May 19, 2001 07:01 PM
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Film, somebody once said, is a disease. In Shadow of the Vampire it's more like an addiction for the character named after the great German director F W Murnau.
Murnau, played by John Malkovich, is portrayed as a seeker of cinematic visions so obsessive he hires a real vampire (Willem Dafoe) to pose as actor Max Screck and star in his vampire film Nosferatu. Though it uses film history as little more as a jumping-off point, E. Elias Merhige's darkly comic thriller is also a provocative meditation on the allure of filmmaking.
Murnau, addressed by associates as Herr Doktor, wears a white lab coat on the set and considers himself a scientist of the psyche. Impatient with the artificial environment of the Berlin studio, in 1921 he hauls his small crew to Czechoslavakia to shoot an uncredited adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. He introduces Schreck, a hideous ghoul with pointed ears and four inch fingernails, as a method actor whom they must address as Count Orlock.
At night Murnau brings Orlock small creatures and decanters of blood to dine upon, meanwhile hoping the count can control himself long enough to complete the film and earn the vampiric equivalent of residuals-the luscious neck of leading lady Greta Schroeder.
On one level Shadow of the Vampire, scripted by Steven Katz, is a droll satire of the film world, with Orlock as the dose of authenticity that Murnau craves but can't harness and who terrifies and brunches on the crew and overweening actors. At one point, Murnau asks Orlock why he couldn't pass the over the cameraman and pounce on someone less crucial, like the script girl. ''I'll eat her later,'' Orlock undeadpans.
But there are other layers. Most poignant is the portrait of Orlock, disturbingly well embodied by Dafoe as a disenfranchised nobleman dismissed as an eccentric thespian. Orlock receives the undeferential Murnau in the expressionist ruins of his castle-a set honoring the real Murnau's cinematic roots-and in one scene relates to enraptured producer Albin Grau (Udo Kier) what he considers the saddest part of the novel Dracula. It could almost move you to tears. Then he eats a bat!
Of course there really was a Murnau, a Schreck and a Nosferatu, though as far as I know everyone survived it's making. Schreck, primarily a stage actor, appeared in at least one film before Nosferatu and several afterward; he died in 1936, of a heart attack presumably not from a stake.
Murnau was a more prominent enigma. Nosteratu's use of real locations was pioneering in an expressionist horror film; his camera strategies in the Last Laugh are considered groundbreaking; and his first Hollywood production, Sunrise, is ranked among the greatest silents.
But the 41 year old Murnau died in a car crash in 1931, and besides his films seems to have left behind little but gossip about his personal life.
Out of this void Shadow of the Vampire spins departures from reality that are both entertaining and thought-provoking. The film obligingly supplies Murnau with a laudanum habit-he keeps his works in a coffin-like little box-and a taste for Weimar decadence, but I am thinking of two scenes in particular. In one, Murnau, introducing a clearly discomfited Orlock to his crew, acts like an anthropologist proudly displaying his latest find at a press conference. In another, later, a grinning Orlock advises a shell-shocked Murnau,''This is hardly your picture any longer.''
