Film Analysis - " Vampyr "

[Jason K]

The Movie “Vampyr” made by Carl Theodor Dryer in 1932 is a movie based on slaying vampires. A Traveler, Allan, enters a village, and encounters incidents such as someone getting shot, or gets sick during the stay in a hotel(?). Allan opens up the package that the shot old man had gave him (the day he arrived in the village) which contained a book about vampires. Throughout the story Allan explores around the village and finds out about vampires and hunts them down one by one.

Title
The Title of this film is Vampyr. It does not show much creativity but foreshadows that the movie is about Vampires. Additionally, the word Vampyr is from the word Vampire, one thing I have found about the word is that, the letters ‘yr’ in the end of the word gives a much scary mood.

Lighting
Lighting is probably one of the most important factors in modern movies that creates mood and tension, however, it feels like the movie did a very poor job in lighting, and did not use it as a tool to create mood and tension. As the film was black and white, and with the fog that was always present. It made it hard to determine whether it was morning or evening, and it was hard to pick out lightings such as the contrast and the direction of light. For example, in almost every scene light was visible from the windows, however, the main character was holding a candle to illuminate the surroundings. Most horror movies use Low Key, and Under Lighting to create dark, evil scenes, however this movie hardly had any of those. Instead the movie used Music and Action to create a scary mood.

Music & Sound
The movie uses a lot of background music that drags the viewer’s attention to the movie. In my own words, I call it the disturbing music. The background music sometimes tends to give the viewer a headache. It feels like as if the music is stabbing parts of your brain with a stick. However, the music still does its job, the ringing or the echo sound that remains in your brain when the music stops leave the horror in your mind.
[What is a disturbing music? Think about the movie The Shining]


Action
Another thing that creates mood is the actor’s actions and facial expressions. This is not used modern movies, because it would totally ruin the movie. However, it fit very well with the movie and created tension. The main character Allan, kept the same expression throughout the movie, a confused, befuddled face. This in fact is the facial expression of the viewer of the movie, always so curious and confused about the situation and does not know what will happen next.

Message
Many movies tend to send messages to the audience through action and dialogues, or even symbols. However the movie Vampyr does a very poor job in sending messages to the audience. The message is sent through a slide with all the summary of what have happened and what will happen. This hints that the actors lack expression skills, however it is understandable because it is a film filmed over 70 years ago and it may ruin the plot if the characters spend time explaining the plot rather than focusing on the incidents.

Shadow
Shadow, I think this is the best used factor in the whole movie. But didn’t I just say the movie did a very poor job in shadow because the movie was black and white? Yes, but this is another kind of shadow. The shadow was like another character in the story. There are many scenes when shadows dances and play around when there was no one on the scene to cast them. The movie creates most of its scary mood through shadow, in fact that is what I thought the most scary part of the movie was. It also really relates to the theme: Death.


Horror
As the movie is about Vampires, one obvious theme would be horror. The film creates horror through many items in the movie. Even though it seemed like nothing nowadays, it might have had great effect on the audiences during 1930s. Like I mentioned before, the shadows created horror. (Seeing a bunch of shadows when there was no one there to cast.) There facial expressions of the characters also created horror as it rarely changed throughout the movie. Also there are some small items such as moving skulls, opening doors when there is no one, have created horror.