Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

Released at the same time as Dracula and Frankenstein,Carl Theodor Dreyer's dreamlike film,"Vampyr" is one of the few times in cinema a director has succeded in capturing a nightmare on the screen.

The film loosely follows Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla",Vampyr follows the story of a wanderer who finds himself in a village surrounded by superstition and the supernatural.

The mood Dreyer creates is one of intense dread and terror,creating a dream like feel to the film utilizing elements such as cloth draped over the lens to create a shadowy haze effect upon the viewer.
Vampyr is a collection of some of the most outstanding and scary supernatural images ever put on film.

For years the film was thought lost,and the Criterion edition is the best that has ever been available.
The subtitles are pefected and the sound and quality are better than ever.
Criterion has also released this DVD in a beautiuful case complete with Fanu's original story and the screenplay of the film.
Commentary and a documentary on Dreyer are also included.

This is a must not just for the serious Horror buff,but any student of cinematic art.

Carl Dreyer is a film-maker's film-maker. His films resonate, and are imbued not just with striking images, mise-en-scene and editing choices, but with a numinous nexus of meaning. I'll watch a Dreyer film, and in the course of the days and weeks to come, a moment or moments from the film: a notion, a face, a dramatic epiphany, (or all these things), will return to haunt me. Fortunately it's not usually a spooky haunting, but an artistic one: the mastery of Dreyer as a cineaste strikes notes which always resound in this viewer's soul.

Oddly enough, in the case of Vampyr it is a spooky haunting. Sort of. As the wonderful supplemental features in this Criterion edition of Vampyr make clear, Dreyer wanted to make a "popular" (or at least commercially successful) film after the financial disaster of The Passion of Joan of Arc. Vampires had made at least a modest bite into the popular culture of the 1920s: Nosferatu, London After Midnight and the stage production of Dracula with Bela Lugosi all exploited the public interest in the undead. Dreyer had his subject.

I won't repeat the story of the production tribulations of Vampyr, where Dreyer worked both as a producer and director. Suffice it to say that Vampyr was also a commercial flop. Dreyer had a nervous breakdown and checked himself into the Joan of Arc Sanatarium to recover. He didn't make another film for about another 10 years. As for the film: the original negative for Vampyr no longer exists. The soundtrack, especially in those early days of European sound-film making is horrible. When I first saw this movie long ago back in college, I was entirely put off. The sound sucked, the acting seemed stilted and the print looked
fuzzy, scratchy and just plain terrible. Worse still, it just wasn't scary.

It's still not scary. But it's eerie, and this eeriness is worth consideration. Criterion has cleaned up the movie's sound, and, to the best extent possible, restored the image. Vampyr was a low-budget production and, though it looks antique to us, it was deliberately set in contemporary times. Dreyer found an abandoned factory for the scene where the vampire calls an abrupt halt to the fleeting shadows dancing across the walls during a witches' ball.
These scenes feature startlingly modern compositions, evocative lighting and a fluidly gliding use of camera by Dreyer's gifted cinematographer Rudolph Mate. The musical score has been cleaned up as well, and contributes much to the disconsolate mood of the piece. I won't analyze the plot of the film, (loosely based on Sheridan Le Fanu's short novel "Carmilla") or the character relationships, whose opacity seems as much a characteristic of Dreyer's approach as of his largely non-professional cast's shortcomings as actors. The reason why Vampyr is worth watching is because this film succeeds astonishingly in conveying the surreal, illogical yet poetically thematic experience of dreams and nightmares. The episodes here don't link at all well in terms of narrative structure. However, the quality of light in one sequence (the boat caught in the fog) visually evokes the cascading flour in the mill sequence with which it's intercut. The parallel cutting suggests there may be a meaning linking the two sequences, but there is no overt narrative or even character link. We're left with the soft slow clouds of fog, the briskly tumbling suffocating clouds of flour, and the knowledge that the characters in these parallel scenes are lost. It's a dreamlike, poetic moment, evoked beautifully by cinematic means. Vampyr is the film poetry of unquiet dreams, and worth a visitation. (The special features of this fine two-disk set include interesting critical analyses, a wonderful short feature about the production of Vampyr, a filmed interview with Dreyer, and--- in a supplemental booklet--- the shooting script and a reprint of Le Fanu's "Carmilla." Film school in a coffin-box without the school! Enough to make any self-respecting movie vampire drool!)