Vampyr
August 2008 Reviewed by: Rad Bennett Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Criterion faced one of its biggest challenges yet in restoring this movie for DVD release. The film was made in France in 1931 in English-, French-, and German-language versions, but none of them has survived without damage. The German version was the best, and its 1998 restoration has served as the basis for the Criterion DVD set. There are a lot of questions as to a correct version. The movie was shot silent and dialogue was looped in later. This method was difficult with the equipment available at the time, and it was also hard to synchronize the different versions with Wolfgang Zeller’s music score. To make matters worse, the German censors objected to two scenes that had to be cut and then totally resynchronized. All of this would surely make you appreciate the ease of digital editing.

Criterion has, as usual in this process, come up with a version that is as good as we are liable to get, unless someone were to discover better source material. Many of the outdoor scenes lack contrast and seem soft, but most of the interior shots are crisp and well contrasted. There are quite a few variations in quality, but these stem from the use of disparate source material, not from anything that Criterion personnel did to it. I was rather surprised that the movie looked as good as it did, having previously known it only from the Blackhawk Films edition released on DVD some years back by Image Entertainment. I was even more surprised that the soundtrack was quite good, the music reasonably full-bodied and clean, with little distortion.

Vampyr is a film in which logic is sacrificed to achieve a mood of terror and confusion. Though it is credited as being based on Carmilla by the Irish author Sheridan le Fanu, it shows little resemblance to the original. There are strange shifts in attention, both from scene to scene and within scenes, that produce a desired unsettled feeling. The main character, Alan Grey (Julian West, who as Count Nicolas de Gunzburg financed the project as long as he could be its star), may be or may not be dreaming the story and alternates between being a passive onlooker and an active protagonist.

The groundbreaking camerawork still looks impressive, and even a casual viewer will note scenes that have now become a necessary part of any vampire movie. Perhaps the most famous scene occurs when Gray dreams he has died and been put in a coffin. The latter has a window so the dead person’s face can be seen. In an eerie scene we are shown what Grey sees, the camera shooting up through the aperture, first on a lighted candle and faces (including the head vampire, in this case an old woman), then on church towers and buildings as the casket is carried to the graveyard. I also found the shots of the grinding gears in the old mill to be classic. These shots have been imitated dozens of times, but I found these originals much scarier.

The disc with the movie on it has a somewhat stuffy but informative commentary by film scholar Tony Rayns. It also has a second version with English text. Much of the movie’s plot is told with written pages, and placing subtitled text against onscreen text is very difficult. I had trouble reading some of it myself. For the English-text version, Criterion has replaced the German-text shots with digitally rendered English texts and no subtitles. The rest of the film, however, is handled the same way as the original, with English subtitles for the spoken dialogue. This proves an ingenious solution to a difficult problem, and I would recommend that you watch that version if it is your first time with the movie.

There is a second disc in the set and that includes a 1966 documentary on Dreyer’s films made by Jřrgen Roos. An older Dreyer appears in much of this film talking about each of his films. Shots of him are interwoven with scenes from the movies themselves. Another visual essay has scholar Casper Tybjerg on the soundtrack discussing various aspects of Vampyr, while still frames and footage from the movie are displayed on the screen. That’s not all. Criterion has also included a handsome 220-page paperback book that includes the complete shooting script for the movie in English translation, and the original novella Carmilla by le Fanu. Talk about thorough!

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