stuff too". In London and New York, the stage version of Dracula had been a large hit in 1927. Dreyer and Jul created a story based on vampires which Dreyer considered to be "fashionable things at the time". Vampyr is based on elements from J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly, a collection of five stories first published in 1872. Dreyer draws from two of the stories for Vampyr, one being Carmilla, a lesbian vampire story and the other being The Room in the Dragon Volant about a live burial. Dreyer found it difficult to decide on a title for the film. It may have initially been titled Destiny and then Shadows of Hell. When the film was presented in the film journal Close Up it was titled The Strange Adventure of David Gray. Pre-production Dreyer returned to France to begin casting and location scouting. At the time in France, there was a small movement of artistic independently financed films, including Luis Buñuel's L'Âge d'Or and Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet which were both released in 1930. Through Valentine Hugo, Dreyer met Nicolas de Gunzburg, an aristocrat who agreed to finance Dreyer's next film in return for playing the lead role in it. Gunzberg had arguments with his family about becoming an actor, so he created the pseudonym Julian West, a name that would be the same in all three languages that the film was going to be shot in. Most of the cast in Vampyr were not professional actors. Jan Hieronimko, who plays the village doctor, was found on a late night metro train in Paris. When approached to act in the film, Hieronimko stared blankly and did not reply. Hieronimko later contacted Dreyer's crew and agreed to join the film. Many of the other non-professional actors in the film were found in similar fashion in shops and cafés. The only professional actors in the film were Maurice Schutz, who plays the Lord of the Manor, and Sybille Schmitz, who plays his daughter Léone. Many crew members of Vampyr had worked with Dreyer on his previous film The Passion of Joan of Arc. Returning crew members included cinematographer Rudolph Maté and art director Hermann Warm. The entire film was shot on location with many scenes shot in Courtempierre, France. Dreyer and his cinematographer Rudolph Maté contributed to the location scouting for Vampyr. Dreyer left most of