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Vampyr - Criterion Collection | 
 enlarge | Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Actors: N. Babanini, Albert Bras, Baron Nicolas De Gunzberg, Henriette Gerard, Jan Hieronimko
Studio: Criterion
Category: DVD
List Price: $39.95
Buy New: $25.26
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New (41) Used (8) from $25.26
Rating:  31 reviews
Sales Rank: 3838
Format: Black & White, Dvd-video, Special Edition, Subtitled, Ntsc
Languages: German (Original Language), English (Subtitled)
Rating: Unrated
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number Of Discs: 2
Running Time: 75 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.7 x 1.7
MPN: IMEDCC1757D
UPC: 715515030427
EAN: 0715515030427
ASIN: B00180R06I
Theatrical Release Date: 1931
Release Date: July 22, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Five Star Seller!!! New, factory sealed US Region 1 DVD. Item is 100% guaranteed not to be a bootleg or import. Item is shipped directly from our warehouse. Easy exchange if item defective or damaged in shipped.
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Product Description
Studio: Image Entertainment Release Date: 07/22/2008 Run time: 75 minutes Rating: Nr
Amazon.com
In this chilling, atmospheric German film from 1932, 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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 26 more reviews...
 A nightmare captured on film. November 20, 2008
James Simpson (USA)
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.
A restored Vampyr September 30, 2008
Swifty (Culver City, CA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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!)
Great September 30, 2008
Cosmoetica (New York, USA)
The Criterion Collection will shortly be releasing a two disk version of the 1932 black and white classic horror film by Carl Theodor Dreyer, Vampyr. I first watched this film about twenty years ago, on a VHS release, and, unlike many others, immediately recognized it as a supernal piece of cinema. Then, I did not have the critical knowledge to discern why, but I do now, and will explicate. This film was the first sound film released by the Danish filmmaker, and perhaps the last film in the vein of silent German Expressionism. That stated, it is a very different form of vampire film from the then contemporaneous Dracula, made by Tod Browning, for Universal Studios in America, as well the earlier explicitly Expressionistic take on the film, 1922's Nosferatu, by F.W. Murnau. While the two other horror films have risen to the stature of iconographic symbols of evil and fear (as well a bit of hokum, with the passing of decades), Vampyr has not; although it still retains a creepiness that, to modern eyes, makes it a more unsettling experience than the two other films, great as they are.
The primary reason for this has not to do with blood and gore, nor even with mood, mis-en-scene, or the like, but with the fact that Dreyer and cinematographer Rudolph Maté do not merely make the viewer observe what is going on, but also feel it, by using narrative and filmic devices that elicit empathy from the viewer, by emotional and intellectual means. As example, characters are frequently entering the frame from odd angles- sometimes they seemingly walk around the back of the camera; other times the camera pans to a place, to make the viewer believe a character will enter, only to have the character enter the frame from where the camera just left. Also, there are dolly shots (and reverse ones) where the point of view morphs from the presumably subjective to the demonstrably objective, as the character whose point of view we presume we are seeing then includes said character. At other times, two differing points of view are used. Then there are the more manifest devices- the use of shadows that seem detachable from their material casters, or those that seem to have an ability to act upon the material (a shadow that seemingly murders a man), or images that have no logical place in the narrative, yet whose appearance enhances it greatly in a Keatsian Negatively Capable way (a shadow that seems to not be digging a grave, but filling one up, as dirt seems to flow into its shovel at its apex, or odd characters who grimace and stare at the camera, but whose presence and/or import to the tale are never explained). The film's hero, too, is often seen glaring through things- windows, openings, holes- to see the world framed in a way different from reality. Yet, we also see him framed obversely through the frames; thus we empathize with him, even as we realize the limits he may not, just as the viewer is limited by what is in the frame. Also, some of the later outdoor scenes were filmed through filters which give the film a blanched quality that Dreyer strove for- to give a more shroudy appearance (rather than merely foggy), yet which lends the film a dreamy quality that visually is unmatched, even by many later film advances in obfuscation via special effects. Dreyer famously remarked that he was more interested in mood than story for this film, yet, his transcendent use of mood becomes the story, even as we are drawn to it not by its moodiness, but the engendered psychological empathy that Dreyer's visuals impose on us. Dreyer's thesis was this: `Imagine we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind the door. In an instant, the room we are sitting in is completely altered: everything in it has taken on another level; the light, the atmosphere have changed, though they are physically the same. This is because we have changed....This is the effect I want to get.' And he succeeds. In another scene, a room darkens as a door opens, because the source of light is blocked. Little touches like this, which play against the infused logic of reality, help Dreyer displace the expected into the unexpected, where real fear dwells; and this is only accentuated by the fact that the film was one of the first to be shot entirely on real world locations, not in a studio.... Vampyr is one of the few early sound or silent films (indeed, it almost seems to occupy an artistic place all its own, midway between the two forms of film) that still works as well as it did upon its release because, unlike Dracula or Nosferatu, its horror was never based in the `reality' of the day, rather the never-changing reality of the human psyche. It could be dreamt by someone today, a century ago, or five hundred years from now. Its disjunctions and contradictions are the real seed of its horror, not monsters nor that which goes bump in the darkness. In a sense, this film gave birth to the sort of `adult horror' that the RKO pictures of Val Lewton exploited a decade later, rather than the more puerile horror that came after the first few classic monster flicks put out by Universal in the 1930s. Dreyer relies on subversions of the ordinary to create horror, not blood and gore, which only produce shock and disgust. Yet, the film also acted as a precursor (by two to three decades) to films that sought psychological depth from characters and tales that did not rely on plot driven action. For these, and reasons too many to enumerate, it is a film that has rightly earned the appellation classic, as well as great film. Perhaps, some day, Criterion will release a DVD set that, like Orson Welles' Mr. Arkadin, will incorporate elements from both the German and French versions of the film (as well as rumored Danish scenes and intertitles) to construct a `Definitive' version of Vampyr. But, until then, The Criterion Collection version of this film (based upon a 1998 reconstruction of the German version of the film) is the best place to start.
