At #146, we come to this movie from Carl Th. Dreyer. So, this is a movie from 1932, which puts it right on the cusp of the sound era, and sure enough, it’s Dreyer’s first movie with sound. Because I kept confusing it with Nosferatu plus also thinking of Dreyer’s silent Passion of Joan of Arc, I was surprised by this at first. But you can tell that Dreyer is new to sound at this point, because it really feels like a silent movie. Like, a great deal of the story is told by the protagonist reading a book, and the camera just showing its pages as if they were intertitles.

The word that comes up a lot when talking about this film is “experimental,” and yeah, I totally get that. I wrote down “Lynchian” in the notes I took as I watched the movie, because it has that same sense: It’s about cool scenes, it’s about setting a particular mood, it’s about getting across the creepy vibes — all of that over narrative.

There is a story here, and it is reasonably coherent, but to be completely honest, I only really put it all together from reading the Wikipedia page. I don’t think it’s necessarily incomprehensible, but communicating the fine details of the plot just isn’t what the movie is trying to do. And there are plenty of things in the movie that are just never explained at all, like the dancing shadows — which are atmospheric as hell, and very creepy, but don’t seem to have anything to do with the vampire that’s at the heart of the story.

For me, this movie ends up in a weird place: As an old horror film, I think it’s not as good as Nosferatu; as a Dreyer film, I think it’s not as good as any of Passion of Joan of Arc, Gertrud, or Ordet. And so I want to be a bit dismissive of it, but… at the same time, it’s legitimately very good. It feels well-placed on the list, even as I 100% understand the people who put it in their own personal top tens.