He tells us the following, in his smooth voice: After it had been reported in a nearby village that a vampire had killed three men by sucking their blood, Galeen’s cousin was, by high decree of the local Honorable Supreme Command, sent there to investigate, along with two subordinate medical officers. This is the story they were told: Only days after the funeral of a girl by the name of Stana, eighteen years old, who had died in childbirth two weeks previous, and who had announced in a fever that she had painted herself with the blood of a vampire, the family caught sight of the deceased sitting on the front steps of her house. The dead girl repeatedly appeared afterwards at night in the street, and knocked on doors. Children sickened and died. She had relations with an addled widower. When at night, like a trail of fog, she would leave a farm, she left a dead man in her wake.

Galeen’s cousin and the other officers were taken to the graveyard to open and examine the grave. When they exhumed her, she was whole and intact with blood flowing from her nose, mouth, and ears. When the girl’s mother saw her, she spat and said, “You are to disappear; don’t get up again and don’t move!” At those words tears flowed from the corpse’s eyes. After seeing that, the villagers pulled her from the grave, cut her into pieces, and tied them with cloth. The cloth they threw on a thornbush which they set on fire. Whereupon a strong wind rose and blew after them, howling, all the way back to the village.

The first day is overcast. It’s always a question of the intensity of the light. Wagner’s assistants test it with orange filter glasses. We wait. At eleven I announce we’ll set up the close-ups. For those we don’t need sunlight. No sooner are we ready than the sun is out. We go on, but now Wangenheim and Greta are squinting; Wagner and his assistants have to screen with canvas the very sun we’ve been waiting for all day, fake the half-light we’ve suffered through to this point. Flies circle everywhere. The wind shakes a background I want still. The camera develops a tremor. Wangenheim abominable.

That night, cold sweats while trying to sort out the next day’s tasks. Confronted by the characters, I feel like an official called in to oversee a crowd of immigrants. They stand about, passive, as I regard them with growing dismay.