Vampyr

Last night I was watching the 1932 movie Vampyr, directed by Carl Th. Dreyer, on DVD. The movie is very loosely based on the short story collection In a Glass Darkly by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, in particular the famous vampire story "Carmilla" which features in the collection. In the movie, a young man named Allan Gray (played by Julian West) arrives in a strange town where he percieves a disturbing and oppressive atmosphere. Wandering around the town he witnesses a variety of strange, supernatural occurances, and meets an elderly man (Maurice Schutz) who is terrified by the fact that his two daughters are apparently being targeted by a vampire. Despite being only about seventy minutes long, the movie is very slow and deliberately paced. The images have a hazy, dream-like quality to them, which apparently came about by accident after light hit the camera lens causing one of the takes to come out with a foggy look to it. Dreyer liked the result so much that he had the rest of the film shot through a sheet of gauze held about three feet from the camera lens in order to replicate the look. The movie was originally intended to be a silent film and, although it is a sound film, it retains many of the techniques of silent films, such as intertitles, and dialogue is kept to a minimum, partly because Dreyer had to shoot German, French and English language versions for different markets. The movie has now become acknowledged as one of the most important horror films ever made and it is a genuinely haunting and creepy film.

I went along to my parent's house for lunch today, as usual. In the afternoon we sat out in the garden for awhile, because the weather was good. I read a few more of the Haruki Murakami stories. In "The Kangaroo Communique" a reply to a letter of complaint to a department store becomes quite disturbing. In "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning" a man tries to work out why he thinks a girl he sees on the street is so perfect for him. In "Sleep" a woman suffering from extreme insomnia starts to have strange experiences. In "The Fall of the Roman Empire, the 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler's Invasion of Poland and the Realm of Raging Winds" a man tries to write his diary on a windy Sunday afternoon, and in "Lederhosen" a woman's trip to buy lederhosen for her husband as a souvenier of a trip to Germany proves a catalyst for divorce.

Mostly it's been an okay weekend.