[3] The film portrays the heroine as living in a disorienting dream, cajoled by priests, vampires, and men and women alike.

[4] Valerie, a 13-year-old girl, is asleep when a thief steals her earrings; as she tries to investigate, she is startled by a horrific man, the Constable, who wears a mask.

During her neighbor Hedvika's wedding, Valerie sees the Constable watching her in the crowd and her grandmother also seems to recognize him.

Valerie frees Orlík and takes him to her house, avoiding his romantic intentions by blindfolding him, since she now thinks they are siblings.

Disguised as a young woman, Elsa introduces herself as a distant cousin and tells Valerie that her grandmother left suddenly.

He orders her captured and burned at the stake, but Valerie swallows the magic earrings and escapes unharmed.

In a progressively more dreamlike sequence, Valerie reunites with Orlík, revealed to be one of the actors; then Elsa, who does not recall anything that has happened; then her long-lost parents.

However, after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Němec was fired from Barrandov film studio and was not allowed to direct.

In June 2015, the film was released on DVD and Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection, featuring a 4K digital restoration; three early short films by director Jireš, Uncle (1959), Footprints (1960), and The Hall of Lost Steps (1960); interviews from 2006 with Jaroslava Schallerová and Jan Klusák; and an alternate psychedelic folk soundtrack by the Valerie Project.

[10] The film soundtrack, featuring music composed by Luboš Fišer, was released for the first time in December 2006 by Finders Keepers Records.

Available both on CD and LP, the booklet reveals previously unseen archive images, international poster designs, as well as notes by the label founder Andy Votel, a film professor Peter Hames and Trish Keenan from the band Broadcast.

[11] In 2006, members of New Weird America acts Espers, Fern Knight, Fursaxa and other musicians formed The Valerie Project.

[14] The New York Times called the film "Consistently and humorously anticlerical", writing that it "may be the most exotic flower to bloom on the grave of the Prague Spring, but it's one with deep roots in 20th-century Czech culture".

[4] Her screenplay for The Company of Wolves (1984) adapted from Carter's short stories, in collaboration with director Neil Jordan, bears a direct or indirect influence.