Unfortunately for Hutter, Orlok is a vampire who repeatedly feeds on Hutter, and keeps him as a prisoner. Orlok leaves for his new home, and Hutter escapes the castle. Both end up on the same ship to Germany, where the crew is decimated by plague and Orlok. Hutter is reunited with his wife, who is fearful of her new next-door neighbor.
How others will see it. Nosferatu ranks among the best known and influential silent-era movies. At imdb.com, it has more than 80K user votes, and a lofty user rating of 8.0 out of 10. The ratings are consistent except for a drop-off to 7.3 among women over 45, who presumably dislike Ellen's death.
The user reviews heap praise upon the movie, especially the striking appearance of Count Orlok and Murnau's masterful building of the sinister atmosphere. Little mention is made of Sunrise, Murnau's other celebrated silent film, in which Margaret Livingston, Janet Gaynor, and George O'Brien play characters with respective parallels to Orlok, Ellen, and Hutter.
How I felt about it. Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula" is public domain today, but that was not the case when Nosferatu was made, as the novel was then only a quarter-century old. Nonetheless, the film more or less plagiarizes "Dracula." There are obvious parallels between Orlok and Dracula, Hutter and Harker, Ellen and Mina, Knock and Renfield. The castle visit by the businessman, the ghost ship, the manipulations and attacks by Orlok/Dracula on Ellen/Mina, the many coffins filled with dirt, are all taken from the book.
But there are differences. Major supporting characters, such as Van Helsing and Lucy, are absent. This simplifies the story, appropriate for its adaptation to film. Nosferatu adds story elements absent from the novel, including a plague and Ellen's dawn sacrifice to kill the vampire. That did not prevent the Stoker estate from suing the production, and attempting to destroy all prints of the movie. Fortunately, a few survived.
It has been noted that Orlok is not only the first cinematic Dracula, but also the ugliest. Future screen bloodsuckers became increasingly handsome, culminating in Frank Langella's 1979 casting. Orlok is so physically exaggerated that he is more amusing than scary, thus we have to give the nod to creepy Bela Lugosi as the best characterization of Dracula.
One shouldn't wonder, I suppose, how Orlok obtains the funds to purchase a house in a German village, how Knock became Orlok's love slave, why Orlok wants to kill off his food supply via a plague, why Orlok is specifically obsessed with Ellen, how Hutter survives his passage on the ghost ship, why Ellen stays with friends during Hutter's absence as if she is a child that must be looked after, or why Orlok wants to leave the safety of his castle in the first place. Typical of horror films, you must go with the flow, culminating in the requisite climactic confrontation between the monster (Orlok) and the hot young woman (Ellen).