Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18167 in DVD
• Brand: Image Entertainment
• Released on: 2008-07-22
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, DVD, Silent, Special Edition, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: German
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 75 minutes

Album Description
With Vampyr, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer's brilliance at achieving mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, profoundly unsettling imagery (as in The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath) was for once applied to the horror genre. Yet the result-concerning an occult student assailed by various supernatural haunts and local evildoers at an inn outside Paris-is nearly unclassifiable, a host of stunning camera and editing tricks and densely layered sounds creating a mood of dreamlike terror. With its roiling fogs, ominous scythes, and foreboding echoes, Vampyr is one of cinema's great nightmares.

Amazon.com
In this chilling, atmospheric film from 1932, Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer favors style over story, offering a minimal plot that draws only partially from established vampire folklore. Instead, Dreyer emphasizes an utterly dreamlike visual approach, using trick photography (double exposures, etc.) and a fog-like effect created by allowing additional light to leak onto the exposed film. The result is an unsettling film that seems to spring literally from the subconscious, freely adapted from the Victorian short story Carmilla by noted horror author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, about a young man who discovers the presence of a female vampire in a mysterious European castle. There's more to the story, of course, but it's the ghostly, otherworldly tone of the film that lingers powerfully in the memory. Dreyer maintains this eerie mood by suggesting horror and impending doom as opposed to any overt displays of terrifying imagery. Watching Vampyr is like being placed under a hypnotic trance, where the rules of everyday reality no longer apply. As a splendid bonus, the DVD includes The Mascot, a delightful 26-minute animated film from 1934. Created by pioneering animator Wladyslaw Starewicz, this clever film--in which a menagerie of toys and dolls springs to life--serves as an impressive precursor to the popular Wallace & Gromit films of the 1990s. --Jeff Shannon

Stills from Vampyr (Click for larger image)

On the DVD
Vampyr, among the most mysterious of film classics, gets some welcome illumination from Criterion's extras. Jorgen Roos's half-hour documentary Carl Th. Dreyer (1966) evocatively addresses most of the director's feature films; there were only fourteen of them, and they took him four-and-a-half decades because of the absolute integrity of his approach (and because of the difficulty of getting financed). Dreyer determined the particular style of every film in adherence to his own concept of "realism"; the look, rhythm, even the incidental details and props on the sets, all flowed from a fidelity to the core idea behind the movie. Most famously, for The Passion of Jeanne d'Arc, the rhythm of dialogue in the original trial transcripts mandated the "stream of closeups"--in Dreyer's own words--that ensured its place in film history. In Casper Tybjerg's visual essay on Vampyr (and also in Roos's film), Dreyer is quoted on a fortuitous discovery. While scouting the French countryside for locations, he came upon "a house where strange white shadows danced around the window and doors, as though some white fire inside were throwing off clear flames through the openings and cracks... We had to explore that white fire." Whether he saw those "white shadows" in reality or in his mind's eye, Dreyer was looking into the heart of the disordered universe--with laws of energy and physics all its own--where Vampyr transpires. The director's lone "genre film" (a perhaps cagy move after the prestigious but money-losing Jeanne d'Arc), Vampyr had mostly been shot by the time production began on the American Dracula; still, distribution had to wait till after the Hollywood vampire film went into release.

British film scholar Tony Rayns' running commentary on the feature notes that Vampyr was reduced by German censors and then cut by Dreyer himself after a hostile German premiere audience. Rayns then goes on to make admirable sense of the movie's refusal to make much sense in any conventional way. He identifies a "constant dislocation"--in the editing, in the camerawork, and in the ways the spaces of the film (don't) fit together. Most of the movie flows subjectively--does the hero's susceptible mental state perhaps invite the otherworldly events the film describes? That explains some things, but as Rayns eventually proposes: the film's "overall strategy is not to explain, not to cohere into orthodox dramatic patterns, but to constantly surprise, subvert and undermine the audience's expectations." Vampyr is a film "designed to be disquieting." No wonder the premiere audience was irritated. And no wonder that, among cinema masterpieces, Dreyer's Vampyr remains inimitable. The extras on disc also include a radio broadcast of Dreyer delivering an essay on filmmaking and an alternative English-only text of the film's sparse dialogue. In addition, there's a booklet featuring new essays by Mark Le Fanu and Kim Newman; details of the restoration by Martin Koerber; an old interview with Nicolas de Gunzburg, the amateur who bankrolled the production on condition that he star in it; and a book featuring Dreyer and Christen Jul's screenplay and its nominal source, Sheridan Le Fanu's 1871 story "Carmilla." --Richard T. Jameson

