of Uta Barneval; they have in fact killed Uta, who had shapeshifted to appear as Nosferatu. Upstairs, they locate the real Nosferatu in bed with Maria. Barneval ineffectively shoots him, and the shot goes through Nosferatu's back, severely injuring Maria. Nosferatu, enraged, kills Barneval's friends. While fleeing the villa, Barneval is lured into a garden by Helietta. Posing as Helietta, Nosferatu seduces Barneval before revealing that he had shapeshifted into her, and killing Barneval while showing his true form. Nosferatu leaves the villa with a nude Maria in his arms, walking along a Venice canal. Dying, Maria asks Nosferatu to turn her into a vampire. He apparently refuses, saying that doing so would be an eternal punishment, the same he has endured for centuries. They hold each other while Nosferatu keeps walking, and they eventually disappear in the morning mist, leaving both of their fates a mystery. Cast Production Development and pre-production In the mid-1980s, producer Augusto Caminito began producing horror and thriller films in Italy for foreign markets, such as Lucio Fulci's Murder Rock. Caminito was introduced to the script for Nosferatu in Venice by Carlo Alberto Alfieri who had written the screenplay and its original story with Leandro Lucchetti. The script was originally a sequel to Werner Herzog's film Nosferatu the Vampyre with Alfieri securing the star of that film, Klaus Kinski, to headline in this sequel. On December 17, 1985, Caminito and Kinski signed on for a two-film deal: Nosferatu in Venice and Paganini, the latter being a film Kinski had been working on getting produced since 1980. The film was initially to be directed by Maurizio Lucidi. Among the crew was Luigi Cozzi, who was a friend of Alfieri and worked on the set as a consultant and during post-production. Cozzi recounts that Caminito felt the film would be a bigger success with a larger budget and a better-known director. As a consequence, Caminito doubled the film's budget and fired Lucidi, who had only shot a few scenes without Kinski set at the Carnival of Venice in February 1986 . Caminito hired director Pasquale Squitieri and assembled a cast that included Christopher Plummer, Donald Pleasence, Barbara De Rossi, and Yorgo Voyagis. Squitieri re-wrote the script, setting it in the near future of 1996 Venice and hired a number of comic book artists to storyboard the film. Caminito found the storyboard to be "too baroque" and too