That is the power of a single frame, to capture one confluence of the face in isolation, the twitch and movement of the eye, there and gone again. We can pluck out a single moment of the creature’s repose as his gaze wanders.
What is this world he has come to, with its strange lights and fine buildings? He seems to sway, in hesitation perhaps. We can see simultaneously the roving eye of a predator tracking a scent, as well as the look of a man alone in a strange new place, lost and unsure. It feels like happenstance that the camera should have caught him here at all-he is an intruder in his own film, the postcard-perfect image of the square at dusk suddenly eclipsed by his great pallid visage, like a pre-set camera serendipitously capturing the natural behavior of an animal that has wandered into the shot. So it is that Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre ends its world-swiftly, and yet by inches.
Immediately, juxtapositions are created: between the predator and its new hunting grounds a specter of the past in a modern world the last vestiges of the light as darkness encroaches.
Still we can see the lights, stretching away across the town square, the roofs against the dusk-filled sky in picturesque tableau. He pauses, straightens, as if he has just become aware of his surroundings. The vampire enters the frame abruptly, in close-up, filling it as the camera racks focus.