Customer Reviews

One of the best vampire movies ever gets the Criterion treatment. (Criterion features below) The Book Included is Over 200pages
Director Carl Th. Dreyer's ( The Passion of Joan of Arc (Criterion Collection Spine #62)) 1932 film Vampyr is as relevant a silent film (even though there is some talking) as the recent movie Once is a musical. Meaning, in Once when they bust out into song, they're actually musicians so it makes sense and when there are words on the screen in Vampyr it's because a book about vampires is being read. It works. The film plays like a black and white photograph come to life. It is filled with eerie dreamlike atmosphere and scares that hold up even now. This possibly could be the scariest vampire film rivaling Nosferatu, notably the part when one of the daughters goes from terrified about losing her sole to an evil smile. Even though it is made a decade after F.W. Murnau's classic Nosferatu (The Ultimate Two-Disc Edition) and one year after Browning's Dracula (75th Anniversary Edition) (Universal Legacy Series) this could still be the first movie about vampires.
In Nosferatu and Dracula the story tells of a specific vampire and in Vampyr it is about vampires in general. Vampires here are shadows we see not a guy without a shadow (very effective and eerie). They are people who have done wrong while living and are not at rest. They are companions of Satan and have minions working for them that could look like anyone. You can see how many countless vampire movies this has influenced, none of which come close to this masterpiece. I found the concept of the ending reminded me of Guillermo Del Toro's great Pan's Labyrinth [Blu-ray] but I won't go into detail.
If your familiar with Criterion or any of their horror releases this should be great and the original dvd could use improving. I've listed the Criterion features below from their website. Another reviewer did the same but I usually like to include features in my reviews as well.

CRITERION DVD FEATURES (DIRECTLY OFF CRITERIONCO'S WEBSITE)
Special Features

* - SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET FEATURES:
* - New, restored high-definition digital transfer of the 1998 film restoration by Martin Koerber and the Cineteca di Bologna
* - Optional all-new English-text version of the film
* - Audio commentary featuring film scholar Tony Rayns
* - Carl Th. Dreyer (1966), a documentary by Jörgen Roos chronicling Dreyer's career
* - Visual essay by scholar Casper Tybjerg on Dreyer's influences in creating Vampyr
* - A 1958 radio broadcast of Dreyer reading an essay about filmmaking
* - New and improved English subtitle translation
* - PLUS: A booklet featuring new essays by Mark Le Fanu and Kim Newman, Martin Koerber on the restoration, and an archival interview with producer and star Nicolas de Gunzburg, as well as a book featuring Dreyer and Christen Jul's original screenplay and Sheridan Le Fanu 1871 story "Carmilla," a source for the film

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Film Info
1932
75 minutes
Black & White
1.19:1
Dolby Digital Mono 1.0
Not Anamorphic
German

Vital contribution to early film.
This film is truly outstanding. It's possible to even go so far as to call 'Vampyr' the last in the line of German cinema expressionist movies; evidence to suggest the influences of 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari' and 'Nosferatu' certainly abounds throughout.

First things first; the film has no tangible plot to follow except that the storyline is loosely strung on a young man's attempt to fight vampirism in a small (Danish?) town. While the lack of plot sounds bad in the abstract, there is so much strength in the movie's other attributes that the issue of story structure soon fades in the viewer's mind. Imagery provides 'Vampyr' with its rasion d'etre. One haunting, shadowy image segues into the next to make for a horror experience that's far subtler than what Universal Studios was starting to crank out at the time of this film's release. Director Carl Dreyer apparently shot some of the scenes through gauze to enhance the ghost-like wispiness of the sequences.

