F.W. Murnau's horror classic departs from the artifice associated with Expressionism to evoke its more subtle, more disturbing imagery in natural, largely exterior settings. Max Schreck's characterization of the vampire Nosferatu has been called “a convincing ‘symphony of horror'” (Georges Sadoul), a “superbly cadaverous and unnervingly marionette-like figure” (Tom Milne). Gilbert Perez Guillermo comments on the “incandescent strangeness of Nosferatu”:
“The settings are chiefly authentic: the ferocious landscape of the Carpathian mountains, the narrow streets and closely packed houses of a small town of the Baltic.... This is not a mere directorial trick, a clever way to set off the fantastic narrative.... Rather it is the fantastic narrative...that is incidental, and merely a way by which the film gets at its true subject....: the horror and mystery it discerns in that actual world.... Nosferatu...sees everything from a distance...and that ghostliness inherent in distant vision serves...to invest the familiar with a sense of horror....” (in Sight and Sound and Film Comment)