Director Theodor Carl Dreyer began planning Vampyr in late 1929, a year after the release of The Passion of Joan of Arc.
As Dreyer’s first sound film, it was made under difficult circumstances as the arrival of sound put the European film industry in turmoil.
In France, film studios lagged behind technologically–the first French sound films were shot on sound stages in England.
Dreyer went to England to study sound film, where he got together with Danish writer Christen Jul.
To create a story based on the supernatural, Dreyer read many mystery stories, in which he found some re-occurring elements including doors opening mysteriously and door handles moving.
In London and New York, the stage version of Dracula had been a big hit in 1927.
Vampyr is based on elements from J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “In a Glass Darkly,” a collection of five stories first published in 1872.
Dreyer draws from two of the stories for Vampyr, one Carmilla, a lesbian vampire story; the other The Room in the Dragon Volant about a live burial.
For casting and location scouting, Dreyer returned to France, which had a company of artistic independently financed films, including Luis Buñuel’s L’Âge d’Or and Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, both in 1930.
Dreyer met Nicolas de Gunzburg, an aristocrat who agreed to finance Dreyer’s next film in return for playing the lead role in it.
Gunzberg had arguments with his family about becoming an actor, so he created the pseudonym Julian West, a name used in all three languages.
Most of the cast in Vampyr were not professional actors. Jan Hieronimko, who plays the village doctor, was found on a metro train in Paris. Other non-professionals were found in similar fashion in shops and cafés.
The only professional actors were Maurice Schutz, who plays the Lord of the Manor, and Sybille Schmitz, who plays his daughter Léone.
Major crew members had worked on Dreyer’s previous film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, like cinematographer Rudolph Maté and art director Hermann Warm.
The film was shot on location with many scenes in Courtempierre, France.
Dreyer and cinematographer Rudolph Maté contributed to the location scouting for Vampyr. Dreyer left most of his scouting to an assistant, instructed to find “a factory in ruins, a chopped-up phantom, worthy of the imagination of Edgar Allan Poe. Somewhere in Paris. We can’t travel far.”
In the original script, the village doctor was intended to flee the village and get trapped in a swamp. On looking for a suitable mire, the crew found a mill where they saw white shadows around the windows and doors. After seeing this place, they changed the film’s ending to take place at this mill where the doctor dies by suffocating under the milled plaster.
Vampyr was filmed between 1930 and 1931. By having everything be shot on location, Dreyer believed it would be beneficial to lending the film the feel of a dream-like ghost world as well as allowing them to save money by not having to rent studio space.
Dreyer originally wanted Vampyr to be a silent film, with title cards. Dialogue in the film was kept to a minimum. For the scenes with dialogue, the actors mouthed their lines in French, German and English.
There is no record of the English version being completed.
The scenes in the chateau were shot in April and May 1930. The chateau also acted as housing for the cast and crew during the filming.
The church yard scenes were shot in August 1930. It was not an actual church, but a barn with tombstones placed around it. This set was designed by the art director Hermann Warm.
Vampyr’s style as closer to experimental features like Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) than a horror film made after the release of Dracula (1931).
Dreyer changed direction after cinematographer Maté showed him one shot that came out fuzzy and blurred. This washed out look was an effect Dreyer desired, and he had Maté shoot the film through a piece of gauze held three feet away from the camera to re-create this look. For other visuals in the film, Dreyer found inspiration from the fine arts.
Actress Rena Mandel, who plays Gisèle, said that Dreyer showed her reproductions of paintings of Goya.
In Denmark, a journalist and friend of Dreyer, Henry Hellsen wrote about the film and the artworks it drew on.
When asked, Dreyer replied: “I just wanted to make a film different from all other films. I wanted to break new ground for the cinema. And do you think this intention has succeeded? Yes, I have broken new ground”.
The shoot of Vampyr was completed in the middle of 1931.
A black and white image of the film depicting a transparent Allan Gray looking at his own body that is lying in a coffin.
Allan Gray (Nicolas de Gunzburg) finds a coffin containing himself in a dream sequence. Modern critics praise this sequence as one of the most memorable sequences from Vampyr.
Dreyer shot and edited the film in France and then brought it to Berlin where it was post-synchronized in German and French.
Dreyer did the audio work at Universum Film AG, which had the best sound equipment at the time. Most of the actors did not dub their own voices. The only voices of the actors that are their own are of Schmitz and Gunzburg.
The sounds of dogs, parrots, and other animals were fake, created by professional imitators.
Wolfgang Zeller composed the film’s score.
There are differences between the German and French releases. The character Allan Grey is named David Gray for the German release, which Dreyer attributed to a mistake. The German censors ordered cuts to the film that still exist today in some prints.
The scenes which had to be toned down include the doctor’s death under the milled flour and the vampire’s death from the stake. There are other scenes that were included in the script and shot that do not exist in any current prints of Vampyr. These scenes reveal the vampire in the factory recoiling against a shadow of a Christian cross as well as a ferryman guiding Gray and Gisèle by getting young children to build a fire and sing a hymn to guide them back to the shore.
Dreyer had prepared a Danish version of the film which was based on the German version with Danish subtitles. The distributor could not afford to have the title cards completed in the manner they appear in the German version, which were instead finished with a simpler style. The distributor also wanted to make the pages in the book shown in the film as plain title cards which Dreyer did not allow.
The premiere of Vampyr in Germany was delayed by UFA, as the studio wanted the American films Dracula and Frankenstein to be released first.
At the Berlin premiere, on May 6, 1932, the audience booed, leading to Dreyer to cutting several scenes.
The film was distributed in France by Société Générale de Cinema who also distributed Dreyer’s previous film The Passion of Joan of Arc.
The Paris premiere was in September 1932 where Vampyr was the opening attraction of a new cinema on Boulevard Raspail.
At a showing of the film in Vienna, audiences demanded their money back. When denied, a riot broke out that led to police having to restore order with night sticks.
When the film premiered in Copenhagen, in March 1933, Dreyer did not attend.
In the US, the film premiered with English subtitles under the title Not Against The Flesh.
An English-dubbed version, edited severely, appeared later on the roadshow circuit as Castle of Doom.
The film was a financial failure, and Dreyer had a nervous breakdown and went to a mental hospital in France.
