The film’s hero, too, is often seen glaring through things — windows, openings, holes — to see the world framed in a way different from reality. Yet, we also see him framed obversely through the frames; thus we empathize with him, even as we realize the limits he may not, just as the viewer is limited by what is in the frame. Also, some of the later outdoor scenes were filmed through filters which give the film a blanched quality that Dreyer strove for to give a more shroudy appearance (rather than merely foggy), yet which lends the film a dreamy quality that visually is unmatched, even by many later film advances in obfuscation via special effects.
Dreyer famously remarked that he was more interested in mood than story for this film, yet his transcendent use of mood becomes the story, even as we are drawn to it not by its moodiness, but the engendered psychological empathy that Dreyer’s visuals impose on us. Dreyer’s thesis was this:
Imagine we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind the door. In an instant, the room we are sitting in is completely altered: everything in it has taken on another level; the light, the atmosphere have changed, though they are physically the same. This is because we have changed.…This is the effect I want to get.
And he succeeds.
In another scene, a room darkens as a door opens, because the source of light is blocked. Little touches like this, which play against the infused logic of reality, help Dreyer displace the expected into the unexpected, where real fear dwells; and this is only accentuated by the fact that the film was one of the first to be shot entirely on real world locations, not in a studio.
The film’s more conventional narrative, by contrast, is simple, and plays out in straightforward and unaffected way for its rather brief 72 minute running time. Although released under many different titles, the Criterion edition uses the film’s simplest form, Vampyr. The film was scripted in German, French, and English language versions, but never shot in English. There was a Danish version of the film under preparation, but apparently a full version of it never saw release. Minimal dialogue, and the characters often speaking while off camera, or with backs turned, helped make this approach to multinational distribution possible.
The lead character was originally called David Grey, and several of the film’s working and release titles used that name, Vampyr: Der Traum Des David Grey (The Dream Of David Grey), but somewhere along the line the character was renamed Allan Grey. The film commentary, by film expert Tony Rayns, speculates why, but not conclusively. The lead character was played by Julian West, a pseudonym used by the film’s co-producer (along with Dreyer), the Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, who later became an influential magazine editor in America. He agreed to finance the film if he could star in it. This agreement has often been a sore point for many Dreyer fans, who see West as the film’s biggest minus, in a cast that included only two professional actors (only Sybille Schmitz, who played Leone, and Maurice Schutz, Leone’s murdered father, were professional actors).
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