Vampyr

Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (German: Vampyr – Der Traum des Allan Grey) was Dreyer's first sound film, made between his masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and his later Day of Wrath (1943). The production was financed in significant part by Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, an Anglo-Russian aristocrat who appears in the film as the lead under the pseudonym Julian West; this was Gunzburg's only screen credit, taken largely as a way of underwriting the production financially.

The film was shot in Courtempierre — a small commune in the Loiret département of north-central France — in the autumn of 1930 with cinematography by Rudolph Maté, the Polish-born cinematographer who had also shot The Passion of Joan of Arc and would later emigrate to Hollywood for an extensive career as both DP and director. Maté's distinctive deliberately-overexposed and pre-fogged 35mm photography on this film is one of the most-discussed cinematographic accomplishments of early sound cinema.

The film is loosely based on Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novella Carmilla and the 1872 collection In a Glass Darkly in which it appears, although the screenplay by Dreyer with Christen Jul is substantially original. The German-French production was shot in three language versions simultaneously (German, English and French) using mostly the same actors with re-recorded dialogue. Sight & Sound's 2022 critics' poll placed the film on its Greatest Films of All Time list. Multiple full restorations have been issued through the Murnau-Stiftung, the BFI, and the Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration since the early 2010s; the film is now widely cited as one of the most original works in the entire horror genre.