"El Greco showed me that painting should appear, confront the viewer and then disappear, like a kind of retraction..."-Luc Tuymans (Nosferatu: Eine Symphonies des Grauens). In Nosferatu, Murnau departed from the artifice associated with German Expressionism to invest the natural world with an unnerving incandescence that surpasses any studio-created image. Filming on location, he managed to draw from the jagged profiles of the Carpathian Mountains, and the narrow streets and distorted architecture of a Baltic village, the most horrific sense of all: that of a real world. As the vampire, Max Schreck embodies for all time a figure of living death-existence and non-existence-in a film that, as critic Robin Wood has noted, "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."