Gary Lucas plays Vampyr

In keeping with our Halloween tradition of spooky silent cinema, we are honored to welcome guitar legend Gary Lucas and his live score performance to Carl Dreyer’s silent horror classic, VAMPYR. Lucas’ dreamy, ethereal guitar score for VAMPYR compliments Dreyer’s visionary 1932 masterpiece with modern touches and creates a cinematic tension that spans a century of spooky storytelling.

GARY LUCAS

A world class guitar hero, a Grammy-nominated songwriter, an international recording artist, and a soundtrack composer for film and television, GARY LUCAS is on the move in 2024. The former Captain Beefheart guitarist has recorded over 50 acclaimed albums to date in his own right in a variety of genres—jazz, rock, classical, folk, blues, avant-garde and world music—and has performed in over 40 countries—including the UK, Canada, Australia, all over Eastern and Western Europe, Scandinavia, Israel, South Korea, Serbia, China, Russia, Brazil, Cuba, Colombia, Costa Rica, Taiwan, Morocco, India, and elsewhere. Gary has received several Lifetime Achievement awards for his songwriting with Jeff Buckley (he co-wrote Jeff’s anthems “Grace” and “Mojo Pin”) and many honors—including performing solo before the General Assembly of the UN to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day. He has performed and collaborated with a who’s who of musical luminaries, including Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet), Jeff Buckley, Leonard Bernstein, Lou Reed, John Cale, Patti Smith, Chris Cornell, Bryan Ferry, Nona Hendryx, Los Van Van, Bob Weir, Nick Cave, Thurston Moore, Lukas Ligeti, Martha Wainwright, Camille O’Sullivan, Steve Kilbey, and many others, and he has given Masterclasses in guitar and songwriting at his alma mater Yale University, Columbia University, Rutgers University, the Amsterdam Musik Conservatorium, the Henri Dutilleux Conservatoire in Paris, The New School, and other academic institutions. Dubbed “The Thinking Man’s Guitar Hero” by The New Yorker, “The world’s most popular avant-rock guitarist” by The Independent (UK), “One of the 100 Greatest Living Guitarists” (Classic Rock), “Legendary Leftfield guitarist” by The Guardian (UK), “Guitarist of 1000 Ideas” by The New York Times, “a true axe God” by Melody Maker, and “One of the five best guitarists in the world” by the national Czech newspaper Lidove Noviny; the British world music magazine fRoots recently described Gary Lucas as “without question, the most innovative and challenging guitarist playing today.” Rolling Stone’s David Fricke wrote: “Gary Lucas is one of the best and most original guitarists in America…a modern guitar miracle.” Best-selling author/producer Dan Levitin (“This Is Your Brain On Music”) recently cited Gary as “the greatest living electric guitarist”. Gary was also dubbed “one of the world’s greatest guitar players” by HITS Magazine. Pete Frame, music journalist, founder/editor of legendary UK music magazine ZigZag, and author/creator of 5 volumes of “Rock Family Trees” said of Gary, “Can there be another musician as adventurous, ingenious, accomplished, diverse, intrepid, hard-working and well-travelled as Gary Lucas?” On Sept. 15th 2021, Rolling Stone magazine published their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time which included Gary Lucas and Jeff Buckley’s anthem “Grace”—the title track of Jeff Buckley’s two-million selling 1994 album.

VAMPYR, based on ghostly tales by Irish author J. Sheridan Lefanu, occupies a singular niche in the horror cinema, occupying its own peculiar space somewhere between a silent surrealist film and a sound film thriller. A German-French co-production filmed in France, dialogue is kept to a minimum and the film unfolds its convoluted narrative mainly through the use of gestures and subtitles. Dreamy, phantasmagoric soft-focus cinematography and unusual editing rhythms and camera angles dislocate the viewer’s sense of time and space throughout—and nothing truly is just what it seems. French aristocrat (and “Vampyr” backer) Nicolas de Gunzberg plays Julian West, a lost soul out of time and space, who wanders one night into the village of Courtempierre, only to discover a sinister secret lurking in the shadows of the old cathedral.