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Murnau never loses his themes in phantasmagoria — science and economics underpin the film’s horror. On some level, this is a parable about gentrification. A real-estate agent (Dracula’s Harker, here called Hutter, played by Gustav von Wagenheim) brings the wealthy Count Orlok — Nosferatu (Max Schreck) — into his neighborhood, which Nosferatu devastates. The film’s Van Helsing character (John Gottowt) lectures his students in a biology class, and we see microscope views of predatory life forms. "This one . . . clear . . . almost bodiless . . . almost a phantom," intones the professor in the intertitles. The dark world he leads us into is predatory, dream-like, hidden but real. Murnau created a bridge between the two. (And indeed, bridges appear throughout his work.)

Die Finanzen des Großherzogs/The Grand Duke’s Finances (1924; October 2 at 9 p.m. at the HFA), Murnau’s one comedy, travels Lubitsch territory in a decidedly Murnavian way. Sunlight streams into this island movie and combines with Murnau’s agile use of large-scale city sets and his love of ships and trolleys to set the stage for Sunrise. Duke Ramon XII (Harry Liedtke, a Lubitsch actor who’s a dead ringer for Bill Clinton), ruler of the Mediterranean kingdom of Abacco, must secure marriage to a Russian countess before his island goes bankrupt and falls to revolution. The film is frenetic and winning. Alfred Abel, the industrialist from Metropolis, is a standout in the cast as a suave thief named Philipp Collins.

Abel is a desperate poet in 1922’s Phantom (October 7 at 2:15 p.m. and October 9 at 10:30 a.m. at the MFA), a melodrama that uses another impressive city set. At one point in the film, this set begins to collapse around Abel and, yes, pursue him down a street. Abel’s whole life here is a traffic accident; he’s struck twice by a carriage like the one in Nosferatu. What starts as a glossy, somewhat unfelt tale of pity evolves into a self-aware melodrama in which a sister says to her brother, "We’re lost, both of us. We’ve fallen under the wheels of fate." Family drama is also at the heart of 1922’s Der brennende Acker/The Burning Soil (October 2 at 7 p.m. at the HFA), which is about grasping for oil rights in a place called "The Devil’s Field." Here, fire replaces plague, and for once the tinting in silent movies comes off as dramatic rather than nostalgic. Like so much of Murnau, this German film predicts American cinema yet to come. It’s a better film than Giant.

Murnau was always fortunate in his collaborators. The cinematographers, screenwriters, and set designers he worked with in Germany at Ufa and elsewhere were among the best the cinema had in the 1920s. In Emil Jannings, despite the hamminess, he had an actor of real power. Jannings’s performance as the doorman in Der letzte Mann/The Last Laugh (1924; October 2 at noon at the MFA; October 9 at 7 p.m. and October 10 at 9 p.m. at the HFA) is one of the greatest in movies. Because of its ending, this film’s reputation has waned a little. It shouldn’t have. The ending is shocking, both parodistic and eerie, and Murnau uses his newly mobile camera to show the audience itself, a device he uses again in Tartuffe (1926; October 7 at 6:30 p.m. at the MFA), also with Jannings. Faust (1926; October 8 at 7 p.m. at the HFA; October 10 at 2 p.m. at the MFA), with Jannings in various incarnations of the Devil, is the culmination of Murnau’s German career. It’s his most bravura film, overflowing and cosmic.

Sunrise (1927; October 7 at 4:40 p.m. and October 8 at 8 p.m. at the MFA; October 10 at 4 p.m., October 11 at 9 p.m., and October 13 at 7 p.m. at the HFA) and City Girl (1930; October 7 at 8:15 p.m. at the MFA), the two American films that survive of the three Murnau made, are arguably his best. Sunrise is a film encrusted by trivia: it was a huge success when it came out but still lost money because it was the most expensive film Fox had made up to that time; Janet Gaynor won the first Oscar for it (and for two other films); the set was enormous; the moving-camera shots were extraordinary. The film still stuns. It’s perhaps the best introduction to silent cinema for the uninitiated. It changed the movies in a way that wouldn’t happen again until Citizen Kane. City Girl is the series’s revelation. Without these films, John Ford and Terence Malick would have been impossible, just as Ingmar Bergman could not have existed without Murnau’s German films. Malick’s Days of Heaven is a virtual remake of City Girl, but the relevance and beauty of Murnau’s films do not depend in any way on movies they influenced. The way the lonely, unassuming he achieved this level of mastery remains a little enigmatic.

Tabu (1931; October 8 at 6:15 p.m. at the MFA; October 11 at 7 p.m. and October 13 at 9 p.m. at the HFA) was planned as a collaboration with the documentarist Robert Flaherty, but Murnau and Flaherty parted after shooting began in Tahiti. The film was made using non-actors in natural locations in the South Pacific. More than any novel about the South Seas, it is like a dream, echoing Nosferatu at every turn, mythic in a true sense, as if in a myth described by Claude Lévi-Strauss. This tragic exotica made without the support of a studio shows that Murnau could invent anywhere with whatever means he had. At Ufa, they used to say that he "had a camera for a head." Tabu — the result of two years’ effort — seems made inside the director’s mind and projected directly onto the screen. Where Murnau would’ve gone from there is anybody’s guess.