Vampyr
Vampyr
•
1h 13m
Directed by Carl Th. Dreyer • 1932 • France, West Germany
Starring Julian West, Maurice Schutz, Rena Mandel
With VAMPYR, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer channeled his genius for creating mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, unsettling imagery into the horror genre. The result—a chilling film about a student of the occult who encounters supernatural haunts and local evildoers in a village outside of Paris—is nearly unclassifiable. A host of stunning camera and editing tricks and densely layered sounds create a mood of dreamlike terror. With its roiling fogs, ominous scythes, and foreboding echoes, VAMPYR is one of cinema’s great nightmares.
Up Next in Vampyr
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VAMPYR Commentary
Recorded in 2008, this commentary features film scholar Tony Rayns.
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VAMPYR English-Text Version
Director Carl Dreyer relied heavily on text that fills the frame in VAMPYR, and subtitles can be hard to see when overlaid on that text. Thus, Criterion, taking care to hew as closely to the look of the original as possible, prepared a version of the film in which the on-screen text has been digi...
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VAMPYR: The Genre Film as Experimenta...
Observations on Film Art No. 34
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s haunting 1932 masterpiece VAMPYR has long occupied a singular place in film history, resting somewhere at the intersection of horror, avant-garde cinema, and waking nightmare. In this episode of Observations on Film Art, Professor David Bordw...
