Director: Carl Dreyer
Studio: Danish Film Institute/The Criterion Collection 437 (2 DVDs + screenplay)
Video: 1.19:1 letterboxed B&W
Audio: German Dolby mono
Extras: Printed screenplay, “Camilla” by Le Fanu, Commentary by film scholar Tony Rayns, new English subtitles; On Disc 2: 1966 documentary on Carl Dreyer by Jorgen Roos, Visual essay by scholar Casper Tybjerg on Dreyer’s influences in creating Vampyr, 1958 radio broadcast of Dreyer reading from his essay on filmmaking, Printed 1964 interview with producer and star Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg plus three other articles about Vampyr and one on the transfer to DVD
Length: 73 minutes (feature)
Rating: ****
This is one of the classic early horror films, from Danish filmmaker Dreyer, who also did The Passion of Joan of Arc. While influenced by the German Expressionists, surrealism, Le Fanu’s book Camille, and various other vampire stories including Bram Stoker’s, Vampyr is an artistic and conceptual achievement of singular distinction. He shot it outside of studio involvement, financed by a wealthy French nobleman who acted the main role of a visitor to an inn where inexplicable things are going on. Dreyer began shooting Vampyr as a silent film but it was realized that by 1932 sound was the thing and some brief dialog was added to the film, plus an interesting music score.
The film imparts a dreamlike, nightmarish feeling with settings often full of fog, the use of an abandoned building and factory, very creative camera work and layered sound effects and music. Many of the shots mimic various paintings, and a repeated disturbing image is that of a farmer with a very large scythe. Both the unsettling images and the sound come across with greatly enhanced clarity in Criterion’s transfer compared to previous prints of the film I have seen. Some of the images are left completely unexplained – such as the disfigured man behind a door of the inn, or the little shadow creatures which scurry along as the young man is investigating the occurrences. The plot line differs from other vampire stories in the vampire being an old woman, and her henchman at the end is killed not in a dark scene but one where all is brilliant white. There is a peg-legged man serving the vampire whose shadow has a separate life from himself, and the hero of the story falls asleep on a bench while his soul gets up and investigates things on its own. This has to be one of the most interesting dreamlike pieces of cinema ever made.
– John Sunier
