F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" was the first screen adaptation of Bram Stoker's famous novel "Dracula," and it remains one of the best vampire tales in the cinema. The plot centers around Count Orlok, who is so convincingly portrayed by the unknown actor Max Schreck that rumors persisted that the star was, in fact, a real vampire and not an actor at all. With his imposing height, rat-like fangs, and pointed ears, Orlok is a creepy, animalistic vampire, a far cry from the dapper appearance of later movie vampires. If Bela Lugosi's Dracula seemed like an eccentric foreigner, Orlok seems to come not from a different country but an entirely different world. Murnau amplifies the terror created by Schreck's performance by filming the vampire attacks with some of the film's most expressive and abstracted techniques. In fact, the first few attacks are filmed entirely in shadows, with Schreck projecting the outline of his ferocious form on the walls above his sleeping victims, his clawed hands stretching into long black streaks on the white walls. Shadows stand in for the monster throughout the film, moving with the same slithery evil as the vampire himself. Orlok is also a disturbingly sexual vampire, linked by some mystical bond to Hutter's wife Ellen, as evidenced by the scene where a sleepwalking Ellen and the vampire seem to look at each other across the gulf of a tremendous distance, from Ellen's home to Orlok's distant castle. This is a deserved classic of the horror genre, a phantasmagoric experience that slips the viewer into ghostly, ghastly realms.