Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr is arguably the most dreamlike of horror films. Not quite a silent film, not quite a talkie (it was shot in 1930 but not released for two years), like the film’s protagonist it’s trapped in a strange and unsettling limbo where traditional shocks are few and far between but where an atmosphere of dread unsettles you far more effectively than any mere jump scare or gory moment. It exists in a genre all of its own – there really is nothing quite like it.

The story – based on J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 supernatural anthology In a Glass Darkly according to the credits – really isn’t up to much but that’s missing the point. It’s the accumulation of strange details and the oneiric atmosphere that counts and, on that score, Vampyr succeeds admirably. The hero of the piece of David Gray – named Allan in the German prints that are most easily accessible today, played by one Julian West. West is was in fact the film’s chief financier, the grandly named Frenchman Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg – a dead ringer in some lights for horror novelist HP, Lovecraft – who like much of the cast was strictly an amateur performer. Gray, “a dreamer for whom the line between the real and the supernatural became blurred” arrives in the French village of Courtempierre where he rents a room for the night but is woken by a creepy old man (Maurice Schutz) entering his room and leaving him a parcel marked “to be opened upon my death.”

Guided by disembodied shadows, he arrives at a nearby castle where he meets the elderly Marguerite Chopin (Henriette Gérard) and her companion, the village doctor (Jan Hieronimko). After a series of uncanny happenings, including the murder of the lord of the manor, the old man who visited David earlier, our hero opens the parcel and finds a book about supernatural beings called “vampyrs.” After dreaming of his own death, David saves the lord’s daughters Gisèle (Rena Mandel) and Léone (Sybille Schmitz) and with his servant (Albert Bras) rushes to find and kill Marguerite Chopin who he realises is the vampyr stalking the village.

Packed full of symbols, expressionistic sets (actually real locations spruced by Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari‘s (1920) art director Herman Warm), odd eccentrics and indelible, nightmarish images, Vampyr exists in a dreamscape of shadows and darkness, beautifully shot by Rudolph Maté, later a director of films like D.O.A. (1949), When Worlds Collide (1951) and The 300 Spartans (1962), who showed Dreyer some early footage that had come out blurred and fuzzy. Dreyer liked the look and he and Maté shot the rest of the film through a piece of gauze to add to the ghostly atmosphere.

Dreyer also made the conscious effort to minimise dialogue (actors mouthed their few lines in German, French and English and the words were dubbed in later although the planned English seems to have never been completed), telling the story as visually as possible, There are great stretches where there’s no dialogue at all, most notably perhaps in the almost entirely silent and nightmarish coffin scene, wherein David dreams of his own death and, frozen in his coffin, watches Marguerite Chopin performing arcane rituals through a glass window in the lid. When characters do speak, it’s in brief snippets, most of it inconsequential and seemingly spoken by people who are barely interacting with each other.

Apart from the aforementioned coffin scene, perhaps the best remembered of the film’s set-pieces is the climax in which the village’s aging doctor, who has fallen under the spell of the vampire, is buried beneath an avalanche of flour in the local mill. Subsequent films would opt for more mundane ways to dispose of the vampire or his/her familiar but as demises go this is one of the most spectacular and keeping with the off-kilter atmosphere of the rest of the film, the most unsettling. The film was made before most of the accoutrements of the vampire story had been set in place (though by the time of its belated release in 1932, Universal had set the visual image of the vampire for years to come in the shape of Bela Lugosi) and there’s no garlic here, no stakes, not transforming into bats.

Vampyr seemed to baffle the critics in the early 1930s who dismissed it as one of Dreyer’s less important and creative works and the film was a financial flop, leading to Dreyer spending some time on a psychiatric hospital following a breakdown. Over time its surreal charms have worked on a couple of generations of critics and it’s now rightly regarded as a classic of the genre. Perhaps tellingly, no-one has ever tried to remake Vampyr (they’ve remade everything else it sometimes feels) though some have tried, and mostly failed, to recapture its singular atmosphere. It would a lightning in a bottle exercise, an impossible task to recreate something so thoroughly unique that it’s almost impossible to describe in mere words. Some are going to find Vampyr‘s slow pacing a challenge but anyone looking for where David Lynch very likely got some of his best moves (Eraserhead (1977) feels like the film’s most authentic descendant) or the direction the vampire film ma have gone in if Vampyr had been released before Dracula (1931) will be amply rewarded by Dreyer’s surreal masterwork. As note several times, Vampyr plays like a dream, though the viewer is never told exactly when the dream begins. And most crucially we’re left uncertain as to when it ends, if indeed it ever does.