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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: $24.99
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Rating:  33 reviews
Sales Rank: 4023
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
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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 28 more reviews...
 um, weak December 4, 2008
David G. Apetz (NEW YORK, NY USA)
I was recommended by none other than the Wall Street Journal recently that this was the "scariest movie ever". Not. Want scary? Avoid this over-hyped trash with all its subliminal scary faces and rent "The Exorcist". Or, go to youtube and watch the Mumbai attacks for real fear. This movie is not scary! It is stupid. Even "Dracula" wth Bela Lugosi was at least far more interesting. Put a stake through this one's heart.
 Not Nosferatu but still scarey... December 1, 2008
Steve Reina (Troy Michigan)
Just like Japan gave us great Godzilla movies Germany was tops in developing the Dracula lore. First of course was F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu and then there's Vampyr...different but still scarey.
It's a different movie because its more stream of consciousness so there's this dreamy feel (nightmarey feel?) to it as the main character visits a town that turns out to be vampyr central.
Some of the best devices in this are where you see the guy being buried from his perspective and one of the vampyrs dying at the end of the movie (in a scene so gruesome its removal was demanded by a censor).
But even in the so called throw away scenes there's mood development.
So for those interested in a good Dracula story, watch this one along with Nosferatu...but do it during the day so you don't get too scared. True story: after I finished watching this, one of our cats jumped on the counter while I was getting a snack out of the fridge and I almost had a heart attack.
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.
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