Act 3 of F. W. Murnau's 1922 vampire film, Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, opens with the ill-fated Hutter (played by Gustav von Wangenheim) lying in a hospital bed. The real-estate agent has already completed his business with Count Orlok (Max Schreck) and made his departure from Orlok's Transylvanian castle, nestled in the Carpathian mountains. Meanwhile, Hutter's wife Ellen (Greta Schröter) remains in Wisborg, a small, fictionally-named port town, awaiting his safe return. During his stay with Orlok, Hutter was plagued by visions of the undead while asleep, of inanimate things becoming animate, and horrifying vampires lying in coffins. Frightened, he escaped Orlok's abode, but fell from a high window and was knocked unconscious.

As he lies recovering in the beginning of Act 3 of the film, a doctor remarks to a nurse: “He was brought to the hospital yesterday by farmers. They say he had fallen. He still has a fever …” As the film cuts back to Hutter, he begins to stir, evidently struggling with his nightmares. Suddenly, in a daze, he sits up and slowly stretches out his arm, pointing to the lower right of the film frame. Bewilderment and panic fill his face. The nurse attempts to calm him, but the hapless Hutter is possessed by a strange, unseen force that inspires him to utter a single word: “Coffins …” Following this great effort he falls back and returns to unconsciousness. An intertitle signals that, at this precise moment, other developments were taking place far away: “Nosferatu was coming. Danger was on its way to Wisborg. Professor Bulwer, a Paracelsian, who was investigating the secrets of nature and its unifying principles, told me about it: Caskets filled with dirt were loaded onto the double-masted schooner, Empusa.”

As if to instigate the cut to the intertitle, Hutter's strange exclamation is followed by a sequence that depicts Nosferatu drawing near to his home and wife. Murnau juxtaposes shots of this allegorical figure of death traveling to Wisborg, depicted by a single coffin carried over water on a raft, with other images showing several coffins unloaded from a ship onto the Wisborg docks.