Nosferatu 2024 Beat Sheet

Nosferatu opens with a girl calling into the dark and ends with a woman calling into it again. Everything a Save the Cat! beat sheet measures – catalyst, midpoint, all-is-lost, finale – sits between those two summonses, so the structure is a distance between two identical acts. Robert Eggers’ shooting script draws on Henrik Galeen’s 1922 screenplay and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and it runs two stories at once: Thomas Hutter’s commission in the Carpathians and Ellen Hutter’s covenant in Wisburg. This beat sheet anchors all 15 beats to the printed page of that script, so a writer can open the document and check the placement. In short, every claim below has a page number.

How to read the page markers

Page markers cite the printed page numbers of the 24 May 2023 shooting script, revision pages included. Where a beat spans several pages, the heading names the landing page first, then the description gives the run. The beats appear in Save the Cat! order, while the script’s own order is noted where the two diverge.

The Nosferatu 2024 script this beat sheet uses

The document is the Final Draft shooting script for production #04193, titled Nosferatu by Robert Eggers, with a draft history printed on its title page: White Draft 11/11/22, Blue Draft 06/12/22, Pink Draft 15/02/23, Shooting Script 24/05/23. Blue and Pink revision pages are stamped in the header, so a reader can also see which scenes were still moving three months before cameras rolled. The players page then lists eight principals – Orlok, Ellen, Thomas, Friedrich and Anna Harding, Dr. Sievers, Herr Knock and Professor Von Franz – and sets the story in Wisburg, Germany, 1838. The script spells the city Wisburg and Knock’s map reads Transilvania; so this beat sheet keeps the script’s spellings.

Scene numbers run to 169 with a handful of omitted slugs and eight A-pages (16A, 17A, 18A, 52A, 56A, 71A, 75A and 101A), which is why the printed page count ends at 108 while the PDF runs longer. So all page markers below refer to the printed number in the top-right corner of each page.

Beats 1-5

Act One: Setup (Beats 1-5)

Act One establishes a young marriage that is financially strained and emotionally pure, and a household that already has something supernatural living in it. Thomas wants money, a house and a position, while Ellen wants Thomas to stay. The script’s economy is ruthless: the prologue states the contract, the dream states the theme, and the commission arrives before the honeymoon glow has faded.

1. Opening Image – p. 1

A teenage Ellen kneels at the edge of her bed in fervent prayer, calling for a guardian angel, a spirit of comfort, anything. A voice answers in an ancient, indecipherable language, and then a massive shadow fills the window. She walks into it, is embraced by it, and levitates as it tells her she is not for the living. Next, on p. 2, she swears herself to it in the garden, the embrace turns to attack, and the title card lands over her seizing in the dirt. The film’s first image is not Thomas or Orlok; it is a vow.

2. Theme Stated – p. 9-10

Ellen insists on telling Thomas her dream: their wedding, not in a chapel but under a thundercloud, lilacs strong in the rain, and Death waiting at the altar in Thomas’s place. When the vows are done everyone is dead, and she has never been so happy. Thomas calls it a foolish dream, just like her past fancies. The theme – that her desire and her destruction are the same appetite – is stated as a nightmare and dismissed as one. The script still pays the dream off literally: the lilacs return as her crown on p. 106.

3. Set-Up – p. 10 (stretch p. 3-14)

The set-up lands at the Harding house on p. 10, where everything Thomas wants is on display; the stretch runs p. 3-14. The Hutter bedroom is cute and aspirational, new furnishings disguising the shabbiness underneath, while Thomas ties his cravat and announces that today is of the utmost importance for them. After that, Knock’s agency, rain, a bouquet of lilacs. Then the Harding house on p. 10-13: Harding’s brandy, his crushing responsibility, two daughters and a third child on the way; Thomas admits he envies him. Ellen snips a lock of hair into a heart-shaped locket on p. 13, and meanwhile, on p. 14, Knock kneels naked inside a heptagram and reports to his lordship that the object of the contract is near. So every character who will matter is on the board by p. 14.

4. Catalyst – p. 5-7

Knock has been dealing with a foreign count of very old nobility who wishes to retire to Wisburg and has already chosen Grünewald Manor, a ruin. But the count will not come to sign, so Thomas must journey to him, east of Bohemia, into the Carpathians. If he secures the account, Thomas gets his official position in the firm. Thomas notices strange documents on the desk dripping with red wax seals before Knock slides them away. The name arrives as the last word on p. 7: Orlok. Rain then begins on the window.

5. Debate – p. 9 (stretch p. 8-10 and 14-15)

The debate belongs to Ellen, but she loses it. First, in the parlour, she tells Thomas to throw the lilacs out, tells him he cannot leave, tells him the dream. He answers with the plan: when he returns he will finally make something of himself, a fine house, a maidservant. Later, at dawn on p. 14, she kisses the locket and fastens it to his watch chain, extracts a promise to write every day, and on p. 15 he tells her it is all for them. The question is never settled; instead it is overruled by the mortgage.

