The first unofficial film adaptation of Bram Stoker's romantic horror novel is an ingenious precursor and benchmark for almost all later 'Dracula' film adaptations. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau makes virtuoso use of the technical, poetic and emotional effects of the medium and - by depicting the incursion of the demonic into the bourgeois idyll - creates a dark reflection of collective fears in the Weimar Republic. An undisputed masterpiece of German Expressionism.