The young estate agent Hutter is sent by his shady employer Knock to a remote place in the Carpathian Mountains to close a deal with a local nobleman, Count Orlok, who wishes to buy a property in Wisborg. Knock suggests his employee to offer Count Orlok an empty building which is right opposite Hutter’s home. After leaving his young wife Ellen, who appears to be particularly distressed at the thought of her husband’s mission, in the care of their friend Harding and his sister (who is identified as Anny in the original script), Hutter leaves for his journey with great expectations and enthusiasm.
Once arrived in the Carpathians he spends a night with some local peasants who shudder and cross themselves at the mention of the very name of Orlok and forcefully invite him to give up on his journey. However, neither the peasants nor the warnings contained in a book on ‘vampires, monstrous ghosts, sorcery, and the Seven Deadly Sins’ found on his bedside table can dissuade Hutter from reaching Orlok’s isolated castle. Left in the middle of the forest by the carriage men who refuse to accompany him any further, Hutter is picked up by a coach driven by a mysterious man completely wrapped up in a black cloak and eventually deposited at the entrance of the Count’s castle. Once crossed the archway, the Count, who appears to be a lanky and pale figure clad in a tight black suit, meets Hutter and invites him into what appears to be a deserted home. During his first dinner with Orlok, Hutter cuts his finger with a breadknife and observes with shock the Count licking his lips seemingly in anticipation at the sight of his blood. During Hutter’s second night at the castle Orlok attacks his guest in his room with the apparent intention of drinking his blood. At the same moment, Ellen wakes up and starts sleepwalking on the balustrade of Harding’s villa. Although the doctor dismisses her state as a ‘harmless congestion of the blood’, an intertitle and a creative use of cross-editing link her illness to Nosferatu’s actions against Hutter and to the Count’s forthcoming arrival in Wisborg. Back at the castle, Hutter is horrified in discovering that the count sleeps in a sarcophagus and then observes him loading up a cart with coffins and leaving the castle. Understanding Orlok’s intention to go to Wisborg and thus linking the Count’s arrival in town with an ominous sentiment of danger and alarm, Hutter escapes from the castle and is found feverish and confused by some local peasants. Meanwhile the crew of the schooner Empusa set sails to Wisborg oblivious of the danger lurking in the boat’s load. A cut takes the viewer back to Wisborg where Professor Bulwer (whom we briefly saw at the beginning of the film when he admonished Hutter that ‘no one can escape his destiny’) is lecturing on carnivorous plants and other mysteries of nature whilst Hutter’s employer Knock is showing clear signs of madness and Ellen is seen by the sea longing for her beloved. A new intertitle features a newspaper cut detailing the explosion of a plague epidemic in Transylvania and other ports on the Black Sea, whilst on the Empusa the sailors fall one by one victim of Count Orlok. The arrival in Wisborg of the now empty and spectral ship during one of the film’s most spectacular and iconic sequences also marks the beginning of the plague for the town’s inhabitants. Ellen, although breaching Hutter’s explicit prohibition, reads an excerpt from the Book of Vampires and discovers that only the sacrifice of a woman without sin can put an end to the plague brought to the town by the Nosferatu. With the panic-stricken town crumbling around her, Ellen summons Nosferatu into her room and lets him drink her blood until the morning when the first ray of the sun kills the vampire thus freeing Wisborg from the curse. The last shot of the film shows us a distressed Hutter embracing his dead wife whilst in the image’s foreground Professor Bulwer looks defeated and helpless.