Would you not like to wait awhile with me, dearest worthy? It is not so long until the sunrise—

And during the day I sleep my best; I sleep most truly, the deepest sleep—

Long hours in the makeshift projection room last night. The coach arriving at the inn. Wangenheim crossing the little bridge to the “land of the phantoms.” The forest he views on his journey. That last setup particularly difficult because of the terrain. Extreme long shots of landscape must be shot north or south so that the crosslight provides definition. Flat, dead-on light causes shadows to fall away behind objects so that there’s no modeling, and backlighting is problematic in all but the clearest skies.

It’s irritating to see so little, because the true rhythms will be produced only in the cutting. Can’t find the take of the white horse turning with its balked jumpiness, and there’s no trace of it on the labels. Awful if that shot lost.

With some of the vistas Wagner hasn’t enough courage. He compromises and won’t take a bold enough line. The result is a softness to his work that I must overcome. It’s all too “beautiful.” Whereas I want something more harsh to contrast with the beauty, a starkness and awed sweep.…

Grau has done a marvelous job of turning what’s innate in Schreck into the Nosferatu. Schreck’s been bound into a three-quarter-length jacket, buttoned up tightly. His makeup (I must show his hands today) will take three hours.

Endless discoveries. Water from a spring so pure the animals take the trough to be empty. The play of shadow off it in twilight like the marble ceilings of seaside hotels. Grau, in his other hat as producer, complains that we continue to fall behind our schedule. But what shots! Today an open cart-shed full of rakes and scythes, and that gray spider on the backlit orb-web. Broken sunlight through isinglass. Wagner’s work, viewed each night, is breathtaking: in clarity, in richness of detail, in contour. One can find that same soft brilliance in certain kinds of silver polished with skins.

Greta came to me with an idea for Heligoland: her character, Ellen, waiting for Hutter’s return at a seaside graveyard—stark crosses at oblique and neglected attitudes on the dune, with the sea beyond. A wonderful idea: the natural world enlisted and compromised by the Nosferatu. The natural world operating under the shadow of the supernatural. Enormous tranquillity in the context of unease and dread: for whom is she waiting?

A discussion grows out of our enthusiasm. Endless polarities—west and east, good and evil, civilization and wilderness, reason and passion, with the contested terrain in every case the body of the woman. The obsession is not with the oppositions as much as the areas between them—the possibility that they’re not such oppositions. Hence the connections between Hutter and the Nosferatu, Ellen and the Nosferatu.