Directed by Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer in 1932 and his first sound picture, Vampyr may have been meant as a fairly commercial endeavor but, maybe not so surprisingly in hindsight, it failed to connect with audiences of its day. Decades later, however, it's easy to appreciate just how impressive a film it really is.

Very loosely based on the short story Carmilla written by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and published in his In A Glass Darkly collection, the story introduces us to a young man named Allan Grey (Julian West). He's a man with a deep interest in vampires and the supernatural and he's also a bit of a wanderer. When we first meet him, he's arrived at an inn in the town of Courtempierre. Oddly enough, a strange looking old man (Maurice Schutz) comes into his room, puts a package on the table, and ushers him a stern, macabre warning about how he must ‘not let her die.' After the man vanishes, Gray deduces that someone is in need of help and, package in hand, he heads out into the night and winds up being lured by shadows to a creepy old house. This is the home of the town's eccentric doctor (Jan Hieronimko). Here the doctor is given a bottle of poison by an old woman.

Later, Grey spies the old man from the inn as he's shot dead by a shadow creature. Grey heads to the old man's house where he meets Gisèle (Rena Mandel) and Léone (Sybille Schmitz), his two daughters, and their servants. It's then that Grey decides to open the package that the man gave him. When he does, he finds an ancient tome that details the history of vampires. This comes in handy when it turns out that Léone has been bitten. When the doctor is asked to help, he instead offers her the bottle of poison he was given and makes off with Gisèle. It turns out that all of this ties into Marguerite Chopin, the resident vampire of Courtempierre, long dead, or so we're led to believe…

One of many interesting things about this film is how the vampire of the film is portrayed. While there are exceptions (Nosferatu being the most obvious example), vampires are typically portrayed in films as having no shortage of sex appeal. Be they male or female, vampires are usually able to entice their victims, their feeding habits having more in common with whatever rite of seduction you'd care to mention than anything else. Not so with this film. Here our antagonist looks more like a decrepit old witch than she does a succubus from a Jean Rollin or Jess Franco movie. Dreyer plays this up well. Vampires in this world are repulsive things, they're sick and they spread their sickness like a plague. The visuals further enhance this in a lot of interesting ways: long, shadowy figures stalk the streets, a man with a scythe looking not at all unlike the grim reaper skulks about, graves are dug, horrifying faces appear… it's all very grim, quite nightmarish and wonderfully macabre. This sets the mood in interesting ways, allowing Dreyer to take the film into some serious flirtations with surrealism at times.

At just over seventy minutes in length the picture never overstays its welcome. While this is a ‘sound film' there isn't a whole lot of dialogue here, more than not the exposition that drives the narrative comes in the form of lengthy intertitles, but it works. We never have any trouble following the narrative, a narrative that, as many have noted before, leaves a lot open to the individual viewer to interpret. Some have made the case that the film is autobiographical to an extent, serving as a way for the director to come to terms with his own past as an adopted child and issues he had with those who raised him. Regardless, the film remains a striking work of dark, an atypical vampire film that seems just as strikingly strange and unique today as it must have when it first played theaters during its initial release.

Video:
Vampyr debuts on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection in a "high definition digital transfer of the original German version of the film, from the 1998 restoration by Martin Koerber and the Cineteca di Bologna" framed at 1.19.1. So this means that the transfer on this disc is taken from the same restoration that was used for Criterion's DVD release a few years ago, but clearly the added resolution that Blu-ray offers factors in here. For a film that's well over eighty years old, the transfer here is solid. Parts of the movie were clearly shot with gauze or some sort of filter overtop and those shots understandably look significantly softer than others but for the most part the detail levels evident in the picture are more than satisfying. Some print damage is noticeable throughout but while it might be constant, it's not major and never particularly distracting. Black levels look good, contrast is fine and there's a nice grey scale to the black and white image. The transfer shows no evidence of digital manipulation in the form of noise reduction or edge enhancement and the disc is free of compression artifacts. This is a very impressive picture, all things considered.