John Carpenter has said that what attracted him to Vampires wasn’t the horror — it was the western. The New Mexico desert, the mercenary crew, the lone hunter tracking a monster across open land. He saw The Wild Bunch more than Dracula in John Steakley‘s 1990 novel, Vampire$, and that instinct — to treat the vampire as a creature of the American frontier rather than a gothic European castle — is exactly what makes Vampires feel like nothing else in Carpenter’s filmography. Imprint Films has now released it in a 4K UHD limited edition hardcase, and it looks and sounds excellent. The conversation about what’s included — and what isn’t — is slightly more complicated.

Jack Crow (James Woods, Cat’s Eye) leads a Vatican-sponsored vampire hunting outfit with the energy of a man who’d be difficult to be around at a dinner party but absolutely indispensable in a firefight. When master vampire Jan Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith) wipes out his entire crew at a motel celebration and escapes with a bitten prostitute named Katrina (Sheryl Lee), Crow has to rebuild fast and track Valek before he completes an ancient ritual that would let vampires walk in daylight. The stakes, so to speak, are literal.

Always known to be a complicated actor (and never more so than in recent years), Woods is admittedly a revelation in this film. Carpenter had considered Kurt Russell, Clint Eastwood, and Al Pacino before settling on Woods, and in retrospect there was never any other choice. He brings a savagery to Crow that mirrors Valek’s. Carpenter knew what he was doing when he cast someone the audience half-suspects could actually bite someone’s leg off. Woods improvised freely within a framework Carpenter had laid down (one scripted take, one improv take per scene), and many of the best moments in the film came from those improvisations. Griffith, meanwhile, makes Valek genuinely menacing and strangely elegant, something you believe is six hundred years old.

The Imprint 4K is a two-disc lenticular hardcase with a slipcover reproducing the original theatrical poster. The 4K restoration in Dolby Vision is excellent — Gary Kibbe‘s heavy filtration on the New Mexico desert photography registers with real depth and richness; nighttime sequences have a black-level firmness that previous releases couldn’t match. The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 opens up the sound stage considerably, with Carpenter’s own guitar-driven score — performed by his band The Texas Toad Lickers — filling the surrounds in a way that genuinely transforms the viewing experience.

Here is where I have to be straight with you, though: if you already own the Shout Factory 4K, this set doesn’t replace it for extras. Disappointingly, the Imprint package couldn’t secure the legacy featurettes, which means the extended interviews with Woods, Griffith, Tim Guinee, and special effects artist Greg Nicotero are absent. What you get are two new additions — a Troy Howarth audio commentary and “Potshots and Padres,” a video essay by Andy Marshall-Roberts on the film’s western-horror theology — along with the Carpenter archival commentary and a vintage making-of featurette. Howarth’s track is thorough and the Marshall-Roberts essay is a worthy addition, but if those interviews matter to you, hold onto the Shout disc.

For John Wick fans who know that Chad Stahelski — playing Male Master #4 — would go on to direct the franchise, there’s a nice through-line here about genre stuntwork and where it leads. This is, trivia aside, a film that deserves its reputation: one of the most entertainingly aggressive horror-westerns ever made, dressed up in a delicious lenticular hardcase that makes it look tremendous on a shelf. The Imprint edition is beautiful packaging around a strong transfer. For those coming to it fresh, it’s an excellent way to own it.