DVD : Vampyr - Criterion Collection
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Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: Unrated
Binding: DVD
Brand: Image Entertainment
EAN: 0715515030427
Format: Black & White, DVD-Video, Special Edition, Subtitled, NTSC
Label: Criterion
Manufacturer: Criterion
Number Of Items: 2
Publisher: Criterion
Region Code: 1
Release Date: July 22, 2008
Running Time: 75 minutes
Sales Rank: 6876
Studio: Criterion
Theatrical Release Date: 1931
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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 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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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.
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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.
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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. ... Read More
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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 ... Read More
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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 ... Read More
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