Nosferatu - Phantom der Nacht

Jonathan Harker is a young real estate agent in the German city of Wismar. His employer Renfield — already quietly mad, muttering about flies and the master — sends him to Transylvania to finalize a property purchase with a Count Dracula. Jonathan kisses his wife Lucy goodbye and travels east through increasingly wild country until he reaches the count's castle.

Count Dracula is ancient and mournful. Klaus Kinski plays him not as a seducer but as something exhausted beyond reckoning — pale, stilted, moving in ways that are barely human, a creature that has lived so long it has forgotten what living felt like. He sees a portrait of Lucy and is transfixed. He tells Jonathan to stay. Jonathan is a guest who cannot leave.

The count loads his coffins onto a ship called the Demeter and sails west. Jonathan, sick and weakened, escapes the castle. The Demeter's crew dies one by one during the voyage. The ghost ship drifts into Wismar harbor with everyone aboard dead. Dracula steps off into the city. With him come thousands of rats, flooding the streets. The plague begins.

Lucy reads the Book of Vampires she has found in the house. She understands what has arrived in Wismar and what the book says must be done: a woman pure of heart must offer herself willingly to the vampire and hold him until dawn. Dracula comes to her. She gives herself. He feeds through the night while she holds him, and he is so consumed by her that he does not notice the light beginning to change. The cock crows. He dies.

Jonathan arrives home in Wismar — haggard, altered. Dracula is dead. But Jonathan has become something else during his time in Transylvania. He mounts a horse and rides out of the plague-emptied city, dressed in black, into the pale horizon. The film ends on that image, and on the understanding that the curse has not ended — it has only changed hands.