Gothic Listening is pleased to present the second entry in the “Unvoiced” project, an ongoing series that invites artists to reimagine the non-verbal sounds of gothic and horror film and television, whether by remixing public domain materials or by using foley art and other techniques to think through, recreate, or reimagine the nonverbal soundtrack. The first “Unvoiced” entry was a close recreation and remix of ambient sounds from a scene in the pilot episode of Twin Peaks (1990).
This second entry in the series moves back into the history of gothic and horror film, with a study of the foley art and scoring in Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932). The process here was to take two scenes from the film, loosely imitate their scoring and foley art, and then to rework those materials into new pieces of sound art.
Background: Sound in Dreyer’s Vampyr
Vampyr was Dreyer’s first sound film, and was initially planned to be silent. Many scenes still work much like a silent film, carried forward mainly by Wolfgang Zeller’s score. Sometimes the dialogue and other diegetic sounds are just barely audible, submerged in the music, and then at key moments erupt into the foreground. The effect is an interplay between music and moments of highly charged sound. Perhaps because of the sparseness of the dialogue, Dreyer and Jul’s screenplay reads more like a prose narrative, describing scenes, movements, and soundscapes in detail, and with a particular focus on sound, silence, and listening. In the first scene of the film, for example:
“The inn is lying in profound silence, as if all its occupants have gone to bed. Nikolas rattles at the door, but it is well and truly locked. At this moment he sees a reaper walking along with his scythe over his shoulder. He looks at the man curiously as he walks down toward the ferry, He shouts after him:
“Hullo, you there!
“But the reaper, not hearing his cry, continues on his way. The landscape is bathed in a gray, dim twilight; every object has a tinge of unreality.Vampyr: The Screenplay, trans. Oliver Stallybrass and Nicholas Elliott
“Nikolas goes round to the back of the house. There he discovers a window in which light can be seen. He comes nearer, knocks on the windowpane, and listens”
In fact, in the final cut Nikolaus (unnamed in the film) never actually cries out hello. There is some new dialogue not in the screenplay, remarks exchanged with the innkeeper; there is the rattling of the door; but in the final cut, there is no call to the reaper. Instead, on screen the reaper becomes aligned with a different sort of sound, as he rings a bell, with the cadence of a funeral toll, in order to signal the ferryman who pulls to the dock and lets him aboard.
The first piece works with the sound of the bell, which like other sounds in the film plays against and occasionally struggles to be heard over the musical score, and also pushes and pulls against its rhythm. Apparently, all of the film sound, including dialogue originally mouthed in three separate takes in three languages, was added later in studio. To create a similar bell sound, I used a recording taken at McCathran Hall in Washington Heights, Maryland; treated it with pitch shifting and EQ; and mimicked the cadence of the bell as it tolls in the film. The music does not replicate Zeller’s score, but uses a much more rudimentary opening progression to introduce the main theme: the tritone chord formed, in the original film, by the combination of the low strings and the tolling bell together. It then develops that tolling theme in a call and response pattern first as a fairly close imitation and then as a cavernous drone piece loosely inspired by the interplay of diegetic and nondiegetic sound in this scene.
Neither Children Nor Dogs (Part 1)
The next two tracks pick up a few scenes afterwards, with a key scene in the film’s use of uncanny sounds. Later that night, as our protagonist is exploring the premises and is led on by mysterious sounds and shadows. He hears an ambiguous series of noises, vaguely like an animal barking or chirping, or a child crying. Asked if he heard it, he asks, “the child?” – but is told there was no child. He then asks, “But, the dog?” – and he is assured that “There are neither children nor dogs here.” As Isabella van Elferen puts it in her study of gothic film sound, this moment in Vampyr “suggests that perception deceives and that hearing sound does not necessarily imply presence. If there are no children or dogs around, what did either man hear? Was there a sound at all, or did they just imagine it? And if there was a sound, did it have a physical source?” (3-4).
Track 2 recreates those strange animal sounds by blending together field recordings from several different sources. As in the first piece, the music is a loose imitation of Zeller’s, but the focus is more on the interplay of score and incidental sound. The low strings in this scene alternate between steady and intermittent, irregular rhythms, with sudden stops and starts that echo the uncertain search through the darkness, with its various stops and starts, and its moments of listening, silence, and surprise.
Neither Children Nor Dogs (Part 2)
https://gothiclistening.bandcamp.com/track/neither-children-nor-dogs-2
Track 3 takes the basic sounds of that scene — animal samples, pizzicato strings, and clarinet — and runs them through a guitar pedalboard, time-stretch processing, and other effects to create the sonic template for a new, reimagined approach to that scene, with its interplay of music and mysterious animal cries.
Works Cited and Additional Reading:
Alex Barrett, “Vampyr at 90: How Carl Dreyer Conjured a Waking Nightmare.” British Film Institute. 6 May 2022. https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/vampyr-carl-dreyer
Carl Theodore Dreyer and Christen Jul, “Vampyr: The Screenplay,” trans. Oliver Stallybrass and Nicholas Elliott, in Writing Vampyr, edited by Oliver Stallybrass and Nicholas Elliott. New York: Criterion, 2008.
The Dreyer Collection. Danish Film Institute. https://www.dfi.dk/presserum/dreyer-collection.
Isabella van Elferen, Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012.
Mark Le Fanu, “Vampyr’s Ghosts and Demons,” Criterion, July 21, 2008, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/559-vampyrs-ghosts-and-demons.
The Gothic Listening Project 