Here's a throwback to when vampires weren't sexy, misunderstood, tortured souls but rather just reanimated corpses that fed on the living. Allen Grey (Julian West) is a student of the paranormal looking for an experience, and boy, does he find one. While on vacation in a small town, he stumbles upon a family plagued by a mysterious illness. One of the daughters, Léone (Sybille Schmitz), has wasted away with only a mark on her neck. Though she is being treated by the local doctor (Jan Hieronimko), her prognosis is grim until one of the servants (Albert Bras) reads about a similar occurrence from years ago believed to be the work of a vampire.
Allen Grey is much less of a protagonist than he is just kind of a nosy bystander. He is a very passive character that things just kind of happen around, which is also an unusual narrative choice. There are some pretty neat effects for the time period and it's a scant hour and a quarter long, but I will say that it involves a fair amount of reading and the subtitles superimposed over the text of a book makes it kind of challenging.
I did think it was neat that this version was restored from French and German prints with the English believed to be lost. Is this the most important film ever preserved? No, but it is definitely worth watching. It's on the Criterion channel and they also have a full length commentary that I'm sure is also great but I didn't listen to because ain't nobody got time for that this close to Halloween.
One more day! Light your jack-o-lanterns and ready the candy!
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