Susan Granger’s review of “SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE” (Lions Gate Films)
Without doubt, the most awesome, bizarre, and innovative movie of the millennium year is Elias Merhige’s fanciful, if perverse, rumination on the making of F.W. Murneau’s silent film “Nosferatu” in 1922. John Malkovich plays the visionary German film director who cast an obscure actor, Max Schreck, as the legendary vampire. The clever conceit of Steven Katz’s brilliant screenplay is that Schreck wasn’t acting; he was, indeed, a blood-sucker. Murneau explains his unusual behavior by saying Schreck was trained by Stanislavsky and uses his “method,” which dictates that he appear at all times in full make-up and costume and work only at night. The Faustian bargain Murneau strikes with Schreck is that, after the final shot, the vampire can attack the beautiful neck of his drug-addicted leading lady, Catherine McCormack. Inevitably, this concept leads to many allusions about the price one is willing to pay for one’s art, along with humorous comparisons between a film-maker and the undead. “You and I are not so different,” the vampire observes. While John Malkovich captures the expressionist director’s obsessive intensity, it’s Willem Dafoe’s picture, particularly when he plucks a bat out of the air and devours it or impatiently clicks his grotesquely long, yellow nails together as he grows thirsty, yearning, at one point, for the writer. “I am loath to admit it myself,” Murneau demurs, “but the writer is necessary.” Filmed on location in Luxembourg, Elias Merhige has painstakingly duplicated Murneau’s sets and weird atmosphere for the film-within-a-film and the supporting cast is excellent. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Shadow of the Vampire” is an eccentric, enigmatic 8. It’s certainly the most compelling, convincing vampire movie I’ve seen in years.
