Vampyr

An early sound film shot with a distinctive and evocative silent film aesthetic, Carl Th. Dreyer's "Vampyr" is a horror movie as tone poem -- an eerie, ethereal fever dream of a traveler, Allan Grey (Julian West), whose "wanderings" bring him to a cursed village. A villager with a scythe rings a bell on a misty lake as he arrives, already conjuring a feeling of death and portents of supernatural things to come. Grey discovers shadows without bodies and a tormented young woman with vague wounds treated by an unnerving doctor who only visits at night, and embarks on a spirit journey to watch his own funeral (from both within and without his casket simultaneously). West (the pseudonym of Baron Nicholas de Gunzberg, who also financed the film) is a blank, inexpressive actor, more convincing as a creepy corpse than a living hero, but his languid expression makes his passive protagonist just another part of the dreamy world. The ethereal imagery is exaggerated by the worn and faded quality of the print. None of the original materials exist, and this German language restoration, reconstructed from German, French and English prints, is the best it has ever looked, but it still has the scuffed texture of an ancient resurrected text. Criterion offers an alternate English language version featuring excellent recreations of the look and feel of the German intertitles and book pages (the dialogue is in German in both versions) in this new two-disc special edition.

The film is accompanied by optional commentary by film scholar Tony Rayns, who discusses the film in detail -- from Dreyer's style to production details to observations and interpretations -- with intelligence. He has an engaging manner even while in the scholarly mode. The second disc features Jörgen Roos' half-hour career retrospective "Carl Th. Dreyer" from 1966 (which features interviews with Dreyer); a 36-minute visual essay on Dreyer's influences by scholar Casper Tybjerg; an audio-only recording of a 1958 radio broadcast of Dreyer reading an essay about filmmaking; and a booklet with new essays, notes on the restoration, and a print interview with Baron Nicholas de Gunzberg. The box set also features a paperback volume featuring the screenplay and the Sheridan Le Fanu short story that inspired it.