Vampire Cinema Series #1: Vampyr (1932)
Written by Madeline Ostdick
Part 1/3 of our Halloween 2026 Cinema Series
The best early vampire movie has no “vampire” in it at all, at least not as we understand them: no fangs, no cape, no magical transformation into a wire-operated bat. Vampyr (1932), an iconic German horror film with a tremendous influence on international arthouse horror, does have a vampire in it, but viewers expecting a monstrous being permanently pitched forward in pursuit of an unsuspecting target will be left disappointed: it’s just some old woman!
It’s not that the vampire of Vampyr is a red herring, but the folkloric creature invoked in the title is a comparatively abstract rendering of the monster—just one element of a rich cinematic tableau of horror that prioritizes atmosphere over scares. This vampire exerts her powers over the living, forcing everyday people to commit atrocities. The real terror lies in the idea that horrific acts could be so human, presaging the Nazis’ rise to power in the country just one year later.
Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, best known for his silent classic The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), filmed Vampyr on location with a small crew and mostly non-professional actors. Financed by star “Julian West,” aka “Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg”—a fashionable French-born socialite with a showy hereditary title from Czar Alexander II—the independently-produced film feels unburdened by commercial constraints, and it’s all the weirder for it.
Vampyr follows an occult specialist who wanders into a quiet village in France, stumbling onto a local mystery involving a bedridden young woman possessed by an unknown force. It’s less straightforward than it sounds: sequences are obfuscated through a mix of cinematic techniques, including disorienting close-up shots that act as a form of visual abstraction intended to alienate the viewer. It’s a destabilizing feeling akin to waking up from sleep, when the mind can’t parse the separation between dreams and reality, the former bleeding into the latter. We can’t really know the exact sequence of events and become just as unsettled by this lack of syntactical clarity as our hapless protagonist.
Made at a time in film history when the industry was navigating the shift from silent film to “talking pictures,” Vampyr feels like a work caught in the middle: shot entirely without sound, all dialogue was dubbed in post. Because of this process, the camera is comparatively fluid and kinetic by the day’s standards, free of the constraints created by sound recording, and the film’s minimal dialogue enhances its disquieting vibe. Liberated from the studio soundstage, the film’s exterior scenes, set during daytime, have a soft-focus haze achieved by placing gauze over the lens. Elements like this make Vampyr’s horror feel surreal yet mundane and ever-present: the danger does not end with the sunrise.
It’s a great film to put on at Halloween parties if you want to upset your guests: even the most pretentious amongst us may find their cinephile credentials tested by the film’s slow pace, impressionistic structure, puzzle-like construction, and existential approach to vampiric possession (and religious salvation). It’s a viewing experience closer to an Ingmar Bergman film than a true monster movie: shadows escape bodies and run wild, skeletal hands clutch bottles of poison, and spirits appear as disembodied faces—imagery that is granted no in-film explanation.
In Vampyr’s most unforgettable scene, a man’s spirit, separated from his physical self, sees his own inert body entombed in a windowed coffin. The camera travels down into the coffin and—through terrifying use of first-person perspective—looks back up and out of this window as the body is carried to its grave. Director Guillermo del Toro called Vampyr “a meditation on life and death and on the beyond…[and] a memento mori: a constant reminder of death and death casting a shadow over life.”
Polarizing in its time, Vampyr’s singularity lends it a timelessness that has only improved its reputation over the years among horror aficionados. While more widely-known, schlockier vampire fare like Dracula (1931) feels impossibly tethered to its era, Vampyr only benefits from obfuscating its malevolent force, turning the camera back onto ourselves, and our own eventual dance with death.
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