Shadow of the Vampire

I guess we're getting pretty post-modern here. Now, not only are we talking about the greatest vampire movies, we're going to look at a movie about one of the greatest vampire movies.

In 1922, German director F. W. Murnau created perhaps the first film to feature a supernatural vampire, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.


I could expound at length on Nosferatu alone--and I will in the future--but not today.

Shadow of the Vampire, released in 2000, takes as its plot the making of Nosferatu, which would be interesting enough, but then it throws us a curveball as it asks the question: what if Max Schreck, the actor who played Nosferatu himself, was a real vampire?

John Malkovich plays Murnau as a man obsessed with realism. He hires an actor who he knows is a real vampire and tries to pass him off as a method actor who lives his role. Willem Dafoe portrays Schreck so well that he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Nearly unrecognizable under the makeup, Dafoe plays Schreck as a vampire who, as we would put it, is suffering from dementia brought on by extreme age. It really has to be seen to be believed.

Our old friend Udo Kier plays the film's producer, Albin Grau. While I certainly wouldn't call him the "only sane man" of the production, he does his best to keep things running smoothly, despite Murnau's eccentricity and his own suspicions that Murnau is not telling the whole story.

As for the rest, Cary Elwes (Saw, Princess Bride) is the gung-ho camera operator Fritz Arno Wagner, Catherine McCormack (Braveheart) is Greta Schroeder, the leading lady, and comedian Eddie Izzard is Gustav von Wagenheim, the romantic lead.

Make no mistake: Shadow of the Vampire is one of those really weird "art" films. But we praise it for that.