Suck
on This
SHADOW
OF THE VAMPIRE
From eccentricity and madness, movie vampires are born.
With John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe, Cary Elwes
Screenplay by Steven Katz
Directed by E. Elias Merhige
MADNESS! IT'S MADNESS! Crazy directors who hire insane actors. Insane actors who think they really are the vampires they play on screen. Cameramen who go catatonic when the actors suck their necks. Leading ladies jacked up on laudanum. Producers trapped between their crazy directors and their nervous financiers.
And yet, from all of this comes - ART!
Surprisingly, though, there are few unnecessary exclamation points in Shadow of the Vampire, an enjoyable movie, strictly for buffs, about the making of the 1921 German film Nosferatu, the cinema's first vampire movie and a silent screen masterpiece rivaled by few others. Nosferatu's touchstone director, F.W. Murnau, had wanted to film Dracula but couldn't get the rights from the estate of Bram Stoker. So he created his own rueful and sanguinary ghoul - and got sued by Stoker's widow for doing it.
And now E. Elias Merhige, an emerging American director with a most intriguing name, has treated us to a fanciful glimpse of what surely did not really happen to Murnau and his company during the making of their atmospheric classic. Merhige recreates scenes from the original Nosferatu with startling accuracy, and he directs his actors - some of them known for going way over the top - to cool and exacting cinematic performances.
Beautifully shot, historically interesting, and surprisingly eerie and thrilling for its swift 90 minute of screen time, Shadow of the Vampire offers more to enjoy than to annoy - and absolutely nothing original to say about making movies.
In fact, if you've seen David Mamet's State and Main, you’ll find all of Merhige's stock eccentrics. Murnau - portrayed with sinister savvy by John Malkovich - passionately believes in his art and knows just how to manipulate people into helping him create it. His star, Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe like you can't imagine), is just some guy he finds while scouting locations in a small German town - a guy so freakish and intense that he claims to be a vampire and will only appear before others in full costume, right down to his long, curved, clacking fingernails.
Murnau's diligent producer (the automatically creepy Udo Kier) straddles art and commerce precariously but with always good intentions. His cinematographer (Cary Elwes) is a debonair pretty-boy drug pusher. And his leading lady (Catherine McCormack of Braveheart) is a German stage star and drug addict who can't believe she agreed to take a role in a mere movie during the height of the Berlin theater season.
Yet Murnau convinces her, along with everyone else on his tense set, that they're taking part in something that will change the civilized world. "Our light will play across living faces that agonize," he says, reflecting on the bond between audience and image. When Schreck becomes especially temperamental, Murnau tries to salvage the picture by threatening him. But the nihilistic actor replies, "Tell me how you could harm me when even I don't know how I could harm myself?"
And therein comes another layer of irresistible film history: Half a century later, the mad German director Werner Hergoz would remake Nosferatu with his "best fiend," the even madder German actor Klaus Kinski. Legend claims that the pair came to blows many times, occasionally at the point of a gun.
The astute dialogue in Shadow of the Vampire pages through the last 30 years of modern cinema studies, reflecting with detached intelligence on the way scholars have come to look at film - ghostly tracings taken to be "real" - in the modern world: "The presence of an absence," the French theorist Christian Metz called them. As Shadow of the Vampire explores that consummate metaphor, Merhige’s film becomes another story we tell ourselves about the stories we tell ourselves, layered with ironic realities and shadowy lies.
Despite all this highfalutin intellect, Elwes' waggish character delivers the movie's sliest reminder of how much less than meets the eye there is to Mehrige's slick head trip. As his colleagues rant about the burgeoning madness of Murnau's production, Elwes says off-handedly, "It's the same on every picture." And of course, he's right: Even the sanest people in show business are way crazier than the rest of us.
Just how fanciful does Merhige get in creating his splendid cinemaphilia? One severely doubts that Schreck actually plucked a bat from the air and then slurped its blood like a midnight snack. Now and then you almost feel Shadow of the Vampire about to break unwittingly into a low-keyed chorus of Young Frankenstein, and Merhige's frantic climax is brazen silliness. But at the same time it's a useful reminder - whether intended or not I can't say - that his movie is a fabrication you don't want to take for real. Or "real." Madness!