Visit to a haunted cinema mansion, one of the first great vampire films, filmed in the Loiret

Released in 1932, Vampyr by Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer is one of the first major vampire films. Part of the filming took place in the Loiret, at the Courtempierre manor. Nearly 90 years later, the place and the film continue to nourish the memory of fantastic cinema.

At the edge of a wide river, a clumsy silhouette seems to come from nowhere. A young man, named Allan Gray (David Gray in French), enters the frame of the image, with his luggage and a landing net. He chose to stop at a small hotel, that of the village of Courtempierre.

Here is a summary of the very first seconds of the film. Vampire. Released in 1932, directed by Dane Carl Theodor Dreyer, the 73-minute feature film is part of an unofficial holy trinity of vampire films, with Nosferatu (1922) et Dracula (1931). For Alain Pelosato, in his 2008 article “Monsters au feminine”, Vampire East “an essential link in the history of cinema“, “a cinematic event“.

For his fictional village of Courtempierre, Dreyer uses banks at the confluence of the Cher and the Loire, in Indre-et-Loire, an old inn and a cemetery that France 3 was unable to find, as well as a mysterious manor, scene of most of the action of the film.

This manor is a real building, located in the Loiret, in the small village of… Courtempierre, the real one, about ten kilometers northwest of Montargis. Privately owned, the mansion had fallen into ruin, abandoned a few years after the filming of the film. It has been patiently restored in recent decades.

In Vampirethe small castle is the place of strange events. Allan Gray arrives there somewhat by chance, after following shadows. Upon his arrival, he witnesses the assassination of the squire, not without the latter entrusting him with an old book on the mysteries of vampirism. It is this book which, in the rest of the film, will guide both the character and the spectator, in a narration that is sometimes heavy but which delivers, to an audience of the 1930s not always informed, the codes of the genre.

Everything is explained in the book: bites, spells, the devil’s allies, how to defeat a vampire. And, as the story is well done, Allan Gray is informed that Léone, the squire’s daughter, has fallen seriously ill, and that she is suffering from a bite to the throat.

The filmmaker ultimately has very little interest in the vampire, who is initially only shown from a distance, in a vaporous veil. Even the act of vampirism, the bite to the throat, is only sketched. “The figure of the vampire is elusive, literally foggy“, writes Georges-Claude Guilbert in his article on Masculine and feminine in vampire films in 2010.

Georges-Claude Guilbert notes that, in Vampirethe predator with long canines is a woman, and an elderly one at that. And this while “the majority of vampire films on the market feature male vampires with erectile canines who pierce the offered throats of more or less consenting human women“. The metaphor of vampirism is very far from subtle.

Finally, of all the codes of the vampire film, only one seems to be missing. Vampireaccording to Patrick Zeyen: “passionate love“, so important in the Dracula by Coppola in 1992, in both films Nosferatuuntil Buffy, Twilight et Only Lovers Left Alive. Otherwise, everything is there: the disturbing inn, the journey from nowhere to nowhere, and (spoiler alert) the killing of the vampire, sleeping in his coffin, by a stake through the heart.

Generally speaking, Courtempierre is, in Vampirean unreal place. “We don’t know where we are, we don’t have to know, we just know that we are entering the mystery“, notes the critic Jean Douchet in a broadcast of France Culture dedicated to Dreyer in 2011.

The Loiretain manor is the pinnacle of these mysterious places. Inside, Dreyer takes great care not to direct the viewer, to make each corridor, each room and each staircase an avenue of a labyrinth. In the same broadcast of France Culturethe academic Pascale Raynaud explains that, as in the thinking of the surrealists, the castle of Vampire becomes “an observatory of the inner sky“. In more accessible terms, “a place conducive to the emergence of imagination, the appearance of unconscious phenomena“.

It is for this reason that the filmmaker focuses more on the consequences of vampirism than on the vampire himself. On the gradual transformation of Léone, the squire’s daughter, from vulnerable sick person to diabolical. “More than physical fear, panic fear, the film arouses rebellious anxiety“, explains Jean Sémolué in his work dedicated to Dreyer in 2005.

The film is shrouded in blurry photography, initially a camera exposure error. The filmmaker is seduced, and keeps this style for the entire film, giving it a mysterious aura. Additionally, Dreyer must shoot each scene in three different languages ​​for international distribution. With actors far from being trilingual, he chose to reduce the dialogue. All these elements give Vampire a more than disturbing atmosphere.

The locations chosen for the film reinforce this impression. Dreyer uses no scenery, everything is real, from the castle to the inn sign, from the ferryman’s barge to the cobwebs in the windows. Legend has it that the filmmaker asked for spiders to be bred and then released in the places his camera was going to film.

90 years after its release, Vampire remains a reference in the history of the vampire film, and of cinema in general. A little-known pride for the Loiret, to be rediscovered urgently.

Article originally published on 11/27/2023