In Nosferatu, Murnau departed from the extreme artifice associated with German Expressionism to invest the natural world with an unnerving, incandescent strangeness 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 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.... The first, and still perhaps the finest, film version of Bram Stoker's Dracula,...it also works some fascinating variations on the narrative structure of the original novel.”