Shadow of The Shadow of the Vampire

Suzy McKee Charnas

The Shadow of the Vampire is a bad movie, instructive in its badness as most bad movies are.

(Spoiler warning, as usual)

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For one thing, it is so incoherent that it leaves the viewer baffled as to why anyone in the film behaved as they did. A sampling of the questions left in this viewer's mind: Who was this actor Max Schreck, and what did playing such a grotesque and powerful figure as the nosferatu do to his life and career? Why does F.W. Murnau engage a real vampire to play a fictional vampire in his movie? Why would a real vampire agree to such a silly and dangerous plan? Murnau, we are told well into the story, has promised Schreck that he can "have" the female lead player, Greta, after the final shot is in the can. Why does Schreck care? Has he been haunting the local movie palace in the wilds of Slovakia, watching Greta's pictures over and over? Why would he rather drink from a morphine-addicted, petulant actress than from a nice healthy local peasant anyway? When you eat a steak, do you care how talented or pretty the cow was?

Where did Murnau come from (in reality, Westphalia), what kind of person was he (a homosexual artist from a bourgeois family, but you'd never know that from this movie)? Where was he during World War One (in the German air force, it turns out) and how did that experience affect how he is using his life now, in the aftermath of a Hellish experience that marked forever the consciousness of everyone it touched? Did he get locked up for making a movie in which his leading lady died at the end of massive exsanguination while the Director kept on filming (of course not; Murnau made many other films, and died himself in a car crash in California in 1931, like a real person)?

Why does Murnau, played by John Malkovich in this movie, declare that film creates memory? In his hands it creates false memories, of things that never actually happened, which is actually a much more interesting and potentially fruitful concept. Did this fictional Murnau deliberately set out to kill the nosferatu in the film's "death scene" (in which two other people get wasted on the side, as it were), or does he decide to do it only later because he's annoyed at the monster for draining members of the crew?

What the hell is this piece of flailing, murky, inscrutible crap?

I think it's what happens when a bunch of movie guys come up with one small, single, unthought-out idea — hey, wouldn't it be funny if the actor Schreck had really been a vampire, and if Willem Dafoe would play him that way?

No. It's not funny, and it's not enough. There are, to be sure, a few witty lines here. The one about how devoted Schreck is to the total immersion in character demanded by the Stanislavski method is repeated about four times; it was mildly amusing the first time.

I found a certain fascination in Dafoe's work as the weird, stiff, jerky puppet figure of the vampire, a very creditable recreation of Schreck's performance with the tics contributed by the technology of the time incorporated in the character's physical behavior. But the creature makes no more sense than anything else on offer here. What are we to make, for instance, of his reply to the suggestion that if he is lonely, he should make more vampires: "I can't. I'm too old." Too old? He's not too old to chow down on the cameraman (who is bundled off without further ado to an unknown fate and with no questions asked). Are we then to conclude that new vampires are made not by vampire bites but by ordinary sexual reproduction? Is that why the vampire wants Greta? But how's that supposed to work, if he's "too old" anyway?

Don't ask me. There are no answers in this movie. There are barely any questions, except those I am left with as audience-member.

Dafoe's peculiar, highly stylized figure lurches and twitches about against a background of decadent Berlin Bohemians on location, and the movie staggers along too, looking for some kind of intelligent and intelligeable story-line. It finally tumbles to a close in a general flailing-around before the ancient, creaking camera while John Malkovich, as Murnau, intones a speech so lacking in sense and coherence that I frankly can't recall a word of it now, a day after seeing the movie (and you couldn't pay me to go see the thing again to find out). I think it was supposed to articulate the position of that cliche of movies-about-movies, the demonic Director who will sacrifice everyone and everything to make his film.

Now, there's an original thought!

Skip this junk. Go rent Gods and Monsters, an excellent film about James Whale, the man who made the original Frankenstein, and see an intelligent and moving treatment of the intriguing historic facts of talented survivors of the Great War making the greatest horror films of their time. Or rent Francois Truffaut's Day For Night, if you want a charming comedy about making movies. Or, for something dark on the theme of the exploitive, destructive Director, rent White Hunter, Black Heart about demonic film Director John Houston.

Actually, word is probably already out about The Shadow of the Vampire: I just heard an announcement on local radio of the availability of free tickets to the movie if you are the second caller to reach the announcer in the studio...

Nosferatu is on its own terms a great achievement. These people (surprisingly, Nicolas Cage is listed among them in the production credits) basically disrespected an artistic source that is full of power still, and damned if it hasn't turned around and bitten them in the ass.

In a way, it's a very satisfying outcome.