Nosferatu is blasphemy, and a good one at that.

One of Nosferatu's biggest highlights is its ending, which manages to be both tragic and victorious at the same time. But the more I ponder, the more convinced I become that Satan won in the end and everyone else lost.

I think all of the characters were mere pawns in a game that Satan was playing for amusement. Ellen wanted company, so Satan sent her a demon that she would lust after. Orlok wanted immortality, so Satan turned him into a mockery of the idea of a human, once a powerful count reduced to a walking corpse and a slave to his temptation for a girl. Satan doesn’t care about Orlok; he is as disposable to Satan as Knock is to him. Satan just wanted to show that he can mess with the order that God intended as he pleases, and he did.

Orlok was the middle finger that Satan gave to God. Humankind was meant to be God's masterpiece, and Satan said, "Look what I've turned your masterpiece into", almost like Marcel Duchamp putting a moustache on Mona Lisa. He set out nonsensical rules as God does, such as Orlok needing Thomas to sign the divorce papers. Consummation is now a bloodsucking ritual. Light is supposed to be the source of life, but now it is a cause of death. The final scene is the picture that Satan wanted to paint; the dead and naked body of an innocent woman lying in her marital bed, holding the shriveled remains of a demon as her husband looked on.

And I bet Satan laughed hard when he saw what Friedrich did.