Vampyr is a French-German film by Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, released in 1932. An art film, it is short on dialogue and plot, and is admired today for its innovative use of light and shadow. Dreyer achieved some of these effects through using a fine gauze filter in front of the camera lens to make characters and objects appear hazy and indistinct, as though glimpsed in a dream.
Made in 1930, the early days of sound film, it was filmed in three language versions: English, French and German.
It exists in prints of various lengths and arrangements of scenes, and under alternate titles including Vampyr: Der Traum des Allan Grey (The Dream of Allan Grey) It was copyright in the USA in 1934 as The Vampire and exhibited theatrically with the title Not Against the Flesh in 1935, both by General Foreign Sales Corporation. A re-edited, English dubbed version, The Castle of Doom, in the very late 1930s by Arthur Ziehm Inc.. It stars Julian West (a stage name of Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, the film's producer and financial backer), Maurice Schutz, Rena Mandel, Sybille Schmitz,Jan Hieronimko, and Henriette Gérard.
Young traveller Allan Grey arrives in a remote castle and starts seeing weird, inexplicable sights (a man whose shadow has a life of its own, a mysterious scythe-bearing figure tolling a bell, a terrifying dream of his own burial). Things come to a head when one of the daughters of the lord of the castle succumbs to anaemia - or is it something more sinister? Written by Michael Brooke
