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As one who would rather seize through dusty attics than the *New Arrivals!* part of Blockbuster for a film to gawk, this for me was a rare treat. I thoroughly enjoyed sitting in a theatre with other people who had seen, or at least heard of, FF Murnau’s wonderfully creepy film.
With the double whammy of being shadowy and white and soundless, the film might be at Blockbuster, maybe one copy, but probably a cheap one, badly reproduced, fair reinforcing people’s stereotyping of still films. I hope Shadow of the Vampire keeps rental copies of Nosferatu hopping.
And it fair may, because it’s a substantial film. Max Shreck, the actor playing the Nosferatu, is a valid vampire. FF Murnau is a symbolic bloodsucker, slurping his actors dry, thinking only of the film.
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In addition to being a sizable vampire film, this is a huge period fragment. Sometimes 21st century audiences need reminding that even though Nosferatu is station in Victorian times, it was made in the 1920’s. I acquire the Victorian atmosphere is well done, honest because I don’t peep any evidence of 1922. At any rate, an era that is viewed as innocent by both us in 2001, and the cast of the film in 1922 is recreated. This is indispensable, because the 20’s themselves were a not-so-innocent time. So we have a period allotment within a period share, still and challenging.
The atmospheric achieve of the film is so grand, I wish the cameraman would give lessons. The color of the film is unbelievable. Although gore is restrained, the entire film looks as though it was shot through a vial of blood. There is a creepiness, but not the sort that you feel at a dwelling alien or slasher movie, waiting for the moment that the monster is finally shown in plump belief. The creepiness here is the kind you glean when you create a base turn and pick up yourself in a outlandish neighborhood, where people dress oddly, the buildings are in an weird style, and the more you try to derive your device, the more lost you become.
The performances are safe, and this is all around a film worth watching, even for people who don’t like apprehension films.
SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE belongs to a appealing subgenre of anxiety cinema: dramatized speculations on the inspirations of true-life dismay artists. THE SPECTRE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE told a wildly fictionalized chronicle of splattery tragedies that would sigh Poe’s work. GOTHIC similarly dramatized a night of debauchery suffered by Mary Shelley that would inspire her FRANKENSTEIN. GODS AND MONSTERS fictionalized the final weeks of James Whale’s retirement, unruffled disturbed by the personal demons informing BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN: World War One’s trench warfare and Britain’s class system.
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Of the above films, GOD AND MONSTERS hews nearest historic facts, whereas SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE veers to the opposite obscene, tossing aside history in a brilliantly imaginative, revisionist retelling of the making of F.W. Murnau’s classic vampire film, NOSFERATU (1922) .
In NOSFERATU, German character actor Max Schreck played the vampire, Count Orlock. So compelling was Schreck as Orlock, and so completely did he subsume himself in the roll, that his career was destroyed by subsequent typecasting. (A accepted risk for actors, one that ended the career of Karen Lynn Gorney after SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER) . SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE posits that the reason for Schreck’s compelling performance was that … it was no performance. Schreck was a vampire, and his “makeup” was his true face.
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It’s an though-provoking concept, sublimely executed. SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE opens with Murnau (played by John Malkovich), shooting his final scene in Germany, without Orlock. No one on his region knows yet who will play Orlock. Murnau informs them that he’s found an obscure Device actor who’s craft requires him to always be “in character.” Thus, this mystery actor (named Max Schreck, played by Willem Defoe), will always be in makeup, and will only shoot at night.
The film company travels to the set in Czechoslovakia, where all are impressed with Schreck’s “realism,” even as they judge he carries it too far. Such as when he goes overboard in attacking his co-star, or drinking a bat’s blood. Murnau must control Schreck during the duration of the shoot, cajoling and bribing and threatening, at least until he has “his shot” and everything is “in the can.”
John Malkovich’s portrayal of Murnau is 90% perfect, but is hobbled to the extent that he plays a stereotype: the tyrannical, jackbooted, thick-accented German film director. Neither Malkovich, nor Merhige, nor Katz, do enough to raise the film’s Murnau above this stereotype. One thing they might have done is lose the accents; since everyone in the film (except Orlock/Schreck) is German, there was no need for disagreement. All could have spoken standard American English. But SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE does microscopic to contravene Teuton stereotypes, and the result is that Malkovich’s Murnau is nearly perfect, rather than perfect.
