Ask most film buffs what the most definitive and frightening image of a vampire committed to celluloid is, and many will not say Bela Lugosi’s hypnotic, black-cloaked stare, or Gary Oldman’s bizarrely encephalitic hairdo. No, the scariest image of a vampire on film may very well be one of the first – Max Schreck as the pallid, pointy-eared, long-taloned Count Orlok, the “Nosferatu” (essentially Romanian for “vampire”) from the 1922 German film of the same. Schreck’s performance as the count was so convincing, as was his minimalist makeup, that many in the public wondered if he weren’t somehow the real fanged deal.
What if Max Schreck Really was a Vampire?
While it’s said that necessity is the mother of invention, in the case of Shadow of the Vampire, it’s actually rumor that births the idea. Director E. Elias Merhige and screenwriter Steven Katz have created a scenario in which Max Schreck actually was a vampire, and they examine what shooting the film would have been like in that creepy case. The result is a kind of cinematic mobius strip – an expressionist horror film about the making of an expressionist horror film.
Willem Dafoe Steals the Show
The film stars John Malkovich as F. W. Murnau, the dour director of Nosferatu, who is obsessed with realizing his deep and painful artistic vision at any cost. He is the one who casts the mysterious Schreck (Willem Dafoe), an actor who Murnau says takes his craft with deadly seriousness, to the extent that he shall always be in character, and always in costume, even while not filming. Mirroring developments in Nosferatu itself, everyone on the shoot is oblivious to what’s happening despite all the evidence of mysterious behavior and disappearing crew members.
What really makes the film work is the tenuous and strange Faustian relationship between Murnau and Schreck, bolstered by the ridiculously great performance by Dafoe as the vampire. By all rights this character, a petulant, lonely old monster with a heavy foreign accent, could easily have been a histrionic mess. But Dafoe miraculously imbues him with a deep sense of longing and human melancholy in between all the growling and lip-smacking. He’s an animal who has spent many long years a slave to his dark nature, isolating himself from most human contact out of necessity. The audience actually feels sorry for this creature, which makes it all the more horrifying in those moments when he must inevitably succumb to that same dark nature.
Ponderous and Unique
All this makes for a film that is almost more of a psychological drama than a scare piece. While blood is certainly spilled, the true frights occur in the minds of Murnau and Schreck, who tragically prove their own theories about the torture and dark absurdity of existence.
