Nosferatu

Thomas Hutter is a young estate agent in the German port town of Wisborg. His employer, the increasingly erratic Knock, sends him to Transylvania to finalize a real estate purchase with a Count Orlok, who wants a property in Wisborg. Hutter's wife Ellen has a premonition she cannot explain. He goes anyway.

At an inn near the Borgo Pass, the locals go pale when he says where he is headed. He finds a book in his room — a guide to vampires — reads it by candlelight, and laughs. He reaches Orlok's castle at midnight, meeting a figure who emerges from shadow: bald, angular, with clawed fingers and the posture of something that has forgotten it is supposed to look human. Orlok sees the portrait of Ellen on Hutter's medallion and stares at it too long.

That night, Hutter wakes with two marks on his neck. He attributes them to mosquitoes. He stays at the castle while the count prepares travel documents for the Wisborg property. Hutter explores and finds Orlok sleeping in a coffin in the cellar. He is now a guest who cannot leave. Across Europe in Wisborg, Ellen begins sleepwalking to the shore, arms reaching toward nothing, calling out a name she does not know.

Orlok loads his coffins onto carts and moves toward the coast. Hutter escapes the castle and races home by a different route. Orlok boards a schooner called the Empusa with his cargo. The crew begins dying one by one. When the ship drifts into Wisborg harbor with no one alive at the wheel, Orlok steps off the gangplank into the dark and plague breaks out across the city. Coffins are carried through the streets. Knock — revealed as Orlok's agent, the one who arranged all of it — is arrested, raving.

Ellen has found the Book of Vampires. She reads that the nosferatu can be destroyed only if a woman pure of heart invites him in of her own will and holds him there until dawn. Hutter returns home. Orlok has taken up residence in the house across the street and watches Ellen's window. She sends Hutter away on an errand. Then she opens the window.

Orlok comes to her. He feeds, absorbed entirely in it, and does not notice the light beginning to change outside. When the cock crows and the first shaft of morning hits him, he dissolves — not dramatically, just gone, a faint wisp where he stood. Ellen, emptied, dies in the returning Hutter's arms. The plague in Wisborg ends. The house across the street stands empty.