In Murnau's film, Jonathan travels through nature, past rugged mountains with bits of rocks scattered all about. Max Schreck is a thing derived from yet completely removed from nature. His count has a rat face and he moves around in fast scurrying movements, thanks to stop motion photography. He can rise out of his coffin as flat and fast as a board on a catapult. He fills the darkness in a doorway like no vampire that ever followed him could.
Nature has a major part in the film.
Oddly shaped mountains follow Jonathan's progress to Orlock's castle. One rock formation looks like a chimney and the Count's castle tops a mountain as if it was eroded out of the mountain rather than built atop it. One of the film's most disturbing elements is the rats that follow Orlock, that live in his coffins, that scatter when he leaves the ship, these clusters of rats that live in the dirt of coffins. But there are other disturbing images and elements, disturbing and silent. The ship, the Demeter, its crew now dead, moving smoothly on a bay still as glass.