This was as good as I was hoping it would be on a first viewing. I definitely enjoyed watching it more than I did Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, but I do prefer, at least right now, his Ordet.
The first half of the film was pretty much perfect. The set up is genuinely creepy; the look of everything, along with its narrow aspect ratio and significant film damage, is beautiful. The shadow chase is a spectacular use of the medium of the moving image, and extremely impressive for its time period. The film began to lose momentum about halfway. It never becomes boring, but I caught my attention wandering off a few times near the end. Many people attribute this to the frequent appearance of text, as the protagonist reads a book on vampires to learn about what they are, but when these passages showed up on the screen, they were actually what regained my attention. My only issue with the text was that is often stayed on the screen for too long. I was able to read it almost 3 times through before the text was removed from the screen. No biggie.
I love that there isn’t really a monster in this film; no creature with fangs, or blood-sucking, or flying. The film limits itself to the more spiritual ideas of a vampire, like eternal damnation and avoidance of the afterlife. I look forward to the next time I see, because I am sure that I will like it even more.