The second disk has a half hour long 1966 documentary called, simply, Carl Th. Dreyer, by Jørgen Roos, in which the director discusses some of his films. It also has a bit longer featurette by film expert Caspar Tybjerg on the things that influenced Vampyr, and a radio broadcast of Dreyer reading an essay on filmmaking. While all of these extras could have been put on one disk, that bloating is compensated for by a booklet with essays in the disk set, and a small book that has the screenplay for the film, as well as Le Fanu’s story Carmilla.
Vampyr is one of the few early sound or silent films (indeed, it almost seems to occupy an artistic place all its own, midway between the two forms of film) that still works as well as it did upon its release because, unlike Dracula or Nosferatu, its horror was never based in the ‘reality’ of the day, rather the never-changing reality of the human psyche. It could be dreamt by someone today, a century ago, or five hundred years from now. Its disjunctions and contradictions are the real seed of its horror, not monsters nor that which goes bump in the darkness.
In a sense, this film gave birth to the sort of ‘adult horror’ that the RKO pictures of Val Lewton exploited a decade later, rather than the more puerile horror that came after the first few classic monster flicks put out by Universal in the 1930s. Dreyer relies on subversions of the ordinary to create horror, not blood and gore, which only produce shock and disgust. Yet, the film also acted as a precursor (by two to three decades) to films that sought psychological depth from characters and tales that did not rely on plot driven action. For these, and reasons too many to enumerate, it is a film that has rightly earned the appellation classic, as well as great film. Perhaps some day Criterion will release a DVD set that, like Orson Welles’ Mr. Arkadin, will incorporate elements from both the German and French versions of the film (as well as rumored Danish scenes and intertitles) to construct a ‘definitive’ version of Vampyr. But, until then, The Criterion Collection version of this film (based upon a 1998 reconstruction of the German version of the film) is the best place to start.
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