Notes on Dreyer's Vampyr

Abstract

There is a tendency in the recent criticism of Dreyer's Vampyr (1931) to assimilate it to the genre of the fantastic, especially in terms of the characterization of that literary species that has been developed by Tzvetan Todorov. I think that this is a mistake. Nor is this mistake a niggling error in classification. It is an error that tends to mislead us about the special qualities and effects of Dreyer's Vampyr. Specifically, I contend that Vampyr falls squarely into the genre of horror and that its distinctive qualities and effects hinge on Dreyer's variations upon and subversions of certain structural choices characteristically found in that genre. In order to flesh out this claim, I will compare Vampyr to Tod Browning's Dracula (1931). I choose this foil both because the latter is a film that has been cited as the provocation for Dreyer's production of Vampyr and because Dracula exemplifies quite nicely a number of recurring narrative structures, strategies, and themes of the horror genre in general and the vampire subgenre in particular. The contrast between Vampyr, on the one hand, and Dracula and the narrative type it exemplifies, on the other, will, I believe, point us in the direction of what is quite special about Vampyr with respect to its large-scale narrative preoccupations. And this in turn may help us understand the probable significance of certain frequently observed features of the small-scale narration of the film, notably, that its story is very difficult to follow.