Murnau departs from the artifice associated with German Expressionism to invest natural, largely exterior settings with a sense of horror. Critic Robin Wood writes, “The first, and still perhaps the finest, film version of Bram Stoker's novel is in many ways the archetype of the horror genre in its extremely sophisticated awareness of the significance of the ‘monster.' Here the vampire is clearly the embodiment of the forces that civilization represses, and the film can be read as an account of the appalling cost of that repression. It also works some fascinating variations on the narrative structure of the original novel.”