Through a variety of montage and trick effects, Murnau and designer Hermann Warm created a nightmare world for the troubled hero of Phantom, a young clerk and aspiring poet (Alfred Abel) who becomes obsessed with the image of a woman he has met only briefly. In despair, he indulges himself with a prostitute who resembles his “phantom,” and then allows a friend to draw him into a petty burglary that leads to murder. Lotte Eisner writes, “Murnau...attempted to capture what (Bela) Balazs calls ‘the reality submerged by the dream' in his film Phantom: in a chaos of objects, a table starts turning, streets pass ‘in staggering daylight,' swept along in a fantastic maelstrom, steps go up and down beneath feet which, even when they do move, seem to be unstable.” Elsewhere she notes, “All the sorrowful weight and tension of the Kammerspiel-film is here; we feel the vibrations between the characters. Under Murnau's direction Alfred Abel manages to convey the somnambulistic vagueness of someone who has lost himself and become a mere puppet in the hands of a crook.” Made in 1922, after Nosferatu and before The Last Laugh, Phantom existed only as a lost legend for many years during which critics regarded it as a key “missing link” in Murnau's development.