Nosferatu

Alchemy begins in the nigredo, the blackening, the encounter with putrefaction and death that the substance must pass through before it can be reborn. Orlok is the nigredo made flesh, corruption personified, and the town cannot transmute him because it will not look at him directly. Only Ellen understands the operation. The Book tells her that the vampire can be destroyed if a woman pure of heart holds him at her side until the cock crows and the first light strikes him.

This is the alchemical marriage inverted into sacrifice. Ellen invites Orlok to her bed and keeps him there through the night, willingly, giving her body to death so the plague will lift from the town. When dawn breaks he dissolves into smoke and vanishing. She has performed the transmutation the men with their science and their crucifixes could not: she held the blackness in her own person until the light dissolved it. The base matter is redeemed, and the cost is her life. The stone is purchased with the vessel that made it.

Orlok travels to Wisborg in the hold of the Empusa, and by the time the ship drifts into harbor its entire crew is dead and the captain is lashed to the wheel. Below decks, rats pour out of the coffins of Transylvanian earth. This is the shadow's method exactly: it moves in the dark, in the cargo, in the part of the vessel no one inspects, and it arrives all at once when the conscious crew is already dead.

The town responds with denial and scapegoating, hunting Hutter's employer Knock as a madman while the real contagion spreads unseen. What a culture will not integrate consciously, it receives as epidemic. Wisborg does not defeat Orlok. One woman confronts him alone, in her own bedroom, in the middle of the night, because the shadow can only be met where it actually lives.