Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35813 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