SCYTHE KNOWING YOU Vampyr does its darndest to creep you out.

The public domain can be a cruel retirement home for classic films: Any cheap-ass, backstairs label can subject a scratchy and incomplete print to a quick-and-dirty digital transfer. The results are fobbed off on hopeful movie buffs, who may or may not grasp the extent to which the blur on their screens represents a libel on the talents and intent of the filmmakers.

A textbook case of this kind of free-market vandalism is Danish director Carl Dreyer’s stunningly original 1932 horror-fantasy Vampyr, which has been brutally misrepresented in the home-video market since the early days of VHS. Happily, the perfectionist fanatics at the Criterion Collection have intervened with a superb transfer of Dreyer’s twilit tone poem of supernatural dread. The result merits the attention of lovers of German expressionism, admirers of David Lynch and Guy Maddin, devotees of J-horror, and anyone interested in cinematically induced disorientation, madness and fear.

Perhaps the least commercially successful genius ever to work in film, Dreyer (1889–1968) is best known for his 1928 silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, a harrowing re-creation of Saint Joan’s heresy trial closely based on the Vatican’s own transcripts. Both Passion and Vampyr exemplify Dreyer’s trademark fascination with intense, unusual human faces: The cast of Vampyr includes just one professional actor; the others are ordinary people whose striking physiognomies attracted Dreyer’s collector’s eye.

Essentially a silent film graced with a few dozen lines of postdubbed dialogue and a brooding chamber score by Wolfgang Zeller, Vampyr recounts the hallucinatory adventures of Allan Gray (Nicolas de Gunzberg, a minor aristocrat who also financed the picture), a student of the occult whose arcane obsessions have turned him—according to the film’s introductory titles—into “a dreamer for whom the lines between the real and the supernatural became blurred.”

Wandering the French countryside, Gray stumbles into the rustic village of Courtempierre and takes a room. Awakened by a ghostly intruder, Gray ventures into the night to witness a series of dark marvels, including human shadows that take leave of their owners to embark on murderous errands. One such wraith leads Gray to an old house where a young woman named Leone (Sybille Schmitz, the film’s aforementioned professional) is dying of a strange wasting disease. Consulting an ancient book on vampirism, Gray determines that the source of all this mischief is Marguerite Chopin (Henriette Gerard), a glowering, undead crone whose stooped posture and halting step belie a will so hideously powerful that she can compel the living to serve her dark needs.

Alternating between stark, black-and-white images and foggy sfumato compositions that look the way the vampire’s exsanguinated victims must feel, Vampyr is devoid of sensation and gore yet contains two of the creepiest, most uncanny sequences in the entire canon of cinematic horror. The first consists of a stunning, protracted close-up of the vampire’s primary victim, Leone, as she discovers her own burgeoning appetite for human blood; her expression gradually progresses from guilt and revulsion to an obscene carnality that surpasses hunger, lust and any other merely human appetite. The second unforgettable set piece follows the protagonist while, mysteriously paralyzed, he’s placed in a casket by the vampire’s human helpers and then carried, wide-eyed and helpless, on a funeral procession throughout the town and toward his own premature grave.

Held off the market for a year by its distributor, who mistakenly hoped it would be helped rather than hurt by following Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) into the marketplace, Vampyr proved too weird, subtle and nonlinear for audiences of the time. But it has been justifiably revered by generations of filmmakers, critics and scholars.

Filmed on location in crumbling and derelict buildings in the actual French village of Courtempierre, Vampyr is a languidly paced monument of intentional illogic whose force derives from Dreyer’s unrivaled gift for dreamlike imagery and painterly composition. Supplementary materials on the second disc of this two-disc set, while fascinating, fail to make clear exactly how Dreyer and cinematographer Rudolph Maté achieved the film’s bleached, bone-white palette, but we’re just glad that it’s finally available to home viewers.

Vampyr is out now.