A good candidate for the eeriest vampire story ever filmed. It’s no Saturday matinee chiller. This slow German film from the great Carl Dreyer is more a 4 AM nightmare that sometimes seems to barely make sense, but, as with all dreams, you go with it anyway.
An innocent traveler named Allan Gray stops at a small village inn and while he’s trying to sleep, some cryptic weirdo wanders into his room in the middle of the night and gives him a package that’s only supposed to be opened after the weirdo dies. From there, Allan Gray heads out into the night to investigate this mystery and finds himself in a wild German Expressionist netherworld where shadows crawl all over the walls and surrealism rules. Vampires, ghosts, dying girls, dreams, burials and creepy doctors with vials of poison follow. 
This was originally intended to be a silent film and it shows. The dialogue is sparse and barely matters when it is spoken. Most of the information we need is relayed via old-fashioned title cards and visual economy. The uniquely fuzzy and weathered look of the film is also entirely intentional. Dreyer had cinematographer Rudolph Mate (who later became a director in his own right) shoot the whole movie through a thin layer of gauze for maximum otherworldiness.
Like most real cult films, critics of the day didn’t like it and it was a financial failure in its original release. It was even booed at its premiere. However, over time it’s become re-evaluated as something startlingly strange and unique.