Bram Stoker’s Dracula begins with an unsettling journey. As Jonathan Harker crosses the Danube River, he remarks ominously, “The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.” Harker continues onward to Castle Dracula in Transylvania, “one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe.” Stoker, who never actually visited Eastern Europe, was surely thinking of Metternich’s famous aphorism: “East of Vienna, the Orient begins.”

Dracula’s portentous hints are positively restrained compared to the techniques of filmmaker David Eggers, whose recent adaptation of Nosferatu opens with an even stranger journey. When Thomas Hutter, the movie’s Harker stand-in, arrives in Transylvania in search of the mysterious Count Orlok, he spends his first night in a gypsy village. There he is greeted by exotically costumed locals, child beggars, and a suspicious innkeeper. At night, he witnesses a ceremonial vampire killing that recalls ancient pagan rites.