Second full production meeting tonight. All of us—Wagner, Grau, Spiess, Galeen, myself, Max Schreck, who will be playing the Nosferatu—crowded into my room. Some wine and sausage. Talking about the sources of horror. Grau claims our new art has an advantage over literature because the image can be clear and concrete even as it remains inconceivable. This is the paradox that causes the hair on the back of our necks to rise. Wagner adds that what people look for in film is a way to load their imagination with strong images. The fact that these images are silent is a supplementary attraction; they’re silent like dreams. I think he’s right, for as Hofmannsthal points out, only apparently have we forgotten our dreams; in fact there’s not a single dream that, reawakened, does not begin to stir: the dark corner, the breath of air, the face of an animal, the glide of an unfamiliar gait, all of it makes the presence of dreams perceptible. The blackness below the stairs to the cellar, the barrel filled with rainwater in the courtyard, the door to the granary, the door to the loft, the neighbor’s door through which the beautiful woman casts into the dark and palpitating depths of the child’s heart an unexpected thrill of desire …

We fall silent, passing the wine. Spiess says it’s like traveling through the air in the company of Asmodeus, the demon who raised roofs and laid bare all secrets.

Wagner says he imagines a future film which will be nothing on screen but beautiful creatures and transparent gestures, looks in which the entire soul is read.

Grau points out that in Mediterranean countries, children born with red hair or unusually pale complexions were watched carefully for other vampiric signs. Everyone looks at me.