From provincial Germany--briefly through Hollywood in its early days--to the South Seas, Nosferatu charts a life at once artistic, intellectual and deeply human.

The following are excerpts from various sections from Nosferatu:

EXTERIORS

Six weeks of exteriors: the Carpathians, the Baltic towns of Wismar, Rostock, and Lübeck, as well as ocean vistas of Heligoland and the Frisian Islands in the North Sea. All shooting, exterior and interior, must be finished by November 1921. We begin here, in Czechoslovakia. Half the company has yet to arrive; those who have are filled with questions. Nothing of course has gone as planned. To add to the confusion there are my daily visits to foreign doctors, to say nothing of the visits of nurses to me. What time I have is often expended in elegaic dreams about H--. But already the film takes me from the soft anguish of idleness and drives me from any room where I cannot work.

7/12/21. This is intended to be for the patient readers of Der Querschnitt the journal of a film-maker's progress: an ongoing chronicle, from rough notes composed day to day, of the trials and tribulations of this new project. I hereby pledge to do my utmost to prevent this diary from becoming a "melancholy school of posturing and dreary self-deception." Frankness and clarity will be the goals. If I will not, cannot be truthful with myself here, where can I be?

With this film, I will not aim at poetry. I will try to build a table. It will be for you to eat at it, criticize it, chop it up for firewood.

Dolny Kubin, Slovakia. Grau wants the names of Stoker's characters changed, but echoed. Harker has thus become Hutter. On the long trip here I wrote the first title from his diary, which will introduce the story: Nosferatu. Doesn't the name sound like the midnight call of a death bird? Beware of uttering it, or the pictures of life will turn to pale shadows, nightmares will rise up from the heart and nourish themselves on your blood. [Fade in a long shot of the town.] For a long time I have been meditating on the rise and fall of the Great Death in my father's town of Wisborg. Here is the story of it: In Wisborg there lived a man named Hutter with his young wife Ellen.

Talked with Schreck about the Nosferatu. Schreck is a very strange man: narrow-shouldered, peculiarly stiff and clumsy, strikingly ugly without any makeup. At lunch he knocked over his water glass with a wooden sweep of his arm and then simply watched it, glared at me and then the water as it ran across the table. Intensely private, yet he's begun to follow me around, trying to absorb as much as he can. His performance is absolutely crucial. He has had very little experience but when I saw him bending without pleasure over a child on the Kurfürstendamm I knew he was the Nosferatu. I have begun talking with him about his role the only way I know how: trying to articulate the sources of my own obsessions. His silences seem equal parts hostility and understanding.

I talked of the vampire's parasitism -- you must die if I am to live. I talked of the loathsomeness and the dread of his allure. I talked of the way the terrible inhumanness of him, the nightmarish repulsiveness, should move easily among the bourgeois naturalism of the costumes and acting styles of the rest of the cast -- the way everyone must see him as in some ways not out of the ordinary.

For the vampire's arrival: lack of movement makes the eye impatient. Use such impatience.

Filmed Granach, as Knock, the house agent under the sway of the Nosferatu. A relief working with an old friend. During breaks he told the crew how as students of Reinhardt's we'd lie on the floor of the stage-box to hear and see him work with actors (he allowed no one to view his rehearsals). The scene came off perfectly. Granach reading the cabalistic letter sent by the vampire seems dropped in from another world, his spindly hunchback shifting and jerking, his ugly smile making sense of the strange symbols. A last touch was all his: raising his head upon finishing, as if greeting the evil. Wonderfully disturbing sense of the diabolism closer to home.

The happy accidents of art. As the Austrians say, "Es ist passiert," -- It just happened like that.