January 8, 2011
Year 1921:
German director Frederich Wilhelm Murnau set out to make a film on Bram Stoker's famous Vampire fiction, "Dracula". He however failed to acquire the rights to use the novel's story. Unwilling to give up on the project, Murnau made a few changes here and there inclu... read moreding the characters' names. Notably, Count "Dracula" became "Count Orlock"! For the role of Orlock, he hired a Max Schreck, an actor, who was usually aloof on the sets. Schreck went on to deliver one of the most realistic and famous performances of his career as Count Orlock, while Murnau established himself as a great director who made one of the finest adaptations of Stoker's novel, widely regarded as the best existing film adaption, that is "Nosferatu" (1922).
They say, Shreck was totally dedicated to his character/role and that he played it very believably! Furthermore, his contemporaries have reported that Shreck was a loner and lived in a remote world and liked walking through dark forests! All these mannerisms of his had supposedly given rise to an Urban Legend that Schreck was actually a vampire!!
Year 2000:
Screenwriter Steven Katz and Director E. Elias Merhige decide to take this Urban Legend a few steps further by basing their own vampire movie on it! "Shadow of the Vampire" tells a fictionalized story of the ambitious but troubled production of Murnau's silent horror masterpiece, "Nosferatu". John Malkovich stars as F. W. Murnau, who along with his crew starts the filming process.
The crew, even the producer Albin Grau (Udo Kier) are unaware about who's going to play the central character of Count Orlock. They are then told that his name is Max Schreck, who has been a stage actor with the Reinhold Company. Murnau states that Schreck likes to stay in character and will only appear in full make-up and he insists on shooting only at night. He has already reached Slovakia where they plan to shoot most of the film, in order to get a feel of the air!
While an initial meeting with Schreck (Willem Dafoe) clearly brings about a sense of unnerving discomfort to some of the crew, others commend the great manner in which he stays in character and looks and behaves as frightening as his character!
The chosen location is an isolated one, yet the orthodox locals seem to give the director a problem. Meanwhile, Schreck keeps making demands of his own and becomes increasingly difficult for Murnau. Cameraman Wolfgang Mueller suffers from some kind of a breakdown; he has to be replaced by Fritz Arno Wagner (Cary Elwes) who is specially flown in. Amidst all the problems associated and the rest of the crew's growing suspicion and fear about the true identity of Schreck, Murnau makes desperate attempts to finish his project...
While the idea of "Shadow of the Vampire" is interesting and the director has roped in two of the film biz's extremely talented actors, John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe, somehow something is still missing somewhere! Now, we are given that the film's story is a "fictionalized" account. In that case, the screenwriter could have taken still more liberties to pack some more meat in this venture. This DOES NOT mean that they should've resorted to the increasingly boring, usual cheap thrills/gimmicks which most horror movies are rife with nowadays. Then again, perhaps it is the limitation of the script then...maybe there was no way in which more substance could be added to the film without it treading the oft-trodden path of triteness!
In fact the director does us a big favour by keeping it subtle and doesn't add too much gore/shocks/jolts from out of nowhere/screams, etc.
So, almost casually, Dafoe's character demonstrates how he is "living" the character, to two of the crew members, Albin and Henrik (John Aden Gillet), the screenwriter of Murnau's film, in a particularly important scene in the film.
The director relies on the atmosphere, then, of the set that he uses, the lighting arrangement, the dark ruins where he does the filming, and Willem Dafoe's Max Schreck character amongst other things to invoke a feeling of terror. There are some clever scenes which come across as slightly funny as well as terrifying at the same time! The director also pays homage to the silent film era by use of inter-tiles in the narrative, as well as the iris shot. He intersperses footage from the original "Nosferatu" with the scenes that his Murnau character shoots in this film. It is almost difficult to tell the original footage from the one filmed in the film!
Dan Jones provides an adequately chilling background score and complements the unsettling atmosphere created by Merhige.
"Shadow of the Vampire" then mostly belongs to its two main actors, Willem Dafoe and John Malkovich. While Malkovich delivers a class act as F. W. Murnau, a film-maker who is hellbent on finishing his big film without any compromise, Willem Dafoe almost outdoes the late Max Schreck with his spoof-like rendition of Max Schreck/Count Orlock! It is a Godly act worth a standing ovation as his Max Schreck character in this film mirrors the late Max Schreck's own dedication to the role of Orlock, with Dafoe being almost unrecognizable as we know him and delivering a knock-out performance. He definitely deserved to win the Oscar he was nominated for. Watch him in this and you will know what "getting into the skin of the character" actually means!
If only the film were as worthy of praise as the lead performance in it, we would probably have a vampire masterpiece with one of the most original premises in the genre. This is a result of keeping things subtle, though, so it is more like an inevitable restriction on the script!
Regardless, "Shadow of the Vampire" is a decent film and worth a watch for some of the reasons mentioned above and if those reasons aren't good enough for you, then you can certainly depend on Willem Dafoe to be the sole reason to check it out.
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