Its star was a wealthy baron who financed the production in exchange for the lead role.

In VAMPYR (1932), baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, acting under the pseudonym Julian West, plays a student of the occult drawn into the affairs of a local lord, desperate to protect his two daughters. One of them, Léone, has already been bitten by something that feeds on the living. In this village, shadows detach themselves from their owners and walk on alone, Gray’s own spirit slips out of his body, and no explanations are offered.

Director Carl Theodor Dreyer drew loosely from stories in Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly, working with cinematographer Rudolph Maté to give the film a pale, hazy look in which faces blur and rooms seem to breathe. In one famous sequence, a coffin is filmed from the perspective of the man lying inside it. Sound was still new to film in 1932, and Dreyer used it sparingly, letting long stretches of near-silence carry the dread.

It was a commercial failure on release, baffling audiences expecting a conventional horror picture. Decades later it is regarded as one of the strangest and most influential vampire films ever made, less interested in frightening its audience than in making the world itself feel unstable.