Before the shooting, one must put oneself into a state of intense ignorance and curiosity, and yet see things in advance. My working method is to sketch out everything and then be completely open to impulse and improvisation. Recognize the true by its efficiency and power. The film’s beauty will not be in the images (postcardism) but in the ineffable qualities that those images emanate. To use prodigious, heaven-sent machines merely for belaboring something fraudulent—how would that appear, in fifty years’ time? And yet it’s from those mechanisms that emotion will be born. Think of the great pianists. (Bach, answering an admiring pupil: “It’s only a matter of striking the right notes at exactly the right moment.”) We evoke the preindustrial world of superstition by creating an illusion that allows the viewer to forget the film’s technical base.

In the darkness and stillness there are murmurs and flickering light under Grau’s door. I knock softly, and enter.

Grau and Galeen are sitting cross-legged around a guttering candle. When they lean to make a point, shadows bend around the recesses of the room. Still uninvited, I sit. They share a bottle of Hungarian wine. We can hear mice gnawing at the walls’ interior. Grau repeats his story of the old peasant with whom he was billeted in the Army. The peasant was convinced that his father, who died without receiving the sacraments, haunted the village in the form of a vampire. He showed Grau an official document about a man named Morowitch, exhumed in Progatza in 1884. The body showed no signs of decomposition, and the teeth were strangely long and sharp, and protruded from the mouth. The man was proclaimed undead, known in Serbia as the Nosferatu. Grau an ardent spiritualist. His next project, he’s informed us, will be something called Höllentriträme: Dreams of Hell.

Galeen, too, has a vampire story, from a cousin who served in Austria-Hungary. Galeen is slightly off-putting, watchful and disquieting. He has a bulbous face, with lank brown hair, skin like an orange rind, and an odd and pointless smile. He is only twenty-nine, four years younger than Grau and myself, and was born in Berlin. He reacted well to my revision of his treatment. He’s a Rosicrucian; perhaps even one of the adepts. I learned that from others.