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
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - um, weak
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.
Rating: - Not Nosferatu but still scarey...
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 ... Read More
Rating: - A nightmare captured on film.
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 ... Read More
Rating: - A restored Vampyr
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. ... Read More
Rating: - Great
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 ... Read More
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