Hissing, shuffling his feet, eyeing the cast and crew with evident hunger, Dafoe's Schreck is a distinctively loathsome creation, with none of the erotic suavity of your typical Dracula. When Murnau becomes angry with him for attacking the cinematographer rather than, say, the script girl, Schreck sniffs the air with interest. "The script girl?" he says. "I'll eat her later."

In the film's single best scene, Schreck joins producer Albin Grau (Udo Kier) and screenwriter Henrick Galeen (John Aden Gillet) as they drink schnapps during a break in production. Amused by Schreck's method-actor refusal to break character, they ask him questions about life as a vampire. The novel "Dracula" made him sad, Schreck says. Vampires live alone so long that they become aristocrats without servants, he explains, detached from the details of human life. "Can he even remember how to buy bread? How to select wine and cheese?" For the first and nearly the only time, "Shadow of the Vampire" seems to be about its characters rather than its clever ideas.

As Merhige skips from the Jofa studios in Berlin to the Czech village where Murnau has Schreck concealed to the island of Heligoland, where the plots of both films reach their dénouements, he never establishes a guiding tone, or defines his characters clearly. Is Murnau ridiculous, evil or noble? Is Schreck/Orlock a monster, an object of pity or just a gag man? To what extent is "Shadow of the Vampire" intended as self-parody or farce? I found myself unable to answer these questions, but I do know that the "German" accents used by the entire cast are a heinous mistake. Kier at least has the excuse of being German, but there's no excuse for everybody else in the movie talking like Colonel Klink. (Schreck: "How you vould harm me ven even I don't know how I vould harm myzelf.")

Unable to control Schreck's predatory urges or to retreat from their bargain, Murnau presses forward toward his film's completion and a final confrontation with Schreck, sacrificing everything for art as the actors and technicians drop around him like flies. (Murnau, at the moment when Schreck finally gets his fangs into Greta: "Frankly, Count, I find this composition unworkable.")

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Malkovich and Dafoe increasingly dominate the film, but their hambone acting, although entertaining in itself, comes to seem increasingly pointless. This is especially strange given Merhige's glimpses of how silents were actually shot, with the director essentially narrating the action while the actors improvise under his command. "Shadow of the Vampire" must be the most undisciplined film ever made about a tyrannical filmmaker.

Even if Murnau really was a self-important fop full of queeny pretentions (and even if he really hired a vampire), "Nosferatu" was one of the earliest and greatest accomplishments of supernatural cinema, and Merhige's film can't stand up to it. After the lovely opening credit sequence in imitation expressionist style, an overly chatty intertitle informs us that the "brilliant" Murnau became "one of the greatest filmmakers of all time." This calls to mind my seventh-grade creative writing teacher's advice: Show, don't tell. What Merhige actually shows us is a bloodless film about bloodlust, a horror comedy that's occasionally funny but is never frightening, an academic exercise driven by adolescent ideas that never shape themselves into a narrative: in short, a movie that can never dislodge the art fatally wedged up its butt.

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