A Dream of Death Captured on Film September 30, 2008
Richard Masloski (New Windsor, New York USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Criterion has done a magnificent job in the production of this handsome, hefty, lovely-to-hold DVD package literally packed with all-sorts-of goodies. You get two DVDs in a gothic three-fold holder and the screenplay and short story that influenced the film in a neat little volume. The DVDs and their slipcase and the book are neatly contained in a further casing that is chillingly evocative in its design. This is the perfect gift for the imminent Halloween - and watching this film is a perfect way to kick off the start of October.
This movie was released in 1932, shot a few years prior. There are, of course, no CGI effects (thank God!). There are no grotesque makeups and over-the-top transformations as in many recent vampire/horror films. There aren't gallons - or even cupfulls of blood - and yet this film...this film is perhaps the most uncanny, weirdest, chilling "horror" movie ever made. Not because it is shock scarey, no, but because it is silently scarey. It is shadows-in-sunshine scarey. It is downright creepy! One of the best examples of what I'm talking about is an all-of-twenty second or so scene of ghost shadows dancing on a wall to weird music and a weird shadowy band that - in twenty-some seconds mind you - does more to haunt a man's soul than the entire "The Shining" by Kubrick with its own lavish many-peopled ghost party in the Gold Room (which I love!) or the Dance of the Dead in the classic "Carnival of Souls" (which I love also). It is truly amazing that with no CGI or big budget or latex makeup applications to simulate monsters and ghouls, this movie - and this one scene in particular - can unnerve and haunt and stay with you, long after you've watched the film's economical 73 minutes. What did the great director Dreyer have that makes this film so powerful? A rich and poetic Imagination! Visual and aesthetic Brilliance! Knowing how to edit in order to unnerve the viewer. And there is so much packed into these hallucinatory 73 minutes: the potent image early on of the bellringer with the scythe, the river before him, his back to us...and a face we can only imagine and DO NOT want to see! A disembodied shadow seating itself beside it's owner. Another shadow shovelling in reverse motion that is absolutely inexplicable and therefore bone-chilling. A woman's face slowly becoming overtaken by evil that is scarier than anything I've seen done with makeup or special effects: her rolled up eyes and malevolent smile are precursor's to the first shot of Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance in the aforementioned "The Shining" when we first know he is going mad. The crazy doctor in the ground-breaking film is also a dead-on precursor of Jack MacGowran's eccentric Professor Ambrosius in Polanski's "The Fearless Vampire Killers" (which I also love). The vampire in the film is totally against type - and thereby more fearful than those with dripping fangs and blood-shot eyes in later-day films. The much-commented upon sequence wherein our hero is being buried alive is likewise alone worth the price of admission. I could go on and on with the influences this film initiated in horror films down the years, but it is best to check it out for yourself. It puts Tod Browning's "Dracula" to shame, actually, despite the great Bela Lugosi (whom I love). No, this is not even so much a film as a dream/nightmare caught on film. It is perhaps as close to the world of the Dead as we, the viewers, might dare get...without crossing over ourselves! Yet! Strange, surreal, sublime: it must be seen to be believed.
 This I considered a rip off August 31, 2008
Emory T. Weldon (Jacksonville Florida USA)
0 out of 24 found this review helpful
This movie was terrible and I didn't think that it lived up to the hype advertised. It was so bad I returned it and requested my money back. Picture was awful, sound was terrible and definitely not worth the money I spent.
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