Vampyr (1932)

Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer’s brilliant film with mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, profoundly unsettling imagery is considered one of the earliest horror works on screen. Yet the film—concerning an occult student assailed by various supernatural haunts and local evildoers in a village outside Paris—is nearly unclassifiable. A host of stunning camera and editing tricks, densely layered sounds, roiling fogs, ominous scythes, and foreboding echoes creates a mood of dreamlike terror, resulting in one of cinema’s great nightmares.