The screenings of these two classic horror
films surround a seminar called "Responding
to Evil."
.
Both M and Vampyr are landmark examples of cinema in the early sound period. Both films represent the efforts of highly skilled directors who were anxious to integrate the new sound technology as an added level of meaning beyond that achievable by the powerful visuals alone. Beyond this similarity, however, the two films represent radically different approaches under the horror film umbrella. M is a chilling, but conventionally structured telling of the apprehension of a child murderer. Vampyr is not so much a story as a dream, a very eery dream. From the very first moments of Vampyr, it is clear that Director Carl Dreyer is out to disorient his viewers. The paucity of establishing shots doesn’t allow for any coherent sense of the space in which Alan Gray’s story unfolds. Even naming the character “Gray” reveals Dreyer’s agenda that this project is deliberately ambiguous without black and white clarity about story (“What is really happening here?”) about characters (“Is Leonie good or bad? One of us or one of them?) or about space (“Where are we? How did we get here?”) Another source of disorientation in Vampyr comes from Dreyer’s disconnection of sounds and shadows from their sources. There is barking without dogs. There is music without players. There are dancing shadows with no dancers. It is as though the sound and shadows are the presence of evil, very real, but illusive. Very clearly, as the viewer’s contact with evil in the film grows, so grows the sense of disorientation. Evil throws off our sense of reality. It confuses us and so seduces us. In the end, the experience of Vampyr is most like the experience of a nightmare where the subconscious moves the dreamer through space, where strange things happen and where cloudy characters pass in and out adding to a sense of threat which grows with the dreamer’s confusion. There are two dreams within the dream of Vampyr, the most of striking of which takes Alan Gray inside the experience of his own death. The ultimate horror of the film is the suggestion that nightmares may anticipate what it is like to be dead. The evil in M is much less a force outside of us, than an addiction to which we are all subject. This theme is what makes M ultimately so terrifying. Made during the early days of the Nazi regime in Germany, Director Lang chooses the vilest of evils, the murder of innocent children, as the gruesome compulsion of his lead character, played masterfully by Peter Lorre. Lorre is tortured and full of self-loathing, but still he cannot seem to help himself. Similar to Vampyr, Lang’s use of off-screen sound adds powerfully to the eeriness of the film. The cheery whistle that Lorre’s character uses to attract his victim soon becomes a disembodied harbinger of terrible evil. It is evil cloaking itself in gaity and happiness, a cruel trick that enrages us the way manipulation always should. Lang certainly was thinking of the perpetual propaganda machine of the Nazi regime, promising a happy future, but really leading to unimaginable darkness. In the end, Lorre’s child-murderer is apprehended by a band of criminals in what has become a society being torn apart by a lynch-mob mentality. The climactic speech of the film makes the point that those who would be judge in society need to remember that they differ from the worst evil doers only in matters of degree. There is no one who is just, and we are complicit when someone becomes becomes ‘a murderer among us.’ Essay by Barbara
R. Nicolosi
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