Vampyr

Allan Grey arrives at a rural inn carrying nothing but an obsession with folklore and the supernatural — demonology, vampire legends, the literature of the occult. He is the wrong man to have stumbled into the right place. That night, an old man enters his room without knocking, sets a sealed package on the table, and says: do not open this until I am dead. Then he leaves. Allan does not sleep.

The village is wrong in ways that are hard to name. Shadows fall in directions that have nothing to do with the light. A soldier's shadow moves across a wall while the soldier himself stands still. A scythe swings through hay with no hand on it. The world here is slightly out of register — as if someone has nudged reality a fraction of an inch off its axis, just enough to make everything wrong without being able to say why.

Allan finds the manor. Inside are two daughters: Gisèle, and Léone, who is gravely ill — pale and sunken, wasting in ways the local doctor cannot explain or chooses not to. The old man from Allan's room is their father, the lord of the estate. He is shot that night by an unseen figure from the darkness outside. Before he dies, he presses the sealed package into Allan's hands. Inside is a book. The book is about vampires.

Reading it, Allan begins to understand what surrounds him. There is an old woman in the village, Marguerite Chopin, who moves through the fog with the quiet certainty of someone who has been here longer than anyone remembers. She is the source. The local doctor, who presents himself as helpful, is hers — a thrall, cooperating in Léone's destruction for reasons the film does not bother to explain, because they don't matter.

In the film's central sequence, Allan lies down and something separates. His double rises and drifts through the manor while his body remains. Then he is in a coffin — a glass panel fitted over the face, the lid sealed above him. He watches through the glass as the coffin is carried out. Sky. Branches. The bearers' faces peering down. The grave approaching. He experiences his own burial from the inside, in real time, with no way to stop it. He wakes. It is the most unsettling five minutes in early sound cinema.