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CORRIDOR OF HORROR
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DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 2, No. 11 |
 Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck |
SHADOW of the VAMPIRE |
A FAUSTIAN BARGAIN WITH A VAMPIRE FORESHADOWS HITLER'S COMING REIGN
By JOHN STANLEY
of TheColumnists.com
HAVING SEEN every existing vampire movie at least once, I had come to the conclusion, sometime in my recent movie-reviewing years, that there could be nothing new under a full moon. Nothing could be at stake any longer. The genre had been bled white.
I turn pale to admit that I was wrong. Dead wrong.
"Shadow of the Vampire" has proven there are untapped veins. Fresh blood. And it flows with newfound urgency.
The film chilled me to the bone. Not only for its visual tour de force performance by Willem Dafoe, but for its atmosphere. This movie's set design reeks of decay and dankness. If you could breath the air of this movie, it would be mouldy and foul. The stench of it would make you want to vomit.
Dafoe? What a performance. With fingernails on his gnarly hands that look like knives and a lean, horrific face that looks of death and decay, he never seems to be an actor playing a vampire. He is a vampire. Forget acting. That's how good his performance is. Make up? You never once think about Dafoe being made up. He is Max Schreck, and Max Schreck is him.
But there was something else about "Shadow of the Vampire" that got my heart pounding--its underlying concept. That chilled me even more than the look and "smell" of the movie. There is nothing scarier than when a good movie puts its finger, long-nailed or otherwise, on the monster hidden away inside all of us. A monster worse than any vampire.
That
concept is expressed through the performance of John Malkovich
as the real-life movie maker Fredrich Wilhelm Murnau, who is
hellbent on making his version of "Dracula." Although
the Bram Stoker estate in real life refused to give F. W. Murnau
permission to make an adaptation, he plunged ahead anyway, renaming
the bloodsucker Count Orlock and changing the title of his classic-to-be
to "Nosferatu."
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(Later, when the Stoker estate got wise to what Murnau had done, Stoker's widow ordered that all prints of the movie be burned. Many prints were, but the film nevertheless has survived down through the years. A lucky thing for director E. Elias Merhige, who copies some sequences from "Nosferatu" to perfection (using grainy black and white to good effect) or actually cutting some scenes into his movie, since we can't tell the difference anyway.)
The twist in "Shadow of the Vampire" is that Murnau--in the middle of production on "Nosferatu"--has discovered a real vampire existing in the ruins of an old castle in Czechoslovakia, and decides to film the rest of his movie on location in order to use the vampire only at night. (One of the reasons for "Nosferatu" being a classic is that Murnau, by using natural locations, captured an expressionistic look that was in contrast to the stylized studio sets of other films of the period. He also used real people as his background players--another breaking of the rules that permeated German movie making in those times.)
Secretly Murnau has made a bargain that is sure to get him burned in Hell: If the vampire, whose name is Max Schreck, will restrain himself during his performance and harm no one, he will be rewarded by being permitted to feast on the film's leading lady in the final shots of the film. As played by Catherine McCormack, Greta Schroeder is a big-busted wench of a woman who gets the vampire's blood (or lack of it) going and becomes irresistible in his eyes. (Even after she realizes that Schreck is throwing no image into her bedside mirror and becomes hysterical, Murnau calmly injects her with morphine to quiet her down and allow Schreck to have his way with her.)
Of course, this makes Murnau a human monster in counterpoint to Schreck's blood-drinking vampire, and a far more fascinating one. A bloodsucker is easy to understand--he needs blood, or he'll die. Murnau's creative muse needs feeding with a blood of its own, and that's far less easy to comprehend. The film is about sacrificing everything for art. If that includes a couple of cameramen and a producer, so much the better. Earlier Murnau has told his crew about the importance of this movie-art business: "Our poetry, our music, will have a context as certain as the grave."
There was one other metaphor I discovered at work in this movie. Set in Germany in 1921, "Shadow of the Vampire" very subtly suggests the coming of the Nazi regime. Look closely on the wall in one scene and you will be see a swastika scratched there. There is also a Nordic-blond cameraman named Fritz Wagner (played by Cary Elwes) who has the perfect Aryan look of the Master Race that Hitler soon will call to order. Besides flying his own World War I style German fighter plane as if he were the forerunner of the Luftwaffe, he behaves like a stormtrooper ready to stomp on a few Jews in some of his scenes. Hitler asked his people to sacrifice themselves for the greater glory of the Third Reich, just as Malkovich's Murnau is willing to sacrifice his cast and crew for the greater glory of cinema.
Given that subtext to "Shadow of the Vampire," how ironic that most prints of "Nosferatu" would ultimately be burned at the behest of the Stoker estate. Just as most books in Germany would be burned once Hitler was in power.
Here's an idea for the excellent screenwriter Steven Katz: How about a sequel about the price Murnau ultimately had to pay for letting Greta have all her blood sucked up by Schreck. (Did I mention that the aforementioned Nordic cameraman and the film's producer [Udo Keir] got knocked off by Schreck too?)
Here's the deal, Katz: Murnau, after making another silent classic in 1924, "The Last Laugh," was invited to come to Hollywood to ply his trade. His first U.S. effort was "Sunrise" (hailed by the French review magazine "Cahiers du Cinema" as a masterpiece) followed by two lesser remembered projects at 20th Century-Fox. He then went to the South Seas with documentary fim maker Robert Flaherty to make an unusual movie about native islanders, "Tabu."
Now
here's where it gets good, Katz: On the eve of the film's premiere
in 1931, Murnau was driving from Los Angeles to Monterey when
he was killed in a car crash. Dead at 42 in the wreckage of his
roadster. Work Max Schreck into those unusual events and you
might have another winner.
© 2001 by John Stanley.
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You can contact John Stanley with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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