Vampyr + Live Score

Vampyr — Live Score by the Andrew Alden Ensemble

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 fever dream is less a horror film than a nightmare filmed at the moment of waking — fog, drifting shadows, a scythe, a burial seen from inside the coffin. The Andrew Alden Ensemble scores it live with violin, electric guitar, piano, synthesizers, and percussion, the New York group’s music moving with the film’s logic of dread rather than against it. A young traveler, Allan Gray (Julian West), arrives in a riverside village held under the spell of a vampire, and the world begins to come loose at the edges. Dreyer made it as sound cinema was being born and produced something stranger than either silence or speech; performed with a live original score, it turns stranger still.

A Q&A with composer Andrew Alden will follow, with an informal reception afterward at the bar!

The Andrew Alden Ensemble is a New York-based chamber group that performs original scores live alongside classic films. They’ve sold out art houses and movie theaters across New England, New York, and the Midwest; the executive director of Images Cinema in Williamstown called their October 2024 Nosferatu “the most successful live event the theater had produced.” More at https://www.andrewaldenensemble.com/.