- Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
- Writers: Sheridan Le Fanu, Christen Jul
- Stars: Julian West, Maurice Schutz, Rena Mandel
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 15 Minutes
- Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKZqH-62vHI
Synopsis
Allan Gray stops in at a hotel, but it’s closed. Someone finally lets him in and he sees a strange man with a scythe outside. He hears an odd chanting going on outside his room and he follows the sounds. There’s a strange twisted man upstairs, so Allen goes back to his room. It’s a creepy place, and Allen is more than a little freaked out.
In the middle of the night, an older man comes into Allen’s room and approaches the bed. Allan is awake and watches this happen. “She must not die,” insists the man. He takes out a package and writes on it: “To be opened upon my death.” He sets down the package and then leaves the room.
Allan gets out of bed and wonders what malevolent situation he’s gotten himself into. He sees a reflection in the water, but there’s no one there. He sees the shadow of a man shoveling backwards. He sees shadows of soldiers who aren’t really there. Then the shadow meets up with the real man, who had no shadow until this one showed up.
Allan wanders around the buildings and finds an old castle full of creepy rooms with skulls and old books. The town doctor, an old Mark Twain-lookalike, comes down the stairs and asks if Allan can hear that. Allan replies that he can hear the child and the dogs. The doctor explains that there are no children or dogs here. The doctor takes an old man into his office, and we see that he has a bottle of poison on the shelf.
Allan walks on, and comes to a large manor house, where he spots the old man who was in his room earlier. He checks in on a girl and comments that her wounds have almost healed. The girl cries out, “The blood! The blood!” Allen peeps through the window and watches as someone shoots the old man in the back. Everyone in the household gathers around to watch the old man die. The servants ask Allan to stay with them for tonight.
Allan remembers the package the old man gave him earlier and pulls it out of his coat pocket. It’s a book, “The Strange History of Vampyrs.” It explains what vampires are, and why they do the things they do. It explains that ghosts are in their service, and the living can fall under their sway as well. There is a story about a village doctor that became a vampire’s henchman.
The daughter, Gisele, sees Leone outside, and they run to her, but then they find an old woman crouched over her who runs away as they approach. They don’t see her. Leone has been bitten by a Vampyr.
The town doctor arrives, whom we’ve seen before, with the old woman who is probably the vampire. Could this be the same doctor/henchman who was mentioned in the book? He examines Leone, and she’s not doing well. She needs a transfusion, the doctor explains, and Allan volunteers to give his blood. Allan passes out after the transfusion, and the old servant reads his Vampyr book.
Allen dreams of a skeletal hand offering poison. The old servant wakes him up, and they go into find Leona about to drink the real poison. The doctor runs off with Allan in pursuit. Allan, still weak from the transfusion, has a hallucination, or maybe an out-of-body-experience. In this state, he finds a coffin with himself inside. He also sees Giselle locked up and tied to the bed by the doctor.
Allan’s coffin is carried out to the graveyard, near where the real Allan is sleeping. He wakes up, and the vision fades. He awakens to find the old servant nearby, who has finished reading the book. The old man is now digging up an old grave; he thinks he knows who the vampire is. The body is perfectly preserved, and it’s the old woman we saw a couple of times before. They stake her to the ground with a bar of iron, and she instantly turns into a skeleton.
Meanwhile, weird things start happening to the old doctor, who runs for his life. Allan releases Giselle from her prison, and they run across the fields to get away. The doctor hides in a mill and gets locked in. The old servant finds him there and turns on the machines, burying the doctor in several tons of flour.
Allan and Giselle get home safely, and the doctor suffocates under all the flour.
Commentary
The shadow play is a nice effect to show ghosts, but keep in mind that this was released the year after Universal’s Frankenstein and Dracula, and talkies were getting more and more common.
We don’t see too much of the actual Vampyr here; the main villain here is the doctor, but I couldn’t not see Mark Twain anytime he was on screen. Maybe that was a common look for old men in that age, but it made him look decided not intimidating. As far as celebrity resemblances go, Allan looks just like every photo I’ve ever seen of H. P. Lovecraft. Maybe this is secretly Lovecraft’s own true origin story.
I don’t know how well-known vampire mythology was when this came out, although it was after Dracula. So maybe the long reading on vampire lore was necessary, but it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. Still, maybe this explanation was necessary at the time. It really dragged the story down in my opinion.
There were a lot of interesting visuals here, but maybe too many. The story is really slow-paced, past the point of simply being boring at some points. We never actually see the vampire do anything, but there sure are a lot of ghosts roaming around.