinking about this as I watched and soon became a little obsessed with Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1932 film Vampyr.