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Dreyer's Vampyr is the stylistic mainstay, even before the protagonist's view from the glass window on a casket's lid. He is an aristocratic painter (glimpses of his canvases suggest a blotchy Munch, or a paint-by-numbers Bosch), Ray Milland a bit too rational to substitute for Vincent Price's grand follia. "Let us say I'm entering a new period." Catalepsy is his curse, persistent like a gravedigger's whistled tune echoing in the mind, the sister (Heather Angel) doubts it and the bride (Hazel Court) hopes to cure it. Morbidity is his true art, thus the vault in the moors as the literal monument to his obsessions. "The rigid embrace of the coffin... The blackness of the absolute night... The silence like an overwhelming sea, and then, invisible in the darkness, but all too hideously real to the other senses... the presence of the Conqueror Worm." Some of Roger Corman's most sumptuous studio conjuring in an expansion of Poe, interiors dotted by crimson candles and mist swirling around the grimacing corpse and blue and green filters for the nightmare where not even poison is an escape. Living with death's voluptuous pull means trying to foil it, the protagonist comes up with hatches and ladders and assorted escape options and showcases them proudly like the Marquis with his mechanisms in La Règle du Jeu. (The wife's embrace gives way to the exploding crypt, the toast to life is cut short by the meowing of an entombed kitty.) John Dierkes and Dick Miller with shovels and leers are from Kafka, Court in white gown getting a faceful of dirt is remembered in Belle de Jour. It comes to an end, as often with Corman, at the crossroads of otherworldly mystery and human venality. "Where does this lead?" "Below." With Alan Napier, Richard Ney, Clive Halliday, and Brendan Dillon.
--- Fernando F. Croce |