Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

lasttimeisaw Dreyer's first sound feature, VAMPYR is an archetypal induction of the blood-hankering undead onto the celluloid screen (but not in its stereotyped appearance), made in a time when the story is foisted to unspool predominantly through title cards with minimal dialogs (sound recording is still a nascent embryo in Europe then), the film's chiefly non-professional cast serves as props rather than fully embodies flesh and occurrences are sometimes painstakingly tardy in their paces. Yet, Dreyer's modus operandi prospers in the somber, eldritch and never-wracking mise-en-scène, dispersed with thanatological symbols (the Grim Reaper in the beginning betokens its mythos), enhanced by a dream-like soft-focus tactility, and most extraordinarily, Dreyer's legerdemain of coaxing shadow and light into his narrative, a coup de maître where a soldier emerges with his seemingly discrete shadow denotes the mystic separation and unification of body and soul. During the thick of its vampyr-myth debunking sequences, our protagonist, the spiffy young man named Allan Gray (played by the French scion and later illustrious magazine designer Nicolas de Gunzburg under the alias of Julian West, who invests the movie with his own money to secure his dabbling into filmdom, which is his only screen credit) is afflicted by an out-of-body experience and witnesses a burying ceremony of his own body, swapping between camera's (subjective/objective, body/soul) viewpoints, the film reaches its most eerie, preternatural actualization of a blurred vision between real and unreal. German actress, Sybille Schmitz, whose real-life tragedy inspires Fassbinder's VERONIKA VOSS (1982), leaves behind an indelible image as the mostly bed-ridden vampyr-bitten girl, by dint of Dreyer's stock-in-trade expressive close-ups. Poetic justice prevails in its simplistic ending (why the girl's father who is in possession with the book doesn't try to extirpate the scourge if he is assumedly equipped with the know-how? A title card explanation would be apposite), but the scene where the evil village doctor impelled to receive his comeuppance potently flags up Dreyer's ingenious flight of fancy, and this time, without being curtailed in the religious solemnity and rigidity, Dreyer's VAMPYR surges with its top-drawer German expressionist idiom and avant-garde techniques that have timely reappraised the cachet of a film maudit.

a_chinn German expressionist vampire picture is not as great as Murnau's "Nosferatu," but it is far more surreal, atmospheric, and creepy. This was director Carl Theodor Dreyer's first talkie and is for the most part a silent film with a few moments of dialogue. Dryer still primarily uses title cards to and visuals to tell his story of a man who discovering a vampire is stalking a small town. The plot is rather thin, but in terms of style, the film is a visual feast. Some of the film surrealness includes unsettling reverse film shots, shadows not corresponding to their corporeal bodies, frightening dream sequences, astral projections, POV shots from a dead man, strange looking actors talking directly to the camera (ALA David Lynch), and many many more. The film's undoing is heavy handed symbolism and the lack of a strong plot, but I'm not sure that was really the focus of the filmmakers. Photographed by Rudolph Maté, this is a must see for fans of German expressionism.

roddekker To be totally honest - I didn't exactly hate 1932's "Vampyr" - But, with that said, it was definitely the sort of vampire movie that actually made the likes of 1972's "Blacula" look almost Oscar-worthy by comparison.This was certainly one of those dismal horror pictures that was just too wacky and nonsensical to be taken seriously. But, due to it being a German production, the viewer was actually expected to sit there awestruck, believing that what they were viewing was, indeed, superior film-making.Unfortunately, there just wasn't enough happening (action, drama, interesting situations) in Vampyr's story to hold this viewer's attention for more than just a few brief moments at a time.Vampyr's weak storyline, literally, has its main character running around (all bug-eyed) in an old, country inn, encountering one forgettable character after another until the whole situation turns into a somewhat blurred (and decidedly silly) nightmare.

kurosawakira Liminal, evasive; a cinematic tone poem of light and shadow; the vertex of the ideas of the so-called German expressionist movement; a memento mori; wildly unpolished; a rumination on the fantastical in cinema and ultimately, even on the sacrifice of Christ (as pointed out by Guillermo del Toro on the commentary track available on the Masters of Cinema DVD) — this is Dreyer at his most experimental, adventurous, hallucinatory, and his best. As its German subtitle suggests, this film is a dreamworld not only free of expectations of conventional narrative, it's adventurously lyrical and purely cinematic in its cogitation.The film exists in the atmosphere. By this I don't mean the banal idea that atmosphere is only a stylistic device separate from the plot but instead that atmosphere is the fabric of cinematic experience and narrative. Had Dreyer done no other films at all, I would rank him among the greatest based on this film alone: the eye is remarkably dimensional, moving spatially and lucidly, shocking considering the medium was only some 30 years old at the time. The editing is disconcerting, and in the words of Tony Rayns, "this is cutting that has no rational explanation. These shots are not commenting on each other, they don't materially implicate each other in any conceptual way at all, they simply add a certain rhythm, a certain tone to the film as a whole." It has a marvelous effect on the viewer: we know the elementary story but the way it presents itself is so delirious we're in constant stupefaction because the film evades our formal expectation. No wonder why the film was badly received during the Berlin premiere in 1932 — it's a free film, not adhering to prevailing norms of form and narrative, springing from a film tradition but swerving, ever swerving from the customary orbit.The most frightening images in the film are the ones that are burnt in the memory, take on a new shape in our minds and feed on our nostalgia; whereas the real vampire in the film is time, it's the images themselves that live off this symbiotic existence.I would love to know whether Mizoguchi saw this film or not — the scene toward the end in the fog at the lake is reproduced in "Ugetsu monogatari" (1953) to a startling effect.