Beats 6-10

Act Two, Part A: Action and Midpoint (Beats 6-10)

The first half of Act Two runs two stories in parallel. Thomas rides into folklore, a hostile inn, a staking in a birch grove, a castle with no servants and a host who covets his blood. Meanwhile Ellen, left at the Harding house, begins to feel the pull of what he is meeting. The script cross-cuts them a page at a time on p. 35-36, yet it keeps the two stories in separate countries until the Midpoint puts Orlok, Thomas and Ellen in the same city on the same night.

6. Break into Two – p. 15

Thomas mounts his horse and rides off into the misty dawn while Ellen holds on to her premonition. Scene 17 sends him out past the last of Wisburg into open country, windmills turning in unison and glowing from the eastern horizon he is heading toward. Two weeks later, in the same page, he crests a mountain into a Transylvanian valley at dusk. So the new world is entered in a single page.

7. B Story – p. 25-28

The B story is Ellen’s, and it carries the theme. She is the left-behind story from the moment Thomas rides off on p. 14-15; the beat articulates itself on p. 25-28. On p. 25 she takes her wedding dress out of a trunk and buries her face in it; Anna asks why she brought it. She wants a letter that arrived yesterday to arrive again. On p. 28, walking among iron grave markers at the estuary, she asks Anna whether she ever feels that she is not a person, as if she were at the whim of another, like a doll someone else breathes life into. Anna offers God; Ellen smiles instead and changes the subject to the sky.

8. Fun and Games – p. 31 (stretch p. 16-38)

The promise of the premise is a gothic pilgrimage, and the script delivers it in full: an innkeeper who tells Thomas he brings trouble with him, a Roma man laughing at him from the porch, a corpse exhumed and staked in a birch grove on p. 18, a rooster crow that ends a night he cannot account for, the Árnyék Pass, a coach that stops at a crossroads. Then the castle: a dinner where Orlok’s bloodlust is barely held in check, a covenant signed on p. 31 while something inside Thomas screams not to sign, the locket taken on p. 32, the crypt on p. 33, and the feeding on p. 35-37 – Orlok drinking from Thomas while the script cross-cuts to Ellen sleepwalking in Wisburg – until Thomas, half dead, leaps from the tower on p. 38. In short, Thomas gets exactly the adventure Knock sold him.

9. Midpoint – p. 63-66

A false victory wrapped around a raised stake. Ellen breaks her trance on p. 64 – he is here – and runs into the storm, where Thomas tumbles off a horse in her street, dressed in eastern garb and half dead. She seems herself again; Anna will call it a miracle on p. 67.

Yet the same night the Empusa is driven into the harbour, Knock kills his orderly and escapes, and a dockhand names the ship a plague ship. On p. 65 Knock ferries the coffin to Grünewald Manor, and on p. 66 Orlok states the rule that governs the finale: the compact commands that she re-pledge her vow willingly; she cannot be stolen. That one line converts a monster into a plot. Still, the covenant on p. 31 is Thomas’s personal point of no return; p. 63-66 is the structural centre, and at 59 percent of the script it lands late by the book.

10. Bad Guys Close In – p. 77 (stretch p. 67-91)

The beat lands on p. 77, the ultimatum; the stretch is the whole Wisburg plague. Rats fill the streets on p. 67. Von Franz then puts a leech on his own hand on p. 71 and names the plague in its most rapidly fatal form. The first of Orlok’s three nights falls on p. 75-77: he manifests at Ellen’s bedside, tells her that her husband covenanted her away for a sack of gold, and when she says she abhors him he sets the terms – three nights, submit or Thomas dies. Anna is bitten by p. 79.

After that, Harding sends the Hutters home on p. 80 and throws Von Franz out on p. 86. Ellen then confesses to Thomas on p. 87-88, and from p. 88 Orlok’s shadow speaks through her: the stopped letters, the gold, the house, the debt, and on p. 90 the line that Thomas could never please her as he could. So the bad guys close in from inside the marriage.

Beats 11-13

Act Two, Part B: Despair and Payoff (Beats 11-13)

The second half of Act Two is where the Midpoint’s false victory is taken apart. Thomas is home, yet he can barely walk. Harding has expelled the Hutters and the professor. Von Franz admits on p. 84 that he has never met a Nosferatu and does not know how to kill one. Then the deaths arrive, so the only character with a plan is the one nobody will listen to.

11. All Is Lost – p. 92-93

The whiff of death is not a whiff. First, on p. 92, Anna wakes to her children crying and cannot rouse Harding; on p. 93 Orlok drops the girls’ bodies from his claws and takes their mother. The funeral then follows in the same page: one black casket, two white ones, leafless lindens, Harding a broken man and possibly infected. So everything the Midpoint gave back is gone, and the film’s rational men – the doctor, the merchant, the professor – have run out of moves. The one move left is on p. 92, the same night, before the children die: Von Franz reads in Knock’s book that a maiden’s willing sacrifice broke the curse, and says she is the way.

