Shadow of the Vampire (Merhige, 2000)IMDB Link"Our battle, our struggle, is to create art. Our weapon is the moving picture. Because we have the moving picture, our paintings will grow and recede; our poetry will be shadows that lengthen and conceal; our light will play across living faces that laugh and agonize; and our music will linger and finally overwhelm, because it will have a context as certain as the grave. We are scientists engaged in the creation of memory... but our memory will neither blur nor fade. "Elias Merhige makes a movie about the making of the 1922 Nosferatu classic horror vampire movie. It is a fiction retelling, because the actor in the movie is supposed to be a real vampire pretending to be an actor playing a vampire. Sure, a few people at IMDB are insulted that the movie soils the memory of the actual crew behind “Nosferatu” as they think people might be confused, since the movie doesn’t say its fiction.
I know IMDB has a special breed of stupidity, so we won’t dwell on that. Merhige’s plot is about the director, Murnau (John Malkovich!) making his vampire movie with a crazy obsession, and makes a deal with a real vampire, Schreck (Willem Dafoe!). The premise is, of course, silly, and the movie plays it mostly serious, but with a subtle comical layer. This means we don’t get hilarious scenes of the vampire pretending to be an actor, but we do have Willem Dafoe playing his vampire character like silent movie characters, with exaggerated theatrical postures.
I might have enjoyed the movie much more if I had actually seen the original Nosferatu, but what are the chances of me enjoying a 1922 horror movie. And I don’t care how cool you think you are, but once a movie is older than eight decades, it stops being scary. I don’t care if it scares the shit out of people in 1922, it’s outdated by now. I even watched a few clips on Youtube, and I’m right.
But this isn’t about the 1922 version, but about “Shadow of the Vampire”, which is unique and well-acted, but nothing to jerk off to.
3/5
