"Shadow of the Vampire"

The tender neck of a delectable leading lady, and those of the audience, are offered up for the biting in this confused horror tale.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Jan 2, 2001 | Certain films are plagued by a condition an ex-girlfriend of mine used to call "art up the butt." If you like this kind of thing, you know who you are and you know what I'm talking about.

You own books by William Burroughs and Michel Foucault (not that you've necessarily read them) and albums by Nick Cave and Sonic Youth. You know what is meant by the term "graphic novel" and you have opinions about it. You live in one of about two dozen North American neighborhoods where it's possible to buy a non-Starbucks latte and a nondubbed Hong Kong video. At some point in your life, you wore a pair of those little black kung-fu slippers.

Any film with either John Malkovich or Willem Dafoe in it already has art at least halfway up the butt. When you get both of them plus film history plus vampires, the syndrome reaches near-toxic proportions. In "Shadow of the Vampire," Malkovich stars as legendary silent-film director F.W. Murnau; Dafoe, in ghoulish makeup, plays a genuine vampire hired to impersonate one in Murnau's 1922 classic "Nosferatu." The combination certainly sounds like the ultimate in '90s hipsterism, but all that this glum and slight entertainment manages to prove is that the '90s are over.

Naturally, if you fall into the demographic subgroup described above, the magnetism of the cast and premise will probably prove irresistible, no matter what I say. If not, don't say you weren't warned.

An art-up-the-butt avatar such as R.W. Fassbinder or Wim Wenders would have reveled in the archness and overripeness of this whole enterprise: Who is the real vampire -- the honest bloodsucker or the ruthless artist? As it is, Steven Katz's screenplay feels choppy and uncertain, but in hands like those its morphine-fueled pace and grandiose pronouncements about aesthetics might have been rendered into a languorous, decadent delight, chocolate with an absinthe center. E. Elias Merhige, an American director known for the underground film "Begotten" and his music videos for Marilyn Manson, can only manage a mildly amusing spoof with some striking images, a "Saturday Night Live" sketch for film students.

When "Shadow of the Vampire" is enjoyable, it's largely thanks to Malkovich, who plays Murnau as the brainier older brother of Joel Grey's sinister master of ceremonies in "Cabaret." Drifting through the set of his masterpiece like a distracted mad scientist, goggles askew on his forehead, he intones, "Our battle, our struggle, is to create art. Our weapon is the motion picture. Our poetry, our music, will have a context as certain as the grave."

Later, when his relationship with his living-dead "star" has gone sour, Murnau castigates the ancient bloodsucker in tones of consummate boredom. "Die alone, you vampire rat bastard," he says with no apparent emotion. "Moonchaser, blasphemer, monkey."

Dafoe does indeed look like a cross between a rat and a monkey as Max Schreck, whom Murnau hires to play the vampire Count Orlock. The historical Schreck was an obscure actor who left little trace of himself on the world beyond his memorable performance in "Nosferatu." In Katz and Merhige's version of events, there was no Schreck; the name was a convenient fiction to conceal the sinister deal Murnau made with the real Orlock, a filthy and desiccated vampire he discovered hiding in rural Czechoslovakia. In the interests of both science and art, Murnau would preserve Orlock on celluloid for posterity, and in return deliver him the tender neck of Greta Schroeder (Catherine McCormack), the film's depraved and delectable leading lady.

Next Page: A loathsome creation with none of Dracula's traditional erotic suavity

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