Christensen"s film, however, is more than simply a controversial or salacious work. It is a deeply innovative blueprint for so much horror that was to follow. Its sleight-of-hand mixing of the real and the fantastical became genuinely revolutionary. One hundred years since its initial domestic release, the film still plays a notable role in the history of horror. It wasn"t the only film to deal with supernatural folklore – it had various, more fictionalised European peers to a degree, from Victor Sjöström"s The Phantom Carriage (1921) to Paul Wegener"s Der Golem (1920) – but the film"s form and blurring of scholarly realism with the fantastical gives it a more palpable, lingering dread. It became a kind of Necronomicon for occult and horror filmmakers in spite of being difficult to see; a rare unholy text which showed the screen possibilities of the occult.