We trade ideas until the sky pales, building together an artifice superior to the work of either of our imaginations alone. We construct a new scene for Hutter’s arrival: Distant mountains. Vratna Pass. In the background the fantastic castle of the Nosferatu in the evening light. A steep road leading straight up into the sky. Hutter abandoned by his coach. Something comes racing down—a carriage? A phantasm?—with unearthly speed and disappears behind a groundswell. Out of nowhere, reappears. Stops dead. Two black horses, their legs invisible, covered by black funeral cloth. Their eyes like pointed stars. Steam from their mouths. The coachman, whose face we cannot see. Hutter inside. Carriage drives at top speed through a white forest! (We’ll use meters of negative, like “the land the sun travels through at night” so feared in ancient Egypt.)

If the camera could move with the coach, so we could feel the terrifying capacities of evil.…

Then the courtyard. The carriage at a halt. Almost in a faint, Hutter climbs down. As if in a whirlpool, the carriage circles round him and disappears. Then, very slowly, the two wings of the gate open up.…

Six days of shooting. The camera still trembles. The new one sent from Berlin is even worse. I let them develop the bad takes in case the camera has performed some miracle of its own. Yet some scenes come off beautifully. The panicking horses Hutter sees from the window of the inn. On a grassy slope, the ground falling away toward the back. Night mists creep up the valley. The horses raise their heads as if frightened and, scattering, gallop away. The white horse spun and shook perfectly, which he refused to do yesterday. The camera just got it. And one, after hours of work, backed out of the frame! The effect was marvelous. Even Wagner, for all his exhaustion, was excited by how it will look. The possibility of other people’s fatigue never occurs to me.

Spiess proposes a trip to the South Seas to collaborate on an old photoplay of his entitled The Island of the Demons. I’m insufficiently excited about the idea. A horrible fight.

I must avoid a certain kind of coldness that results from the way I work. It would be fatal.

Spiess gone to Berlin for a few days for “personal matters.” We fought again over Hans. Clumsy life going about its stupid work: even when we want to reveal ourselves we’re so poor at it that we spend most of our time in self-concealment of one sort or another. My experience of him is discontinuous, my attention uneven, my judgment and understanding uncertain.

He was gone all night and announced his trip the next morning. I said nothing, and was busy the entire day. That afternoon on his pillow in his room, I left for him one of the vampire’s entreaties to Hutter: