Shadow prey

Dafoe brings fresh blood to Vampire

Peter Keough

Tradition has it that vampires cast no reflections. Shadow of the Vampire, avant-garde filmmaker E. Elias Merhige's take on the making of F.W. Murnau's prototypical vampire movie Nosferatu, is all about reflection; it's as self-reflexive as a Scream episode, making up for its relative lack of laughs with its depth of contemplation and the dank whiff of the crypt it retains from the original. And it owes much to Willem Dafoe's chimerically creepy performance as Max Schreck, the obscure German actor who played the unforgettable bloodsucker in Murnau's film, and who, in this ingenious if gimmicky premise from Merhige and first-time screenwriter Steven Katz, really is a vampire.

Such is the dark secret of the film's Murnau (John Malkovich, in a bad imitation of a prissy Erich von Stroheim). A zealot for the new art of cinema, which he sees as a means of immortalizing experience, he has determined to make Nosferatu, his "Symphony of Horror," the epitome of supernaturalism by casting the a genuine, rotting revenant in the title role. He conceals the truth from the rest of the company as they labor on location in a spooky Czech hamlet by convincing them that the grotesque and laconic Schreck is a disciple of Stanislavsky who must remain in character and in costume and make-up -- pointy ears, bulbous crown, six-inch fingernails and all -- for the entire production. And the fanatical filmmaker doesn't have much trouble maintaining the ruse, even as members of the crew drop like flies from the difficult star's nocturnal feedings.

What will this accomplish? Verisimilitude, presumably, but the director, who in his white lab coat seems more in league with Dr. Frankenstein than with this other icon of horror, feels a kinship with the undead parasite. As critics like Siegfried Kracauer have noted, Murnau's 1922 masterpiece is a cinematic mirror of its audience's deepest dreads and desires, reflecting the Weimar period's unconscious impulses, prefiguring the Nazi nightmare to come, and establishing a movie archetype that will outlive even Wes Craven's Dracula 2000. Art's ambitions have perhaps shrunk since then, for in Shadow, the film reflects only itself, with Schreck a demonic incarnation of the medium that cheats death by drawing on images of life. It's not a new insight, and neither is it stated eloquently through the fulminations of Malkovich's Murnau, though his dialogue occasionally rises to the level of aphorism and poetry. "If it's not in the frame," he sputters in one moment of pique, "it doesn't exist."

Such ontological concerns, filigreed with crusty humor, trouble Shadow more than concerns over dramatic and narrative clarity. Similar movies like Ed Wood or Gods and Monsters might be more coherent or plausible, but Shadow in its skittish way probes deeper into the compulsion to fill a screen with shadows and light. Like Murnau, Merhige strives for a cinematic logic, and though his camera is static by comparison, he does piece together a fair poetry of images. Close-ups of Murnau's box-like camera parallel shots of a similar box that contain the director's syringes and morphine; both are drugs that dispel briefly the horror vacui he dreads most of all, leaving him gibbering in a bare room next to a scrawled swastika -- the symbol of another failed quest to attain immortality.

That's about it for historical context; the film, to its detriment perhaps, ignores the ferment of its Weimar setting (some cheesy shots of Berlin decadence notwithstanding), the disastrous World War before, the greater catastrophe in the works. In Schreck, though, it has its supreme emblem of the consequences of such a hubristic quest. In one scene he chats with Nosferatu's producer, Albin Grau (Udo Keir), and screenwriter, Henrick Galeen (John Aden Gillet), over a bottle of schnapps, describing (in character, of course) how centuries of life, or undeath, deprive one not only of pleasures like eating but even of the memory of how to buy bread. Dafoe is at his sardonic best here, unbearably funny and sad, punctuating a point by grabbing a passing bat and biting its head off. "The Berlin theater needs you!" says Grau in awe.

But it's the screen that's got him. Although his lust for her seems more theoretical than passionate, Schreck finally gets a chance at the lovely neck of the film's leading lady, Greta Schroeder (Catherine McCormack), and in this version of the tale the heroine is not the selfless sacrifice to love she is in Nosferatu but a drugged victim laid out to slaughter. Murnau gets his shot and the vampire gets his, and the film and the monster fuse into one. It's Shadow's most horrifying moment, as the self-reflecting mirror breaks, piercing to the heart of film itself.