The Cinematheque

“No one has come closer than Dreyer to showing what it is like to believe in vampires, to experience the blurring of the line between the real and the supernatural. That is what makes Vampyr so subtly but persistently terrifying.”

Caspar Tybjerg, Sight and Sound

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s follow-up to the canonical The Passion of Joan of Arc is the Danish auteur’s most alluringly enigmatic film. Loosely based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla—which predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula—Dreyer’s gothic horror follows a young devotee of the occult who wanders into a French village cursed by a vampire. Populated by sourceless shadows and daylight doppelgängers, and bearing scant regard for causality, Vampyr was long considered Dreyer’s bête noir, but has gradually emerged as one of the era’s most influential works of experimental narrative cinema. Our one-night-only Halloween screening will feature live accompaniment from post-rock provocateurs Applied Silence, whose 2023 LP Screen Door shares several of Vampyr​’s themes. Led by Fond of Tigers’ Stephen Lyons and author-performer José Teodoro (Nothing But Time: Conversations with Peter Mettler on Life and Cinema), the quintet will forge an original soundscape of guitars, vocals, percussion, brass, and electronics, leaning heavy into atmospherics and a hallucinatory lyricism that, more than simply underscoring, works in dialogue with the film.

In German with English subtitles

“One of the most enigmatic tales of bloodlust ever committed to celluloid.”

David Zuckerman, Film Comment