Popular reviews

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  Review by brendan o'hare ★★★★ 1

  Title is spelled wrong

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  Review by Branson Reese 1

  Might be a translation thing but I thought it was really funny that as a result of years of malaise Allan “became a dreamer” like it was some sort of grim consequence.

  Beautiful images. A little stately in the pacing department for my taste but babies born the week this movie came out were afraid of rock music by the time I was born so I can look the other way on that. Almost feels like a silent film so moments like the sister lying in bed and quietly saying that she’s afraid to die really hit.

  The sister turning her head and smiling as the vampire disease spread into her was as scary as anything in The VVitch. Probably…

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  Review by kat🕷 1

  An aesthetic movie that particularly impresses with its playfulness with light and shadow. With his unusual narrative style, Dreyer skillfully blurs the line between reality and fantasy.

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  Review by Lara Pop ★★★★½ 32

  #Dreyer-athon with Jack

  Spiritual fulfillment written in a book of macabre lore. Dreyer's Vampyr sees the director's return to spirituality after his religiously profound opus The Passion of Joan of Arc – but this time, wrapping the road to heaven in an even denser gauze of narrative mist and telling his story through mystic visuals.

  Vampyr is a masterpiece because it works on two separate layers. It can be viewed as a visual mood piece, a haunting story of vampires transfused with a ghastly tone and groundbreaking technicality. Dreyer rotates his camera on its horizontal axis and casts grotesque shadows against whitewashed walls in a frenzy of mirage-like motion, making us ponder the meaning of illusion. He puts his camera…

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  Review by Evan T ★★★★★ 5

  There’ll never be anything as influential as Murnau’s Nosferatu, and I’m the first to sing the praises of Herzog’s revisionist remake, but there’s absolutely no question it’s Vampyr that takes the cake as my all-time favourite vampire film. In 1932, Dreyer was moving the camera with all the fluidity of Fellini, Ophüls and Scorsese combined, German-expressionist set designs and dizzying flash-photography grounding Vampyr as one of the most visually stimulating horror films to date. I can understand criticism aimed at the conflicted nature of the film as a whole, caption-cards and questionable sound editing revealing its internal struggle between silent film and sound. To my mind, you can hardly blame the film as much as the era for this, the…

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 2

  "Preoccupied with superstitions of centuries past, he became a dreamer for whom the line between real and supernatural became blurred..."

  This is the most radical of Dreyer's works, and possibly the most formally radical film of any of the 'classical' directors. Not so much abstract as it is a recasting of narrative forms and spacial dissonances, CTD uses generic tropes - a door which opens by itself, a shadow which lives beyond the person casting it - as an opportunity to take 'normal' images and make them incomprehensible - where the simple image of a man walking down a gravel path can become distorted by the simple act of viewing it. Yet at the same time - this is a…

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  Review by Jonathan White ★★★★ 12

  Part of the 30 Days in May challenge, 2014 edition

  Germany

  Expectations for Vampyr were sky-high, as I had recently watched, and completely fell head over heels for, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, his previous film. I thought my wife and I were going to watch Ordet next, but, the brevity of Vampyr fit in well with our 30 countries ‘watch before work’ methodology.

  I’ll have to acknowledge right off the top that the visuals are as arresting as Joan. While the restorers didn’t have the same advantage of a pristine print to work from, you can see the care taken in attention to contrast and sharpness. In fact, in Vampyr, Dreyer is even cleverer, as he has…

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  Review by Justin Peterson ★★★ 4

  Criterion Collection Spine #437
  (Foreign language film)
  (Halloween Movie Fest 2020)

  After watching 'Haxan', 'The Phantom Carriage', and now Vampyr ... I must say that other than a few memorable eerie moments I have a hard time getting into these slow atmospheric gothic horror movies.

  "I know. I'm lost. I'm damned."

  I started out enjoying this vampire story more than the others I mentioned, but as the story went along the dreamlike quality of the narrative made it difficult to follow. Which became frustrating since it felt like I had missed something. But I would likely enjoy Vampyr more on a rewatch, now that I know what to expect from it.

  "Come quickly! Something terrible is happening! Come quickly!"

  (Quick…

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  Review by Robert Beksinski ★★★★

  This early sound horror film from master director Carl Theodor Dreyer is much like cinema itself, a world of light and shadows. One that manipulates and utilizes atmosphere and visuals to toy with its viewers; to make indistinguishable from the reality we are present, and the fantasy we imagine.

  Vampyr is one of the first effective horror films ever made, even more so than the famous Murnau take on the vampire story in Nosferatu from 1922. Most of the reasoning behind that may be due to technological advances within the span of those ten years, which provided many of the fundamental flaws that Nosferatu suffered from. Vampyr being made in the early era of sound cinema, took on more of…

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  Review by Ben Hibburd ★★★ 9

  As a piece of film history, and for its technical achievements, "Vampyr" is compulsory viewing. However, as an actual piece of narrative filmmaking it left a lot to be desired. There are some nice atmospheric shots and there's a plethora of Gothic imagery that engaged my visual interest, but the story itself was really dull and boring. I'm glad I got around to watching this but I don't think I'll be re-watching it anytime soon!

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★★ 4

  ***One of the best 150 films I have ever seen.***

  A milestone in cinema. Dreyer juxtaposes a dense atmosphere with lights, shadows and Gothic visuals having a feast in a ball of horror. Vampyr still ranks as one of the greatest (and scariest) movies of all times, but it initially demands the viewer to let himself/herself to be fully submerged into its supernatural world. With an impeccable vision of the earthly, the otherworldly, the unknown and the macabre, and with an almost complete lack of dialogue, we venture into a world of the unexpected, as unprecedented cinematic transitions between life and death are presented with groundbreaking images filmed in black and white, exactly the colors in moving images that hide…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½

  Dreyer acts like the arrival of sound is only a detail. Some of the finest camera work and moody images around. True experimental cinema that happens to have some recognizable narrative beats, but seems concerned with inhabit a space and a feeling above all
  else.