Dreams and Reflexivity in Vampyr

When dreams appear in horror films, they often show the dreamer and the viewer what is really going on in the waking world. In Vampyr a man dreams of a skeletal hand with a bottle of poison (Figure 10) and wakes in time to stop the vampire's victim from taking poison from the bottle in her hand (Figure 11). The dream and reality shots are similar, showing that the dream was an image of the truth, even if it was stylized. Dreams may offer privileged access to the mysteries and forces behind the story's events and can show them in their real forms or in forms that are more stylized or disguised. Like the dreams in Vampyr, they often appear to unleash evil and show its power but may finally be forces for good, revealing what the dreamer needs to know. The skeleton's hand in Vampyr is a warning about a real event but also a symbolic form for the hand of the victim, for the death the poison will bring her and for the more general force of death that reigns with the vampire. It shows the presence of death behind the mortal scene, which can reveal itself in a dream or in a movie as a whole. In many films, especially reflexive ones, framed narratives such as memories, dreams and tales (like those in Dead of Night) call attention, often simply by their framing, to the larger narrative structures in which they are contained. As we have seen, the world of horror can sometimes be found in a delimited space, like a window frame or a nightmare, but has access to what in terms of the fiction is the real world. Another dream from Vampyr and the one that provides a narrative frame for Dead of Night will clearly show these reflexive tendencies and the power of a contained structure.

As one of the most unsettling and atmospheric of all horror films, Vampyr is the story of a night during which a traveler helps a family threatened by a vampire. The links between nightmares and this movie are strong, not only because of the reflexive coffin-window sequence in its long dream, but also because the whole film is set in a world of shadows, reversals and uncanny events that could best be sustained in a dream.