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The opening text of Shadow of the Vampire is presented in an elegant rectangular frame, with art deco adornments on the sides. It reads: “Brilliant German filmmaker Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau is refused permission by Bram Stoker’s estate to film his novel Dracula . . . F. W. Murnau then creates the most realistic vampire film ever made and establishes himself amongst the greatest directors of all time”. Now as beloved and acclaimed as 1922's Nosferatu is, it has never been called "realistic". Realism was impossible to achieve during the silent movie era; the lack of spoken dialog demanded a very theatrical and stark performance. Those films look strange to modern eyes. Nosferatu's special effects are remarkable – for their day.
Plus, realism is impossible anyway, since - and I
hate to disappoint anybody reading - vampires do not exist.
Except, well, what if there were?
In Shadow of the Vampire, there is a vampire, and he’s a star, baby. In this fictional account of the filming of Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau (John Malkovich) is a perfectionist demanding an impossible level of verisimilitude. The German crew must go to a real castle to shoot, find real peasants as extras, and of course, cast a real vampire (Willem Dafoe) to be Count Orlok. We never learn the name of the creature Murnau casts, he is only called "Max Schreck" as a pretense of humanity. Dafoe is playing a horrible grubby monster man in Schreck/Orlok, disgusting the cast and crew, yet the director insists this is all merely an extreme case of going Method. Maybe the cover story would even work, if it were not for Schreck hungrily feasting on Murnau’s director of photography. "I’ll eat the script girl later."
I guess I do not need to tell you this, but Shadow of the
Vampire is not historically accurate. As far as I know, nobody was killed
during the production of Nosferatu. Every named person in this film who gets
eaten by Schreck lived on for decades. Max Schreck, who was as far as I know,
fully human, appeared in dozens of films until his death in 1936. Also, Shadow depicts Murnau filming his vampire at night, which
would have been an immense technical challenge for the time. I’m not sure that was possible at
all with 1922 film technology. The actual Nosferatu was shot Day for Night, and
is barely disguising the fact that Count Orlok is strolling out in the Sun.
Shadow of the Vampire is a more of a comedy than I thought it would be. I imagined a movie about obsession for art and the promise of an immortality entirely distinct from that of vampirism. And yes, those themes are here, but this is also a ridiculous story about a tough film shoot featuring a grotesque inhuman star. It is a lot of in-jokes about filmmaking, like when Murnau begrudgingly admits that he needs the movie's writer and Orlok can't eat him. Willem Dafoe is going so gross all the time, there's none of the unnatural grace of the original Max Schreck here, he's just a foul thing. This version is less speaking his lines than vomiting out his dialog. It looks like it was a lot of fun to play. So a lot of the movie is reaction shots and awkward pauses. In his first appearance, the Nosferatu is truly terrifying, stunning the crew to silence. But soon enough, he's just another kind of unruly actor to be managed by an exasperated director.
There is some excellent scenes that speaks profoundly to the nature of
the vampire. One night, Schreck/Orlok is out getting drunk with the film’s producer, Albin
Grau (Udo Kier) and the screenwriter, Henrik Galeen (John Aden Gillet). They
ask him casually if he’s read Dracula and what he thinks of it. At first, this
is played for laughs, when the vampire grunts how sad he is that “Dracula had
no servants.” But he explains further, mentioning the scene where the Count is trying to serve Jonathan
Harker dinner. “Can he even remember how to buy bread? How to select cheese and wine? And he remembers the rest of it, how to prepare a meal, how to make a
bed. He remembers his past glory his armies, his retainers, and what he is
reduced to. The loneliest part of the book comes when the man [Harker]
accidentally sees Dracula setting his table.” None of the Dracula movies I've covered have quite captured that point of this scene.
Then Orlok rips a bat out of the sky and bites the head off
of it like he’s Ozzy Osborne.
A lot of the plot of Shadow of the Vampire is a metafictional
replay of the original Nosferatu. We start in the Berlin studios shooting the
opening scenes of peaceful tranquility as the “Mina”, Ellen Hutter (Greta
Schröder (Catherine McCormack)) blissfully tends to her gardens/imagines a
happy career as an actress. Then we go off to a dank Carpathian castle where
the film crew plays the oblivious role of Jonathan Harker, ignoring all the red
flags of increasing horror. By the third act, they’ve traveled to the island of
Heligoland, where they are trapped with the monster, who now openly devours
them one by one, while an obsessed Murnau keeps filming in spite of everything.
The unnamed vampire lusts after Greta just the fictional Orlok lusts after Ellen. By the
end, all fiction has been left aside. It is just Murnau filming a murder for
his grand climax.
Shadow of the Vampire is definitely an interesting movie. It is another recreation of classic gothic horror with a then-modern gloss. It is less impressive
than Bram Stoker’s Dracula but then again what isn’t? The cast is really solid, including a
wacky Cary Elwes as the gun-toting libertine replacement cinematographer, Fritz
Wagner. I wish there was more of the glamorous transgressive world of 1920s Cabaret
Berlin, we only get one scene of it, and it is some delicious delirious queer montage. Still, I cannot say I loved this one.
I’m less impressed ultimately by Shadow of the Vampire’s
tension with the obsession and sacrifice of creating art. That process is
never as sexy or as interesting as any movie depicts it. Making a movie is work, usually
tedious effort. Even if you get a vampire, you’re going to need dozens
of takes, this is a job after all. There’s something creepy about F. W. Murnau, totally lost in his
camera lens, barking orders to crew members who have been dead for hours, still
creating his “masterpiece”. It wants to leave you with the disturbing question
of whether art is worth it. I’m left thinking that really the crew needed a union to speak out against a terrible boss.
Also, back to the realism claim, if Shadow of the Vampire was realistic, they would know the movie was doomed because vampires have no reflection. They do not show up on camera. Blacula showed us this in 1972. So it was all for nothing.
Next Time: Live action bores me. Enough of it. We need anime
in here. Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust.
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