4 June 2008

The first sound-film by one of the greatest of all filmmakers, Vampyr offers a sensual immediacy that few, if any, works of cinema can claim to match. Legendary director Carl Theodor Dreyer leads the viewer, as though guided in a trance, through a realm akin to a waking-dream, a zone positioned somewhere between reality and the supernatural.

Traveller Allan Gray (arrestingly depicted by Julian West, aka the secretive real-life Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg) arrives at a countryside inn seemingly beckoned by haunted forces. His growing acquaintance with the family who reside there soon opens up a network of uncanny associations between the dead and the living, of ghostly lore and demonology, which pull Gray ever deeper into an unsettling, and upsetting, mystery. At its core: troubled Gisèle, chaste daughter and sexual incarnation, portrayed by the great, cursed Sybille Schmitz (Diary of a Lost Girl, and inspiration for Fassbinder's Veronika Voss.) Before the candles of Vampyr exhaust themselves, Allan Gray and the viewer alike come eye-to-eye with Fate — in the face of dear dying Sybille, in the blasphemed bodies of horrific bat-men, in the charged and mortal act of asphyxiation – eye-to-eye, then, with Death – the supreme vampire.

Vampyr has already been announced for a July release as part of the Criterion Collection with a fair sprinkling of extra features, but now Masters of Cinema have announced a UK DVD release of the film for August that will include all of the Criterion extras and then some:

• New, high-definition transfer of the Martin Koerber / Cineteca di Bologna film restoration in its original aspect ratio;
• New and improved English subtitle translation;
• Full-length audio commentary featuring film scholar Tony Rayns;
• Full-length audio commentary featuring Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro talking about one of his favourite films;
• Two deleted scenes, removed by the German censor in 1932;
• Carl Th. Dreyer (1966) – a documentary by Jörgen Roos;
• Visual essay by scholar Casper Tybjerg on Dreyer's Vampyr influences;
• The Baron – a short MoC documentary about Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg;
• Inspiration for the film – Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla – as an on-disc pdf.

Vampyr will be released on UK DVD by Eureka as part of the Masters of Cinema series on 25th August 2008 at the RRP of £19.99.