The effect is utterly magical. Combine that with kinks like reverse filming (man 'digging' the grave), an eerie cello/clarinet-led score as well as a virtually absent dialogue and you've got a film that addresses horror on a high level.

It's important to understand this as you watch, although the scenes are consistently textured enough to remind you that you're trapped in a black and white nightmare experience for the entire duration of the picture. The film seems to become more ethereal every minute and by the time the vampiric crone is done away with, the viewer has been through too harrowing an affair to be able to see how a semi-happy ending can make those feelings of disquiet ebb away. It must be said that it took guts to produce this film. 'Vampyr' breaks many conventions, including its [by then] out of fashion clinging to the techniques and dogma of silent cinema when everyone else was rushing forward to flourish in the new glory of sound. But Dreyer's film is also revolutionary against the conventions of film-making in general. Even Weine's 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari' didn't dare to be so progressive as to do away with a storyline (its one is very complex, in fact). What results is a work as bizarre in form as Dali's 'Un Chien Andalou' and yet coherent and accessible through its ability to convey fear in a language higher than the banal or everyday.

Thankfully, the print was transferred extremely well onto videotape by Timeless Video. It's just unfortunate that the DVD has apparently failed so miserably in that department. Old films need to be treated with a great deal more respect by DVD and video companies. 'Metropolis' has suffered just as badly if not more at the hands of insensitive corporate butchery. It's just too bad that there aren't many video companies headed by people who genuinely care about the nature of their bread and butter. The consequences are very sad indeed: these are classic movies, not toys. Put it this way; would you just pick up a 70 year-old pensioner and throw him any old way onto a......... .........maybe that's a bad analogy but you get the idea. Hopefully, so will they.

Atmospheric Horror At Its Best.
Carl Theodor Dreyer's VAMPYR has long been one of my favorite early horror films but until just a few years ago it was impossible to see it in a decent print. The old Image DVD had the best picture quality but was marred by black box subtitles in Gothic script. Still it was the best there was until now. This new Criterion transfer is not only the best so far it will probably be the best from now on as I can't see anyone else wanting to redo it. It's not everyone's idea of a horror film especially today when poetry and atmosphere are not high on the list of priorities for most horror movies (or most movies in general). The film was not a success in 1932 causing the director to abandon filmmaking for 11 years although it quickly developed a cult following.

The scenario inspired by Irish Huguenot writer Sheridan Le Fanu's novella CARMILLA and influenced by F.W. Murnau's NOSFERATU is probably the closest cinematic equivalent of a dream captured on film. It certainly influenced Cocteau's BEAUTY AND THE BEAST which was 14 years later. The film is actually more of a nightmare as it follows a young protagonist through village inns and country estates on the trail of a female vampire who against conventional tradition is old and wizened rather than young and beautiful. Strange things happen. Shadows have a life of their own, the hero watches himself from above as he is buried alive, and it contains one of the strangest death scenes ever filmed which was borrowed from D.W. Griffith's A CORNER IN WHEAT. The entire film was designed to be pale with lots of fog and scenes shot through gauze over the camera lens. It was photographed by Rudolph Mate' who had done Dreyer's previous film THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC. Once seen it cannot be forgotten. Like most vivid dreams you remember it whether you want to or not.

This new transfer of the German version (there were French and English ones as well) looks as good as any restoration I have ever seen and the cleaning up of Wolfgang Zeller's music score, so essential to the overall mood, is nothing less than astonishing. Like most Criterion releases it comes with a plethora of extras including the original shooting script and a complete copy of Le Fanu's story CARMILLA so that you can see how much they varied from it. There is alao a second disc containing deleted scenes, a detailed analysis of the film and a radio interview with the director. Yes it's expensive and no it's not for everyone but if you appreciate cinema as poetry and are seduced by black and white images than this is the movie for you. Be advised though that Dreyer shot this film as a silent and added the music and effects later. There is less than 10 minutes worth of dialogue overall and no one says more than a few words each time they speak.