... turns on a fear of mortality — or worse, being stuck in some in-between place.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 21, 2024

Vampyr is an experimental film, being less of a straightforward story and more of a display of Dreyer’s filmmaking prowess.

| Jul 9, 2024

A dreamlike tale of the supernatural that exchanges the genre’s usual Gothic murk for bright sunlight, rendering its surreal progression of inexplicable events all the more disorienting.

| Jan 12, 2024

An early sound film shot with a distinctive and evocative silent film aesthetic, Vampyr is a horror movie as tone poem.

| Oct 28, 2023

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s masterful Vampyr (1932) straddles the line between silent and sound pictures, using the visual language of the former to amplify the terrifying atmosphere of the vampire film and bring its horrors into the new age of sound cinema.

| Aug 16, 2022

Dreyer's Vampyr is a strange, unsettling nightmare of a film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 3, 2022

…still a consistently engaging and unnerving film to watch…

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 25, 2022

This eccentric film offers an original, and many would say unique cinematic perspective on the psychology of terror and the elusiveness of clarity, both existential and empirical.

| May 20, 2022

The actual vampire, an elderly woman (Henriette Gérard), is the least interesting part of the film. Which is very European.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 20, 2022

A devilish delight

| May 20, 2022

Vampyr asks: what is it like to be dead? And answers: indistinguishable from being alive. This film is a unique experience.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 17, 2022

The notion of cinema as dreamscape has rarely been realized as exquisitely as in Danish writer-director Carl Theodor Dreyer's moody vampire tale.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 22, 2021

Three-quarters of a century after its making, Vampyr still disturbs and mesmerizes.

| Feb 26, 2021

"Vampyr" is perhaps the most effective and most radical Surrealist movie ever made.

| Oct 30, 2020

Director [Karl] Dreyer's directorial handling lifts this into a class by itself.

| Oct 14, 2020

The scenario was so bad that the author had to excuse it by pretending it was a dream.

| Oct 14, 2020

While it doesn't have the emotional punch of some of his masterworks, it shows a master dabbling in a genre that was outside his comfort zone.

| Aug 5, 2020

a masterfully evocative and unsettling horror film

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 18, 2017

Dreyer's sublimely arcane hallucination

| Oct 26, 2014

Stay with him and you'll be rewarded with one of the more-unusual horror films you'll ever see -- or films of any kind, for that matter.

| Oct 8, 2014