Initially upstaged by Tod Browning’s Dracula, the great Carl Theodor Dreyer’s stab at genre filmmaking is an evocative masterpiece of hallucinatory imagery and dream-logic narrative. It makes sense that Dreyer’s horror film is so unnervingly effective given that his best works—The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Day of Wrath (1943), and Ordet (1955)—all deal with life and death, usually with a key character standing at the verge of passing from one to the other. In this respect, a film about vampires—the very embodiment of living death—seems like a natural fit for the Danish master, whose often unorthodox sense of composition, camera movement, and editing patterns turns standard genre material into an unforgettable descent into the uncanny. (DVD)