Kindly antiques dealer Jesus Gris happens upon an ancient golden device, and soon finds himself possessor and victim of its sinister, addictive powers, as well as the target of a mysterious, crude American named Angel.

"With Vampyr, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyser's brilliance of achieving mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, profoundly unsettling imagery was for once applied to the horror genre. Yet the result--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 and densely layered sounds creating a mood of dreamlike terror....