Summary
With Ellen left in the care of his friends, Hutter sets out for Count Orlok's estate on horseback. A title card tells us that he rode his horses to Karpathen until they got tired, and we're shown a devastated forest of diseased trees. This is not some idyllic natural paradise, but rather a landscape that's hostile to life.
In the evening, we see Hutter's carriage arrive at a small inn. Somewhere along the way, Hutter transferred from horseback to horse-drawn carriage, the change operating on a kind of dream logic. As if it were impossible for him to get fatigued by his travels, Hutter eagerly hops out of the carriage and races into the inn. Perhaps now we start to ruminate on the advice a stranger gave earlier in the film, that Hutter should not hurry, since no man can escape his destiny.
The innkeeper shows Hutter some good old country hospitality, offering a setting in the dining room and a friendly demeanor that suggests any accommodation will be granted. Contrast this with the innkeeper's reaction when Hutter drinks the spirit handed to him in a gulp and demands his food quickly so that he can make his way to Count Orlok. The innkeeper is stunned and, even though this is a silent film, we can tell that the whole inn has suddenly gone quiet.
Perhaps because he is uncomfortable being the bearer of bad news, The innkeeper does not warn Hutter against visiting the count specifically. Instead, he advises that it's unsafe out there on account of the wandering werewolf. We cut to a werewolf wandering the hills and scattering a group of horses.
Hutter takes a room in the inn while we watch a group of old ladies huddle in fear at the sight of that werewolf. It's a chilly night, so Hutter closes his window and settles into the room where he'll spend in the night. He picks up a book called Of Spirits, Terrible Ghosts, Magic, and the Seven Deadly Sins. In it, he reads of the vampire Nosferatu, who drinks human blood and lives in caves and coffins with soil that has been condemned by God. He throws the book down as if it's the most ridiculous thing he's ever read.
In the morning, Hutter wakes up to sunlight and a view of horses running in a field. He picks up that occult book once more and throws it on the ground even harder, this time with a big belly laugh. He sets out in a horse-drawn carriage once again, but its drivers refuse to take him all the way to Count Orlok's castle. They inform him that he could not pay them enough to complete the journey, so he hops out of the carriage and sets out on foot.
Walking over the pass, he encounters a mysterious carriage, whose driver and horses are both draped in black cloaks. It starts to look just as creepy as his own carriage drivers described. Hutter warily climbs into the carriage, and it races up the craggy, forbidding mountainside. The driver of the creepy carriage orders Hutter to go to the door of the castle once they approach it and then races back the other way down the mountain.
The door to the castle opens, and Hutter finds Count Orlok walking towards him. Wait, doesn't Orlok look just like the driver of the carriage drawn by cloaked horses? The count has a ghoulish presence, with his big hooked nose and hairy ears. He informs Hutter that he had been waiting for too long, and invites Hutter in for the night.
Analysis
This travel sequence is really where Murnau starts giving us the goods. After a very ordinary opening sequence set in the town of Wisborg, Murnau uses Hutter's trek into the country as an opportunity to show his dazzling, emotive camera style. In this sequence, we see the filmic hallmarks that would cement Murnau's reputation as one of the finest directors of both the silent age and the whole arc of cinematic history.
Consider the shots of nature. Rarely is silent cinema such a feast for the senses, but with Murnau's photography of airy mountainscapes and horses running through fields, we can practically smell that crisp mountain air. Of course, the first time we hear of this landscape, it's referred to as a land of thieves and ghosts, and Murnau serves us that same introduction visually. The first time we see this countryside, we don't see vast mountains, but a sparse pine forest, devastated by some sort of disease. We're introduced to this countryside through its devastation, and Murnau uses the beautiful vistas to show us the kind of life that is so threatened.
As Lotte Eisner points out in her book The Haunted Screen, Nosferatu is somewhat atypical of the German Expressionism film genre. Movies like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari rely on set design and costumes to map the psychological landscapes of their films, but Murnau simply didn't have the budget available to craft such elaborate mise en scène. Instead, as Eisner aptly notes, Murnau uses location shooting to show the world around his characters as expressive of their plights. Those soaring mountains and roaming horses reflect Hutter's own lust for life, but the strange spires and claustrophobic clusters of trees imbue the scenes with a sense of foreboding, of disaster to come.
Murnau also demonstrates his mastery of editing in these scenes. The whole sequence operates on a sort of dream logic, as Hutter is shown on horseback and in one shot and climbing out of a horse-drawn carriage soon after; later, we realize that Count Orlok had driven the carriage to the castle yet somehow appears from behind those castle doors. Murnau innovates, here, in drawing a dream-like atmosphere that sets the stage for the most nightmarish of horrors.
When in this state, any strange thing can happen. Perhaps even the fairy-tale monsters that Hutter read about in that ridiculous book at the inn could prove to be real! This composition of a dream logic through expert editing would appear again and again in the horror genre, from its bonafide classics like The Exorcist and Nightmare on Elm Street to its cult sensations like Suspiria and Hellraiser.
