Vampyr

This Halloween, experimental music duo Magazinist will perform a live score to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932). Once described by Guillermo del Toro as being “the closest you get to poetry in film,” Vampyr combines dreamlike cinematography with nightmarish tableaux to depict the shadowy events of a small village where occult forces are at work.

Magazinist conjure a haunting shroud of sound using an array of supernatural contraptions, including a homemade tagelharpa, dulcimers, zithers, synthesizers, and ethereal vocal drones. Like the film’s somnambulant protagonist, Magazinist’s live score evokes an out-of-body experience with trance-like requiems and a chilling fog of gauzy textures.

As Gillian McIver notes: “In Vampyr characters always look up, they try to hear the noises that may not even exist. For example, Allan hears barking dogs and a crying baby, and then finds out that there are none in the house.” Indeed, Vampyr is one of the most hallucinatory films in the horror canon, a work of “startling beauty and maddening mystery; it is a vampire film like no other to date.”

Following two sold-out live scorings of Metropolis and Faust, Magazinist return to the VIFF Centre on October 27 with a few new tricks up their sleeves. And on that note: costumes encouraged!