A drifter obsessed with the supernatural stumbles upon an inn where a severely ill adolescent girl is slowly becoming a vampire.A drifter obsessed with the supernatural stumbles upon an inn where a severely ill adolescent girl is slowly becoming a vampire.A drifter obsessed with the supernatural stumbles upon an inn where a severely ill adolescent girl is slowly becoming a vampire.
IMDb RATING
7.4/10
18K
YOUR RATING
- Director
- Writers
- Sheridan Le Fanu(based on a book by)
- Christen Jul(screenplay)
- Carl Theodor Dreyer(screenplay)
- Stars
Top credits
- Director
- Writers
- Sheridan Le Fanu(based on a book by)
- Christen Jul(screenplay)
- Carl Theodor Dreyer(screenplay)
- Stars
Videos1
- Director
- Writers
- Sheridan Le Fanu(based on a book by)
- Christen Jul(screenplay)
- Carl Theodor Dreyer(screenplay)
- All cast & crew
- See more cast details at IMDbPro
Storyline
Allan Gray arrives late in the evening to a secluded riverside inn in the hamlet of Courtempierre. An old man enters his room, puts a sealed parcel on the table, blurts out that some woman mustn't die, and disappears. Gray senses in this a call for help. He puts the parcel in his pocket, and goes out. Eerie shadows lead him into an old house, where he encounters a weird village doctor. The doctor receives a bottle of poison from a strange, old woman. Through the window of an old castle Gray recognizes the old man from the inn. A shadow shoots the man, who drops dead. Inside the house Gray finds his two daughters, Gisèle and Léone, and some servants. He opens the parcel, and finds an old book about vampires. Léone is seriously ill after being bitten by a vampire. Instead of helping her, the village doctor places the bottle of poison at her bedside table, and then abducts her sister Gisèle. An old servant starts reading the old book, and finds out that the vampire in Courtempierre is a dead woman called Marguerite Chopin. He goes to the cemetery, opens her grave and strikes a thick iron stick through her body. The curse is broken, Léone recovers, Gray liberates Giséle. —Maths Jesperson {maths.jesperson1@comhem.se}
- Genres
- Certificate
- Not Rated
- Parents guide
Did you know
- TriviaFor much of the cast, this was their only film appearance since they were not professional actors. Henriette Gérard who played the vampire was a French widow, Jan Hieronimko who played the village doctor was a Polish journalist, Rena Mandel who played Gisèle was an artist's model. Even Julian West (real name: Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg) who played Allan Grey, was French-born member of Russian nobility who agreed to finance the film in exchange for the leading part. (He later emigrated to America where he became a powerful fashion journalist and mentor to designers like Calvin Klein.)
- GoofsAt exactly 16 minutes (in the Criterion DVD) as the camera pans right, there is a reflection in a glass window of the camera operator cranking the camera.
- ConnectionsEdited into Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1943)
Top review
Required Viewing!
Brilliant! Breathtaking! This film was worth the long wait I imposed on myself to see it. It is not the most cohesive narrative about, but it has images that linger with you....haunt you. The film is basically a silent with some speaking. It tells a story about Allan Grey and how he was introduced into a vampire's conspiracy to kill two sisters. Grey is brought in for aid by their father who dies while trying to fight the infection coursing through his daughter's veins. What then follows is pure cinematic magic as Grey...opening a book that the father wrote was to be opened upon his death...begins reading the book on vampires whilst it is going on right around him. The mixture of action and the text from the book create a wonderfully eerie atmosphere and convey a feeling of dread and despair. There are many scenes in Vampyr, directed with fluidity by Carl Dreyer, that are incredibly well-done. The dream sequence in particular explores various camera angles, hitherto not used. As I said before, it is not the tightest story and it has some gaping holes in the plot that are never explained, but that really is not very important because the film succeeds as a film of haunting imagery...fear based on illusion and shadows.
helpful•6015
- BaronBl00d
- Aug 7, 2000
Details
- Runtime1 hour 15 minutes
- Color
- Aspect ratio
- 1.19 : 1
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content

Recently viewed
Please enable browser cookies to use this feature. Learn more.