Vampyr (Special Edition) DVD

Disc One:

• The original German version in a new high-definition digital transfer from the 1998 restoration by Martin Koerber and the Cinteca Di Bologna
• Newly created alternate version with English text
• Audio commentary featuring film scholar Tony Rayns
• New and improved English subtitle translation

Disc Two:

• Carl Th. Dreyer (1966), a documentary by Jørgen Roos chronicling Dreyer's career
• Visual essay by scholer Casper Tybjerg on Dreyer's influences in creating Vampyr
• Radio broadcast from 1958 of Dreyer reading an essay about filmmakine
• A Booklet featuring new essays by critics Mark Le Fanu and Kim Newman, Koerber on the restoration, and a 1964 interview with producer and star Nicolas De Gunzburg, as well as a book featuring Dreyer abd Christen Jul's original screenplay and Sheridan La Fanu's 1872 story "Carmilla," a source for the film

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Julian West, Maurice Schutz, Jan Hieronimko, Sybille Schmitz, Rena Mandel, Henriette Gerard

With Vampyr, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer's brilliance at achieving mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, profoundly unsettling imagery (as in The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath) was for once applied to the horror genre. Yet the result-concerning an occult student assailed by various supernatural haunts and local evildoers at an inn outside Paris-is nearly unclassifiable, a host of stunning camera and editing tricks and densely layered sounds creating a mood of dreamlike terror. With its roiling fogs, ominous scythes, and foreboding echoes, Vampyr is one of cinema's great nightmares.