So, I was curious about this movie. HBO Max had it, and it’s only a little over an hour, but my first thought was maybe it was a silent movie. It isn’t. There isn’t a lot of dialogue, and what is there is in German, but it’s not a silent movie. In fact, as I started, a note said the original negatives were long since lost, and what I would be watching a remastered version of some sort made from a French and German print. Basically, I have no idea what the movie would have looked like back in 1932, if I saw all of it, or if this was even what it was supposed to look like.
That said, this was creepy enough that maybe all the fiddling made it moreso, but it doesn’t much matter in the end. I can still get something good out of this.
A narration box, the first of many, tells the audience that one Allan Gray (Nicolas de Gunzberg) developed an interest in the dark and supernatural things that will damn a person’s soul to hell, but he got more than he bargained for in the village of Courtempierre. Stopping to stay at a Manor house, the Lord of the Manor (Maurice Schutz) asks Allan to make sure that some…thing does not kill someone upstairs. He leaves a package, labeled that it should not be opened until the old man dies, and exits Grays’s room. Sure enough, he dies, but that was just the start of the strange things Gray encounters in the village as he finds himself looking into protecting the old man’s two daughters, Léone (Sybille Schmitz) and Giséle (Rena Mandel) from what turns out to be a vampire and its human minions. The package the old man left behind was a book on vampires, and Gray needs to do some reading.
In fact, there’s a lot of reading to do here. As the movie progresses, there are numerous instances of pages of the book going on the screen, outlining what a vampire is in this movie and what it can and can’t do. This isn’t a Dracula sort of creature. In fact, we don’t really see the vampire doing much. Most of its evil is done off-screen. Instead, it’s more of a dark spirit that drains the life from the young, pushing them to committing suicide to both create more vampires and damn the person’s soul to hell. Gray, and what few allies he has in this village, will need to work hard to save both the girls.
The pages of narration are an interesting technique to dispense a lot of information. As I said above, this isn’t a silent movie, but the characters don’t really speak much, and there’s a lot of lore and information in these pages. Having it spoken verbally would have been a bit much, and what is there is important for the heroes to save the day. That said,, as a hero, I found Gray more or less uninspired. He’s not so much a hero as a witness. A nameless servant and the old man’s ghost are much more responsible for disposing of the vampire and its living minions, most notably the town’s creepy doctor (Jan Hieronimko).
Quite frankly, that’s fine. Gray’s point is more to witness the weird and the creepy, and there’s a lot of that going around, particularly at a point when Gray himself seems to become more of a spirit and witnesses what might be his own funeral procession from inside a coffin. He’s not useless or anything. He’s the audience surrogate, witnessing the weird stuff going on as the evil that is the vampire is gradually revealed. Gray does have a hand in killing the vampire, but he’s more of an explorer while the other characters helping him behave a lot more directly. Had he been the other type, the movie probably would have been a lot shorter, or at least a lot less eerie. We’re better off with it the way it is.
Grade: A-
0 Comments