Tensions continue with Grau over the schedule, our plans for the film, everything. As we get closer to the end, more and more of his energy goes into promotion and distribution, which is necessary but seems premature. After he’s interviewed by Der Film, I have to read: “Each scene is given over to the director only when ready to be filmed; beforehand the artistic director has prepared it down to the smallest details, according to psychological and pictorial principles, and has sketched it out on paper. Each gesture, each costume (the era of 1840, approximately) and movement has been laid out with scientific rigor and calculated to produce a specific effect upon the spectator.”

The publicity material is modeled on that old Expressionist hysteria. One of the handouts:

Nosferatu was there. In the streets. Mongrels howled it. Babies cried it. Crooked branches traced its letters in the earth. The wind swept the word and carried it away, and dead leaves from the trees read “Nosferatu.” It invaded everything. One could see it along walls, above streetlamps, in the eyes of those late to bed. It fastened to ganglia and sounded in bones. It clamored. It uttered cries like rats in a coffin. Maidens whispered it in their sleep. Above them in the darkness it formed, livid and ghastly pale, leaden and yellow, full of sulphur and fatal breath. And you? Do you still feel nothing? Nos-fer-a-tu—Nosferatu—beware.

Shot by shot I know my way through. I will not give in until I have what I want. But every morning there we are, still on the set, with its dismal fraudulence, its flapping wall, and plaster gargoyles. Again I’ll get worked up, pull my hair, go back to my room, start over.

Determined to do ten shots today, despite Wagner’s pace, Grau’s complaints, and the arcs, which keep fusing. Horrible quarrel. Wagner’s taken to calling me the Schoolmaster.

Fruitless check of steamship offices about Spiess. Found a gift he’d brought me at a dinner I’d arranged in my room in Czechoslovakia. An erotic drawing of two boys and a man. We’d been tense and awkward. Wangenheim had wandered by while I was examining the drawing. The whole thing a Feydeau farce. Spiess had become distracted and impatient; in return, I was exhausted and short-tempered. He left before dessert.

A telegram back from Meidner. No help about Hans. His response was full of questions.

The first stalking of Hutter. Discussions with Wangenheim beforehand. What matters is not what the actors show me but what they hide. Above all, what they don’t suspect is in them. I cite for him the Baroness in Schloss Vogelöd, who after her husband fends off her kiss and announces his renunciation of everything worldly, whispers distractedly to herself, “I’m longing for evil—seeing evil—wanting evil.”