Vampyr with Applied Science

Nothing enhances the impact of the cinematic image like an iconic film score. In the silent era of cinema, this role was performed by the theatre pianist or organist, providing moviegoers with cinematic entertainment and a live concert all in one.

In keeping with this cinematic tradition, on August 28 Metro Cinema is excited to present a screening of the 1932 film VAMPYR, with the premiere of a brand new original score created  and performed live by post-rock provocateurs Applied Silence.

Metro Cinema is dedicated to keeping the art of live accompaniment alive and relevant in the 21st century and with this screening aims to give people a chance to experience films the way they were originally meant to be seen.

“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 (bane of one’s existence), 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.”