Note: The following is my entry in the big Film Experience vampire blogathon for your sanguinary edification.

“There are bad dreams for those who sleep unwisely.”
– Bram Stoker

If you’re absolutely sure there’s no such thing as a stupid question, consider these:

1. What would be the position of an elderly European vampire on stem cell research?

2. What would Dracula’s take be on amnesty for undocumented aliens?

Maybe it’s the upcoming election, but I can’t helping looking at both Carl Theordor Dreyer’s Vampyr and it’s close relative, Guy Maddin’s ballet film, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, through a semi-political prism.

Okay, in terms of heated political content we’re not talking Jean-Luc Godard, Oliver Stone or Costa Gravas here, but, for a vampire ballet film, Maddin’s Dracula is about as overt as it can be. How overt? Well, there are the those three succeeding title cards within the first few seconds: “Immigrants!!” “Others!” “From Other Lands.”

As he told NPR’s Terry Gross, when Maddin was preparing, slogging through Bram Stoker’s suffocatingly Victorian novel, he couldn’t escape what he saw as its overwhelming, propagandistic xenophobia. He half-expected one of the characters to exclaim that the “vampires are taking our jobs.” It’s also probably true that the fact that the part of Dracula was to be performed by Chinese dancer Wei-Qiang Zhang amidst an otherwise all-white cast made the conceit of an ironically xenophobic Dracula kind of impossible to ignore.

Since this a Guy Maddin movie, its points are made through earnestly theatrical performances and the canny use of antiquated filmmaking techniques, including grainy Super-8 black and white film enhanced by tints and some computer generated (?) color for key elements. There’s bright red blood, of course, but also bright green cash and sparkly gold for the money that we are told to assume Dracula has stolen from the English body politic. (The possibility that Dracula earned the cash legitimately through his land investments or, perhaps, by working long and hard operating Victorian era convenience stores is never discussed.)

On the other hand, when you’re talking about vampires, you’re also talking about sex. Drac might be out for English money, but he’s really after English women and maybe the men too. (There is a moment or two of “manly temptation.”) Dracula represents the ultimate sexual threat, a massive miscegenation nighmare. Sound like any political attack ads you’ve heard about recently?

Apprioprately, dancer Zhang’s performance of Dracula has a virile James Dean quality to it. He’s not really a bad irredeemably evil vampire, he’s a misunderstood irredeemably evil vampire. And, especialy in the first half of the films, he seems to be almost a force for a kind of sexual liberation for women. That’s never a good thing.

In the second half, however, things get more complex when Dracula tries to come between an actual loving couple in the form of perhaps the cinema’s first really convincing Johnathan Harker and Mina Murray (CindyMarie Small and Johnny Wright), who set off some sexual sparks of their own in a dance which makes it clear that Mina, Victorian heroine or no, is entirely ready to do the consummation nasty. Poor, vampire-traumatized, Johnathan is more ambivalent about what may or may not be a mutual deflowering. After all, all that rampant sexiness could be a sign of the vile vampire’s pernicious influence.

*****

Considering Carl Theodor Dreyer’s reputation as a progressive and humanistic filmmaker, it makes sense that sex is not really the most fearsome force in Vamprye. Perhaps it makes more sense considering his reputation as a “saint’s director” that science and technology and perhaps the human need to be in control may at least be a quiver in Satan’s bow. Or, maybe it’s just that the Devil likes to have MDs do his dirty work….

Vampyre opens with a title card that tells us about its hero, Allen Grey: “His studies of devil worship and vampire terror of earlier centuries have made him a dreamer, for whom the boundary between the real and the unreal has become dim.” Today, these attributes would make young Grey a perfect candidate for a foreign policy job in the Bush White House, but he has less to do in 1930’s Europe.

So, he wanders into a dreamily sinister village and things quickly turn, yes, dreamily sinister. As Vampyre progresses, the line between the “real” story and the many dream sequences is incresingly vague as Allan wanders about trying to figure out just why that old guy wandered into his hotel room and gave him a book to open in the event of his demise — which turns out to be more than immanent. The ensuing events are creepy, beautiful, tedious, and very hard to write about! But I’ll keep trying.

Eventually, Allan meets a pair of endangered young women who are being menaced by (you guessed it) a vampire who we never really see in action; imagines himself dead and buried in a coffin with a glass window in a moment of true creepiness; and meets up with an evil doctor, the apparent knowing accomplice of the vampire and the only person in the film with any connection to science or a rational world view.

Frankly, now that I’ve written this much, I realize that I can’t really back-up my assertion that Vampyr is as anti-science as I implied it might be above. I’ve been speeding through it again and again on my DVR, learning about how Dreyer deliberately used damaged film to help create the film’s surreal atmosphere, but I’m having a hard time finding — you guessed it — rational, hard evidence of my assertions. My statements are not as reality-based as I’d like and as hard to nail down as the title character.

Vampyr is the kind of movie that demands multiple viewings if you really want to begin to get to the bottom of it, and I’m not sure I want to do that right now. In any case, even if I can’t prove my assertions rationally, let’s just say that I believe that it’s pretty obviously fairly skeptical about the power of science.

Eventually, with the destruction of the vampire, the bad doctor meets his end in what appears to be a threshing mill — done in by combination of technology and a natural substance in a moment that seems to prefigure the death of a couple of bad guys in Peter Weir’s Witness (and probably several similar scenes I’ve forgotten in The Last Wave).

It’s a literal incarnation of one truth that really isn’t anti-scientific. In fact, it’s entirely rational, and we all have to admit to it.

It’s this: Call it nature, call it God — whatever it is, and no matter how smart we are, it is going to get us all eventually. Or, as the old graffito put it:

“‘God is dead.’ - Nietzsche

“‘Nietzche is dead’ - God’”

***
Now, I have only one question: Why didn’t I make this post about Blade? It would have a lot easier and I really feel like watching some vampires buy the farm right now.