Carl Theodor Dreyer’s follow-up to the canonical THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC is the Danish auteur’s most alluringly enigmatic film. Loosely based on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s CARMILLA—which predated Bram Stoker’s DRACULA—Dreyer’s gothic horror follows a young devotee of the occult who wanders into a French village cursed by a vampire. Riddled with sourceless shadows and daylight doppelgängers, and bearing scant regard for causality, VAMPYR was long considered Dreyer’s bête noir, but has gradually emerged as one of the era’s most influential works of experimental narrative cinema.
Our one-night-only screening will feature an original live accompaniment from post- rock provocateurs Applied Silence, whose 2023 LP Screen Door shares several of VAMPYR’S themes. Led by Fond of Tigers’ Stephen Lyons and author-performer José Teodoro, and rounded out by Edmonton artists Sean Fulton and Twilla MacLeod, the quartet will forge an original soundscape of guitars, vocals, percussion, keys, and electronics, leaning heavy into atmospherics and an hallucinatory lyricism that, more than simply underscoring, works in dialogue with the film.