Film horror has been riding high in recent years. We’re just wound up a couple of seasons of gore-horrors based on the theme of torture. Before that were the much different “J-Horror” pictures, modern ghost stories from Japan that generated much of their sense of dread from dreamlike, menacing imagery. And a few years before that we withstood a wave of self-aware slasher films featuring teenagers that try to survive bloody murder by applying lessons learned from earlier horror movies like Halloween.
Until 1931 with Universal’s Frankenstein and Dracula, there really was no established horror genre. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu, from the 1920s, were (and still are) highly original and artistic silent films that were quickly recognized as classics.
Just as impressive, but until now much more obscure, is Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 Vampyr. An early German talkie basically stylized as a silent, Dreyer’s film creates a surreal mental space reminiscent of Jean Cocteau.
