VAMPYR

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.

Applied Silence—whose 2023 LP Screen Door shares several of Vampyr's themes—has composed an original score for the film, full of maundering and thunder, tenderness and wonder, noise and melody, songs and abstractions, field recordings and spells of structured improvisation, leaning heavy into atmospherics and an hallucinatory lyricism that, more than simply underscoring, works in dialogue with the film. Each iteration of our Vampyr will be a distinctive, one-time-only experience: in every city where we perform, we invite different local guest artists to collaborate.

Our Vampyr debuted at Edmonton's Metro Cinema on August 28, 2026, where Stephen and José were joined by Sean Fulton and Twilla MacLeod. We made sounds with guitars, vocals, drums, percussion, keyboards, and samplers.

Next stop: Vancouver’s Cinematheque on Halloween! With Stephen and José, Shanto Acharia, JP Carter, and Ida Nilsen. Get your tickets.