Live Score (1932)
Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer
70 minutes
Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1932 fever dream is less a horror film than a nightmare filmed at the moment of waking -- fog, drifting shadows, a scythe, a burial seen from inside the coffin. The Andrew Alden Ensemble scores it live with violin, electric guitar, piano, synthesizers, and percussion, the New York group's music moving with the film's logic of dread rather than against it. A young traveler, Allan Gray (Julian West), arrives in a riverside village held under the spell of a vampire, and the world begins to come loose at the edges. Dreyer made it as sound cinema was being born and produced something stranger than either silence or speech; performed with a live original score, it turns stranger still.