12. Dark Night of the Soul – p. 93-97

At the cemetery Harding goes for Von Franz, but Thomas holds him back on a cane and then tears open his shirt to show the bite on p. 95. In the sealed coach on p. 95-97 the men plan a raid on Grünewald Manor: sanctify the earth, destroy the sarcophagus, drive cold iron through him. Ellen asks the only question that matters – what if it does not work – and Von Franz answers on p. 97 that iron will not do it and that only she can redeem them. The script gives her the beat without a speech, because by the time she asks to walk the professor to his door she has decided.

13. Break into Three – p. 97-98

Break into Three is the conspiracy, not the discovery; Von Franz has had the answer since p. 92. On the professor’s doorstep Ellen asks why her. Von Franz tells her she was born to this world and that in a modern age her purpose is of greater worth than a priestess of Isis. He then promises to keep her husband at bay and names the plan: a false hunt. On p. 98, with the city outside her window reduced to coffins and rats, she makes Thomas promise not to return until Orlok is no more. The script calls the promise a loving deceit. She also knows the embrace is their last.

Beats 14-15

Act Three: Resolution (Beats 14-15)

Act Three runs the A story and the B story on parallel tracks one last time and lets the A story fail on purpose. Thomas, Sievers and Von Franz hunt a coffin that is empty, because its occupant has been invited elsewhere. The film’s climax is two people in a bedroom and a rooster.

14. Finale – p. 106 (stretch p. 99-107)

The false hunt gets a full sequence. First, on p. 101, the men find Harding dead in the family tomb, holding Anna, and burn their friends’ bodies before drifting down the canal. The chapel at Grünewald Manor is carpeted in rats; the sarcophagus holds Knock, not Orlok, and Von Franz sets the fire laughing that there is no remission without her blood. Thomas realises the professor knew, so he runs. Cross-cut: Ellen at the window in her wedding dress, dried lilacs crowning her hair, p. 106. Orlok then climbs the stairs, asks whether she accepts of her own will, and she says the words from her dream. He bites; she holds him; on p. 107 the rooster crows and he begins to rise, and she guides him back and asks for more.

15. Final Image – p. 108

Sunlight rakes across Orlok and obliterates him. Thomas and Sievers burst in, but too late; Ellen and Thomas exchange one last look of love as she and Orlok die together. Von Franz then enters, scatters lilacs over the two bodies, and Greta the cat leaps into his arms. The script’s last description of Ellen’s face: calm, beatific, finally at peace. The girl on p. 1 called something to her bed; the woman on p. 108 has called it again and ended it. So the opening and closing images are the same act, separated by knowledge.

For writers

Why The Nosferatu 2024 Beat Sheet is Essential for Writers.

Three lessons carry over to any script that has to make an internal wound physical: how the script merges its two shadows, how it lets the protagonist’s goal fail so the B story can win, and how it staggers its emotional and literal low points. Eggers’ own commentary track also runs alongside as a production companion – by his account it is about craft rather than dramaturgy, which is exactly why the beat sheet is useful next to it.

Mastering the Internal vs. External Shadow

Ellen’s childhood summons is the internal wound, while Orlok arriving in Wisburg is the same wound made physical. The script merges the two in stages rather than in one reveal: the page-by-page cross-cut on p. 35-36, where Orlok drinks from Thomas while Ellen sleepwalks in the Harding house; the Midpoint on p. 63-66, where both stories land in one city; and the Finale, where she must embrace the external monster to close the covenant she made as a girl. On the commentary Eggers describes the Orlok-Ellen relationship as a demon-lover dynamic in the Heathcliff mould – obsession that wants to destroy what it wants – and the beat sheet shows where that obsession is converted into mechanics: a covenant (p. 31), a rule (p. 66), a clock (p. 77).

A Universal Blueprint for Epic Tragedy

Thomas fails his stated goal. In the end there is no position, no house, no maidservant; Ellen lists everything he left for on p. 89 and asks where it is. His Act Three is a decoy hunt that the professor designed to keep him busy. Instead, the character who wins the climax is the B story’s, and she wins it by submitting. The pivots are legible on the page: Break into Two on p. 15 sends the protagonist after a tangible goal, the Midpoint on p. 63-66 brings the abstract threat to his door, and Break into Three on p. 97-98 hands the wheel to the B story. A tragedy that wants its protagonist to survive with knowledge rather than victory can copy that shape.

Hitting Emotional Peaks with Precision

The script staggers its low point. First, the emotional All Is Lost is the confession and argument on p. 87-91, where Ellen repeats Orlok’s version of her marriage and Thomas hears that he sold her. The literal All Is Lost – the Harding children and Anna – follows on p. 92-93. Eggers singles out that argument on the commentary as a late-Act-Two scene where subtext becomes text, a kind of scene he says he enjoys writing. Separating the two lets the deaths land on a marriage that has already broken, which is why Dark Night of the Soul on p. 93-97 can be quiet and Break into Three on p. 97-98 can be a walk to a doorstep. In short, one beat does not have to be one scene.

Questions

Nosferatu 2024 Beat Sheet FAQ

The script

The beats

The structure