I don’t understand how it is that this generation has not seen the rise of a true poet of film. For all the arts, one is able to cite great masters born to understand them exceptionally. There should come geniuses of the screen who know instinctively what it alone has the power to do. At the moment, we found our stories on novels, stage plays, etc. In the future, we’ll think film and dream film.

More telephone calls to Leo Spiess. He’s taken to hanging up on me.

Wagner took me aside with doubts about Wangenheim’s performance. Wangenheim’s aggressive terror, he said, inhibited his own. The hero, presented to us as bold/hardy/audacious/daring/venturesome and plucky, suddenly passes from all that to convulsive terror? I thanked him and reminded him it was too late to replace Wangenheim. His was not a comment timed to fill me with confidence.

For the vampire’s arrival: lack of movement makes the eye impatient. Use such impatience.

Filmed Granach, as Knock, the house agent under the sway of the Nosferatu. A relief working with an old friend. During breaks he told the crew how as students of Reinhardt’s we’d lie on the floor of the stage-box to hear and see him work with actors (he allowed no one to view his rehearsals). The scene came off perfectly. Reading the cabalistic letter sent by the vampire, Granach seems dropped in from another world, his spindly hunchback shifting and jerking, his ugly smile making sense of the strange symbols. A last touch was all his: raising his head upon finishing, as if greeting the evil. Wonderfully disturbing sense of the diabolism closer to home.

The happy accidents of art. As the Austrians say, Es ist passiert—It just happened like that.

Reminder to the labs: the lettering of the titles should be lanky and tortuous, like that of Caligari. The background, a poisonous green. A tooth is giving me great pain.

In Czechoslovakia, Spiess related to me a dream that he was Ellen in the film. He went up to the bedroom before his husband. At the side of the bed he heard the fluttering of a bird. The air was disturbed. He didn’t light the lamp or draw the curtain. The streetlight provided the only light. He couldn’t keep awake. In a park nearby, the wind moved the trees. It was as if he’d been chloroformed.

Even after his departure, he continues to provide information on the lore of the vampire. Alone in my room, unable to sleep, I go over, in his handwriting, the last three stages of the etymological history of the word: the Old Church Slavonic for “fugitive,” the early Common Slavic for “the one who drinks in,” and the later Slavic for “neighbor.”