Metro Pulse/Shadow of the Vampire

Movie Guru Rating:
Meditative (3 out of 5)

Comment
on this review

Vampire sinks teeth into horror's soul

by Lee Gardner

Almost every vampire film ever made asks the viewer to suspend disbelief and accept the possibility that bloodsucking undead creatures walk the earth. Shadow of the Vampire takes the premise one step further. Director E. Elias Merhige (the auteur behind 1991's cult horror flick Begotten) focuses his lens on German director F. W. Murnau's 1922 silent film Nosferatu and asks, "What if the man playing one of cinema's earliest and most indelible vampires wasn't acting?"

It's not difficult to see where screenwriter Steven Katz came up with his premise. Murnau's Nosferatu is a screen classic in large part because of Max Schreck's eerie portrayal of the title character. No suave seducer, Murnau's vision of Bram Stoker's Count Dracula (who was renamed Count Orlock in the original production to circumvent Stoker's estate) is a gaunt, unearthly being with a bulbous bald head, pointed ears, rat-like fangs, talons for fingers, and stark, staring eyes. Murnau, who died in 1931 and is commonly capsulated as "enigmatic," cast the eerily monikered Schreck ("schreck" is German for "terror"), who made few other films that survive and who died in 1936. The director's skill and the actor's uncanny, out-of-nowhere performance provide ample opportunity for suspended disbelief even now, provided the room is dark.

To those working on Merhige's fictional Nosferatu, Schreck (Willem Dafoe) is just one of those newfangled Method actors taking himself a bit too seriously, appearing for work only in make-up, in character, on location, and after dark. Murnau (John Malkovich), obsessed with making the most realistic vampire film ever, transfers his production from decadent Berlin to an isolated patch of darkest Eastern Europe to shoot scenes with his Count. But things quickly get a bit too real on the set as the star bypasses the 1920s version of the craft services table to dine on the cast and crew. Murnau's full role in this misadventure becomes clear when it is revealed that he has promised Schreck co-star Greta Schroeder (Braveheart's Catherine McCormack) as warm-blooded back-end pay for a good performance.

While Malkovich's Murnau is willing to sacrifice anything for a realistic vampire film, Merhige's goals for Shadow are less clear cut. Certain scenes, such as Schreck/ Orlock's first appearance inside a ruined castle, are genuinely creepy. Dafoe also manages to bring a drop of genuine pathos to his character as a terrible creature reduced to terrible circumstances; the scene in which Murnau's dailies show Schreck the first sunrise he's seen for centuries is an underplayed jewel. But Shadow is also played as a bit of a farce, allowing the camp factor to work its way in. And as any vampire fan knows, camp is as deadly to a believable movie vampire as a wooden stake.

Dafoe preserves his character's dignity, even as the filmmakers make him snatch a bat from mid-air and drain it like a Mickey's Big Mouth, but most of the rest of the cast heads straight for the canteens and tent pegs. Veteran German actor/cult star Udo Kier, who plays producer Albin Grau, appears to have become inherently campy onscreen; sadly, Malkovich seems headed for the same fate. Maybe he's just miscast here, but his take on Murnau's imperiousness and monomania comes off as mere peevishness and pique. Cary Elwes shows up late in the film and offers no help as libertine cinematographer Fritz Wagner. McCormack and British comedian Eddie Izzard (as real-life scenery-chewing Nosferatu star Gustav von Wangenheim) are the only cast members besides Dafoe who manage to act without winking or rolling their eyes. They must have been afraid to take their gaze off the huge, hastily patched holes in Katz's plot, for fear of falling in.

By the time the film and its fictional production rolls around to the final scene—wherein Orlock is supposed to put the bite on Greta's character and be extinguished by the break of day—it's been made hit-over-the-head clear that Murnau is the villain of the piece. In that sense, Shadow of the Vampire is the anti-Ed Wood, a movie about a real monster behind the camera of a monster movie, and wherein there is something to the notion of filmmaker as bogeymen. Horror films are the modern-day equivalent of the old folk tales that spawned vampires in the first place, and filmmakers are the ones responsible for the fearsome visions that stalk us in our heads when we find ourselves alone and afraid in the dark. Flawed and uneven as it is, Shadow offers a potent meditation on the power of film as an obsession, as a recorder and transmitter of dreams, and as a provider of eternal life. After all, Max Schreck has been dead for decades, but the movies enable him to rise from his coffin and walk every night, on some screen somewhere.