Saturday, 10 October 2026 at 9 pm
Directed by: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Germany, France, 1932, b/w, 75'
The young Allan Grey is an investigator of occult phenomena who arrives in the town of Courtempierre, not far from Paris. After checking into an inn, Alan meets the owner of a nearby château, who gives him a book on vampires with instructions to open it only after his death. The young man will soon meet the owner's daughter, Léone, a young and attractive woman suffering from a fatal blood-loss illness, as well as her sister Gisèle, who appears to be held in a kind of captivity.
Both Léone and Gisèle are under the strong influence of Marguerite Chopin, an elderly woman from the cemetery, and the village doctor. Allan will soon realise that behind Léone's serious health condition lies a vampire that is sucking the girl's blood, which will compel him to give his own blood to save her life. But in doing so he will fall into a blood-loss-induced disturbing dream, in which he will also see his own funeral.
Filmed four years after the director's eponymous masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc, which was a commercial failure at the box office, this fantastic horror from screenwriter and director Carl Theodor Dreyer (Leaves from Satan's Book, Day of Wrath, Love One Another), the director's first sound film, is based on two stories from the collection of fantasy short stories In a Glass Darkly by the Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu, specifically the stories The Room in the Dragon Volant and Carmilla. The film was financially backed by Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, who in turn appeared in it under the pseudonym Julian West as the protagonist, a young man who arrives in a village under a vampire curse.
As his first sound film, Vampyr presented a great challenge for Dreyer, both because he had to create three versions of the film in three languages and because of the demands of the source material itself, which involved creating a convincing dreamlike atmosphere and elaborating on the thesis that true horror is not found around us but in our subconscious. To minimise the problem of the three languages as much as possible, Dreyer sought to include as little dialogue as possible in the film, inserting intertitles in the style of a silent film instead. To achieve the most evocative atmosphere, the film was shot on location rather than in a studio, and Dreyer, in collaboration with the renowned cinematographer Rudolph Maté (Foreign Correspondent, To Be or Not to Be, Gilda), with Louis Née unsigned as his assistant, insisted on using various photographic tricks to “blur” the image.
Also, the sound was almost entirely recorded afterwards, in studios in Berlin. Despite all this, Vampyr was a failure with both audiences and critics at its premiere, so the director subsequently re-edited it before its French premiere, which resulted in a better reception. Although long considered Dreyer's weakest work, the film, in which the boundaries between dream and reality are very effectively erased, has gained considerable acclaim among critics in subsequent reappraisals.
Tickets for the screening on 10 October 2026 at 9 pm can be purchased online HERE, as well as at the Surogatkino KIC box office one hour before the start.