Shadow of the Vampire
by E. Elias Merhige
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Cary Elwes, Catherine McCormack, John Malkovich, Udo Kier, Willem DafoeDirector: E. Elias Merhige
Brand: LGF
Producer: Alan Howden
Producer: Jean-Claude Schlim
Producer: Jeff Levine
Producer: Jimmy de Brabant
Producer: Nicolas Cage
Producer: Norman Golightly
Writer: Steven Katz
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); German (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 92 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-06-17
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Lions Gate
Movie Reviews of Shadow of the Vampire
Movie Review: Remake of Murnau's Nosferatu Ripples with Mocking Laughter
Summary: 5 Stars
The heirs to Bram Stoker were unwilling to let F W Murnau film Dracula in 1921. So Murnau called his character Count Orlov and his movie Nosferatu. Stoker's character is suave, handsome and a hit with the ladies. Murnau's Count is bald, has ratty teeth and pointed ears. He is gruesome, ugly and would not go over well in the drawing room.
Shadow of the Vampire is ripping with comic excess. The names of the characters are too stereotypically German. There is an aura of unacknowledged camp dripping from some of the characters. The Weimar Decadence seems evident in many scenes. Every main character is on one opiate or another. At the same time, the movie seems austere. These characters are stoic and serious. Whats going on here?
Right away there is a mystery about the lead actor, Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe). Scenes have been filmed on sets in Berlin before the production arrives on location. The first night the Company meets Schreck. He is eerie and horrible. Still the Madhatters from Berlin try to pretend that he is not scaring them to death. We're all seasoned troupers and all that. Humor will be necessary on this movie, to get over the rough spots.
The scenes between Schreck and Gustav Von Wangenheim, who is buying property from the Count, are filmed. Those scenes and all others are staged almost exactly as they were in Murnau's original Nosferatu. On occasion Director E. Elias Merhige substitutes scenes from Murnau's 1922 version. It is difficult to tell the difference.
Suddenly the cameraman collapses. Old Vampire Hands in the Audience know at once that the Wily Schreck must have been at work the night before. Murnau, played by John Malkovich, is outraged. Murnau is almost always outraged. He takes Schreck aside and tells him he must not do this again. Now the audience is on to the fact that Schreck is a REAL vampire.
After a couple of days, we realize that Schreck has a deal with Murnau to leave the cast alone. But the cameraman is dying from suspicious neck wounds. Murnau confronts Schreck and invokes the whole History and Nobility of filmmaking to get the Vampire to cut it out. To no avail. Schreck says he won't continue on the film unless he lances the neck of anyone he cares to, including self-centered leading lady Greta Schroder (Catherine McCormack). His rage spent, Murnau tacitly agrees to the new deal. He MUST complete his project!
While Murnau planes off to Berlin for a replacement cameraman, the film's writer, and Producer Albin Grau, have an extraordinary conversation about the script with Schreck at Twilight. The threesome pass around a large bottle of schnapps. Schreck says the writer doesn't understand the difficulty a Vampire has in trying to pretend to be hospitable to a stranger when he has lived alone for over 500 years. The speech is the most serious in the film. Willem DaFoe captures the loneliness of the Creature, speaking of the difficulty of trying to remember how he should appear to an ordinary man. The scene is as powerful as any I've seen. The drunken writer and producer are, by turns, awed by Schreck's ability to understand "his character" and shocked when the actor grabs a bat from the air, rips off its head with his teeth, and drinks its blood.
Murnau returns with a new swashbuckling cameraman, Fritz Arno Wagner (Cary Elwes). Wagner brings an energy to the film that has been missing up to this point. His character resembles real-life directors Eric Fleming and William Wellman. He also brings a ton of camera know-how and enough varieties of drugs to power two movies like this one.
The film really begins to move now. Murnau is manic. Schreck tears into members of the Cast while they are still on the set filming. Its getting hard to ignore what is going on. The film is a little stupid this way because its funny. Its about Germans, you know, and for laughs they are considered a little thick. Finally, in a drugged stupor, Murnau admits there is no Max Schreck, that he discovered this real Vampire while scouting locations for the film. The movie moves toward denouement.
Shadow of the Vampire is choppy and shortened like the TV commercials that Mirhige usually directs. But the movie doesn't have to work perfectly as a piece of movie machinery. The mixture of comedy and seriousness and the wonderful performances, give the film enormous power even if the editing and story-telling aren't perfect.
But the film is not for everyone.
It helps to have seen F. W. Murnau's 1921 Silent Nosferatu and Werner Herzog's 1979 color remake. It helps to know that German actor Udo Dier, who plays Producer Albin Grau in this film, played Andy Warhol's Dracula in 1974. Dier was a straight actor then. He was so funny sucking the blood of "weregins" (virgins) only, that ever since he has been cast in strictly comic roles. He can no longer say a line in his thick German accent that does not make one laugh. Eddie Uzzo is an English comic female impersonator who has performed his act for HBO. His performance as the actor playing the character buying land from Nosferatu is awfully good. Malkovich and Cary Elwes, who plays Fritz Arno Wagner, slip out of their faked German accents on occasion. I think they do it on purpose to add to the serendipity of the movie. The film's tone is the same as the overwrought German expressionism of Murnau's 1921 Original. Malkovich's performance is a hoot. He reminds me of Colin Clive's Victor Frankenstein, and a little bit of the former Nazi Scientists who are always caricatured in American space films like the Right Stuff. Malkovich as Murnau is a mad scientist, putting together an unearthly creature: Nosferatu.
Summary of Shadow of the Vampire
Synopsis:Item Type: DVD Movie
Item Rating: R
Street Date: 06/17/03
Wide Screen: yes
Director Cut: no
Special Edition: no
LanguageENGLISH
Foreign Film: no
Subtitlesno
Dubbed: no
Full Frame: no
Re-Release: no
Packaging: Sleeve Please note: This supplier will be closed on 11/24, 11/25, 12/26, 1/2 for the holidays. The shipping cut off is 12/10 to try and have the products delivered by Christmas.
Clever, engaging, and boosted by the sublime casting of Willem Dafoe as Nosferatu actor Max Schreck, Shadow of the Vampire is a film full of good ideas that are only partially developed. Its premise is ripe with possibilities, but the movie's too slight to register much impact, so you're left to relish its delightful performances and director E. Elias Merhige's affectionately tongue-in-cheek homage to a landmark of German silent cinema. John Malkovich is aptly loony as the eccentric director F.W. Murnau, whose passion in filming the 1922 classic Nosferatu leads to the extreme casting of Schreck as the vampire, a vision of evil who, in this movie's delightfully twisted imagination, actually is a vampire, sucking the blood of cast and crewmembers who've dismissed Schreck as an overzealous method actor.
As these on-set maladies and "accidents" continue, Schreck wields greater control over Murnau, who descends into a kind of obsessive art-for-art's-sake madness until diva costar Greta Schroeder (Catherine McCormack, doing wonderful work) is served up as the actor's ultimate motivation. Merhige and his actors (including Cary Elwes, as intrepid cameraman Fritz Wagner) have great fun with this ghastly escapade, and the humor is kept delicately subtle to balance the movie's artistic aspirations. To that end, Dafoe is just right, his bald pate and gaunt features a perfect match for the mysterious Schreck, his grimace and talon-like fingers suggesting a human vulture on the prowl. Likewise, the re-creation of Nosferatu's expressionist style is both fanciful and brilliantly authentic. Too bad, then, that this movie suffers a mild case of vampiric anemia; if it shared the depth and richness of, say, Ed Wood, this might have been a cult classic for the ages. --Jeff Shannon
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