Malkovich’s Murnau also overlaps with a related stereotype: the director as manipulative deceiver. This broader (and not necessarily German) stereotype is similar to the first, but without the accent or pre-World War Two milieu. It evokes Peter O’Toole’s manipulative director in THE STUNT MAN, who lies and connives and blackmails to accumulate his shots. John Vernon in the Canadian slasher film CURTAINS also fits this category.
Willem Defoe offers the film’s standout performance as the vampire Orlock/Schreck. Dafoe’s vampire is feral yet sympathetic, brutish yet poignant. He pines over a photo of the film’s leading lady (Greta, played by Catherine McCormack), implying a romantic heart; yet later pounces on her, slurping her blood as the animal he is.
Vampires are usually depicted as either alluring romantics or repugnant beasts. To his astronomical credit, Defoe successfully blends the two personas. His Orlock simultaneously inspires both our revulsion and sympathy. Defoe’s Orlock compares favorably to Karloff’s Frankenstein monster: both creatures are physically abhorrent, yet beneath their ugliness, we detect wound, self-loathing, and a desire for a nobler existence. Orlock relates his descent from past worthiness, expressing his self-revulsion at what he has become.
Seeing Defoe in makeup and character, it’s hard to occupy he was Jesus in THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST — the most “human” and multi-dimensional Jesus I’ve yet seen on film, the only cinematic Jesus one could record to [until the intellectual THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST]. Defoe also portrayed a genteel and guilt-ridden T.S. Eliot in Tom & Viv, and a memorably chilling biker/sadist in STREETS OF FIRE (another of my personal well-liked films) . Defoe’s range is worthy.
Great villains fabricate for stout scare films. Villains that are morally ambiguous, who confound us by simultaneously evoking our sympathy (or at least, our empathy) and our dislike. Dafoe’s Orlock is that, yet arguably Murnau is the proper monster. He has bribed Orlock with Greta, who Orlock may have once they do their scenes. It’s unclear whether Murnau initially intends to sacrifice Greta for art’s sake, but it’s intimated the possibility was on Murnau’s mind from the inaugurate. Greta’s life is certainly no priority. Murnau would readily sacrifice his cast and crew, and betray Orlock, to glean his precious shots. Murnau continues filming his crew’s deaths rather than intervene, considerable in the manner of war correspondents.
Indeed, Murnau’s callousness might in portion be explained by his living in a Europe composed traumatized by World War One, aside for the fact that the war and its after-effects are curiously absent in SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE. No hint of the war’s human, financial, and political costs that burdened Germany in 1922. This is no irrelevant omission. Most film critics contain German expressionist cinema was influenced by the war. [See David J. Skal's THE MONSTER Exhibit.]
The standout scene is also Defoe’s, and will likely be remembered as one of those classic scenes in cinema that everyone recalls. (And proof of the poignant beauty of fear.) Orlock had earlier told Murnau that what he desires most is to inspect the sun again. After everyone has left the residence, Orlock wanders to the film projector, gazes into the lens, and cranks the film. He sees a shot of a ship sailing with the sun leisurely it. Orlock is mesmerized, gazing into the lens, recalling all that he has lost, and how far he has fallen.
Willem Defoe deserves noteworthy credit, but credit is also due to director E. Elias Merhige, and screenwriter Steven Katz. Reportedly, this was one of those scripts that had been shuttled about for years before someone actually filmed it.
The film’s title seems arbitrary. Orlock pines for the sun, and his lack of reflection in a mirror provides for a minor station point, but there’s nothing especially indispensable about his shadow. Perhaps “shadow” is intended as a metaphor? The shadow of film’s influence on the future? (Murnau speaks of film memory.) But if there’s a metaphor to “shadow,” it’s unclear, and apparently not crucial. This film could objective as easily have been called something else.
Udo Kier is likable as Murnau’s producer, a dissimilarity to Kier’s sleazy Satanist in Waste OF DAYS. Catherine McCormack’s Greta is debauched, shrewish, and thinly sketched, so we don’t remarkable care if Orlock desanguinates her.
A historical note: the Bram Stoker estate successfully sued NOSFERATU’s producers for infringing Dracula’s copyright. All prints were ordered destroyed, but NOSFERATU survived, so there’s no excuse for a scare film fan not to have seen the new. SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE is worth seeing in any event, but you may enjoy it more if you first contemplate NOSFERATU and review its history.
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