Outside the studio we wait irritably for taxis in the rain. Schreck leans against a wall in the darkness, his arms folded. He has no hat. Grau is staying at a nearby hotel. Wagner and I are going back to the Grunewald. Out of the darkness Schreck asks what we think a vampire is. Wagner says: Corpses who during their lifetime had been sorcerers, werewolves, people excommunicated by the Church, excommunicated from their lives: suicides, drunkards, heretics, apostates, and those cursed by their parents. Grau, after a pause, looks at me and says: Demons who dwell in the corpses of men, to instruct them in vice, and lead them to wickedness.

Some Conversations with Leo, Spiess’s brother, about his possible whereabouts. Leo is unsympathetic. The Spiesses were a great Baltic family. Leo is Kapomeister at the Staatsoper Berlin. There’s no guarantee he’ll even let me know if he hears anything.

I blame Spiess as often as I blame myself for Hans. Yet with who else can I share this obsession? He liked to call me the administrator of my own inhibitions. He amended Hans’s nickname and called me Bayard, the Knight Soaked in Reproach. He said we were both to blame, always with that air of knowing the price of everything.

The shooting begins and the wolfhound that was Galeen’s idea refuses to film. He takes his place properly, but leaves as soon as the cameras begin to roll and returns when they’re finished. We attempt the simple scene of Wangenheim in his room in the castle, a tiny whitewashed room with sharp angles and a huge, criblike bed in the period style. He is to read from The Book of Vampires (“THE NOSFERATU. From the bloody sins of mankind a creature will be born …”) and go to the window, throwing it open to look into the starless night, while beyond his door in the depths of the castle the horror gathers. He swaggers through the motions, ruining everything. Multiple takes, two or three quiet conversations with him. The film is nearly always finished before one’s had time to get the actors to forget the bad habit of “giving a performance.”