Vampyr

Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932, a French-German production (Tobis-Klangfilm), after Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly. Allan Grey (Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, billed as Julian West) arrives in a village where a manor family is under a vampire's hold. Rudolf Maté shot much of it through gauze and against the light, so the image looks half developed. Dreyer recorded sound in three languages and kept the talk thin. Not German Expressionism: a Danish director, French money, a dream logic closer to Joan than to Caligari. The burial reel is the point.