Vampyr – Masters of Cinema Edition – review

Many of you may have already read my review of the film Vampyr – the Strange Adventure of Allan Gray. My review of the film, as a piece of cinema, remains the same. The film, which Hitchcock suggested was “the only film worth watching… twice” remains at 9 out of 10. This review is about the Masters of Cinema edition and is a review of the edition itself. Many thanks to Ian who bought me this edition for Christmas.

The film itself is much more of a joy to watch, it has been restored in its original aspect ratio (1.19:1) and is a “new, high-definition transfer” that is not to suggest that the film is perfect but it is as good as you are going to get. More important is the work done on the sound. It is in the German – rather than a mismatch of languages from different versions – and has a choice of restored or unrestored sound. The restored sound still has some hiss issues but you can now hear the film properly.

On to the abundance of special features. The film has an 80 page booklet, which is a joy and gives the box the weight impression of a half-brick. It includes rare production stills, location photography, posters, the 1932 Danish film programme and writings by Tom Milne, Jean and Dale Drum and Martin Koerber. The disc itself contains a pdf of Carmilla.

There are two deleted scenes, without sound, that were cut due to the censors. The scene of the staking of the vampire (Henriette Gérard) is astounding, much longer and visceral, with the intimated pounding of the stake into the corpse and through into the ground, and Allan Grey (Julian West) taking on a much more proactive role. I should note that having looked through the extras I have concluded that we should settle on Allan as the name of the protagonist rather than David – cf. my earlier review of the film.

There is a documentary by Jørgen Roos on Director Carl Th. Dreyer, a visual essay by Casper Tybjerg on Dreyer’s Vampyr influences and a documentary looking at Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg – the true identity of actor Julian West, who received the lead role due to his financing of the film.

There are two audio commentaries. One by Tony Rayns and the second by Guillermo del Toro. Of course, del Toro is no stranger to the vampire genre – having directed both Cronos and Blade 2 as well as being due to write a series of vampire novels. More importantly he is, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest living directors. His contribution is fascinating as he looks at the film and sees it very much as a memento mori. He also points out the physical similarity between Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg and H P Lovecraft, as an aside.

All in all this is a fine set for a fine film. There is a criterion edition (US), which in itself seems like it might be fine also – having read a list of its contents – however the commentary by Rayns is on both editions but only the Masters of Cinema edition has the Del Toro commentary. Score for this as a DVD edition, 10 out of 10.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US (criterion collection)

On DVD @ Amazon UK (Masters of Cinema)