Summary
Hutter wakes up in the arms of a country nurse declaring, simply, "coffins!" We cut to a scene on a dock where workers are loading coffins onto a ship set to leave that night. One of the coffins is particularly light, so they open it to find it full of dirt. Trying to figure out what's in it, they dump the coffin over and rats tumble out. One of the rats bites one of the dock workers, but they seem generally undeterred from continuing to load the coffins on the ship.
We are then presented with a short tangent, where a Professor Bauer teaches his students about meat-eating plants, and we watch a Venus flytrap close around a fly unfortunate enough to crawl into its mouth. A funny counterpoint to this tangent is soon provided when we enter the jail cell where Knock has been locked up. There, mad as a loon, Knock plucks flies from the air and eats them, declaring, "Blood is life! Blood is life!" We cut back the Professor showing his students a parasitic polyp with tentacles, and then back to Knock who points to the wall and proclaims, "Spiders!" The guard ties this madman up.
Next, we visit the duney beach where Ellen sits, longing for her husband. She watches the still sea, surrounded by crosses planted in the sand. Her hosts deliver her the letter Hutter wrote from Orlok's castle, but it only distresses poor Ellen and she runs off. Again, we see that Ellen seems to have some strange intuitive ability, for when we cut back to the room where Hutter was being nursed, we see him fully dressed and declaring he must return home immediately. He is obviously in poor health. Hutter sets out with a horse. The ship carrying the coffins is shown sailing by day. This is what he must beat to Wisborg.
Back in the jail, we watch the guard sweep up Knock's quarters. Knock plucks a bulletin from the guard's pocket that tells of a deadly plague that has swept Transylvania. This delights Knock. We are then taken aboard that ship, where the captain is informed that someone below deck has fallen sick and delirious. That sick crew member sees the image of the Nosferatu appear for just a second, and recoils in terror.
We learn from a title card that soon an epidemic sweeps the entire crew, leaving just the captain and the ship's mate. They throw the last of these victims into his watery grave. While the captain stands despondent, the mate takes an axe below deck to hack open a coffin. It's teaming with rats! He continues hacking away, and quickly wakes the Nosferatu, who levitates our of his own coffin. The mate goes above deck and jumps off the ship in a fit of terror. The captain, as the sole survivor, ties himself to the ship's steering wheel. The captain watches the Nosferatu come above deck and beholds the creature with dread.
Ellen stands on the balcony outside her room at her hosts' house, reaching towards the moon in a trance. When the doctor's sister attends to her, Ellen says that Hutter is coming home and she must go to him. Now it's irrefutable that Ellen possesses some sort of psychic power.
She is not the only one who senses an important person is coming to town. We see Knock in his jail cell, trying to peer through the window between the bars, as he declares that his master is close. The ship pulls into the port and the Nosferatu emerges from below deck. When the guard comes into Knock's cell, Knock pounces and strangles the guard to death. With that, Knock escapes.
Analysis
The winding dream logic continues through this journey segment of the film, as the race to Wisborg that drives the narrative of this segment is interspersed with imagery of microorganisms, haunting beaches, and spiders. Again, Murnau is using editing to great effect here to create a sequence that feels particularly surreal. After all, the whole bit with Hutter somehow finding a horse to ride home and taking it through terrain we have yet to see in the film should come off as unrealistic, if not totally ridiculous, but instead it plays into the grand sense that this film is some sort of fever dream.
That fever dream is a funny one, narratively. It smashes together the maritime tales that were a staple of 18th-century literature with an occult fable and a historical drama about the black plague. We finally come to understand Count Orlok as a wicked force through the coffins full of rats he transports with himself, not by his acts of seduction and blood-drinking. Orlok's visage is plenty grotesque, for sure, but Murnau milks us for revulsion with those shots of rats crawling out of dirt and cracked coffins. It's hard not to recoil whenever those rats suddenly emerge.
This is really the sequence when Murnau pulls out all the stops as a horror director. We're treated to some of the rare special effects of the film. The Nosferatu fades in and out of existence during the sick crew members' fever, and levitates from his slumber when the ship's mates go down to inspect the coffins below deck. When we're trapped on that ship, we're among a crew who we know will not survive. The shocking special effect reveals Orlock's supernatural powers, and as we watch the ship drive towards land, we know exactly what curse it is about to deliver to Wisborg.
Murnau milks shots of the ship going in and out of the frame for every last drop of suspense. Again, here we see Murnau's employment of German Expressionist ideas through location shooting. As critic Lotte Eisner once remarked, "When Nosferatu is preparing for a departure in his courtyward, the use of unexpected angles gives the vampire's castle a sinister appearance. What could be more expressive than a long narrow street, hemmed between monotonous brick façades, seen from a high window, the bar of which crosses the image?"
But most notably here, Murnau builds his atmosphere of doom with his shots of water and shores. One of the most affecting shots in the movie is certainly Ellen sitting alone at the beach, mourning the absence of her dear Hutter. We see her solitary on a bench, surrounded by leaning crosses planted in the sand. The implication, likely, is this is a place where widows of sailors went to commemorate the departed, and we know through this shot that, indeed, all is already lost.
