Shadow Of The Vampire
Being Vlad Dracula
“Are you sure this is safe?” I ask.
“It’s perfectly safe. I’ve done it myself, lots of times. Nothing to be worried about.”
“It just seems so… well… dark, and forbidding. And slimy.”
“After a few seconds, you won’t notice. In you go.”
Climbing in the… what did he call it? Portal? Small and cramped and slippery and… whoa… where am I?
“This itches,” I hear myself say.
“I’m sorry, sir. I’m doing the best I can.”
“I don’t see why I have to wear this in the first place. After all, Murnau’s been dead for fifty years. Nobody really cares what he looked like. I could take off the hairpiece, and nobody would ever know.”
“You said that yesterday, sir. Hold still, you’re squirming.”
“It’s just the principle of the thing, that’s all. I’ve been bald in lots of movies. Lots. The audience is used to me being bald. It shouldn’t be an issue.”
“You were bald in that jewel thief movie, weren’t you?”
“What? No, I…”
“What are you complaining about this time, Malkovich?” Another voice, from across the room. Looking over, and… oh my God, what is that thing?
“Hi, Willem. It’s this hairpiece they have me wearing. It itches.”
“You just got here. I’ve been here two hours. They just put on my fingernails, it’s terrible. I can’t even go to the john by myself.”
“Well, the sacrifices we make for art…”
The words trail off, as the sky turns black. Falling, falling, falling, THUMP. The New Jersey Turnpike, from the looks of things. A car picks me up, the driver looks at me and grins. “Hell of an experience, wasn’t it? This vampire movie they’re making, it’s going to rock.”
John Malkovich’s new movie is not a sequel to Being John Malkovich, and for that we should all be grateful. It is Shadow of the Vampire, a homage to a 1922 German Expressionist vampire movie called Nosferatu. Malkovich (who is, yes, saddled with a hairpiece and a German accent) plays tyrannical genius director F.W. Murnau, who is having to juggle eggs to get his newest project off the ground. The female lead would rather be doing theater, the financiers hate the script, there’s trouble in getting the rights to the story. (Murnau, we’re told, had tried to get permission to use Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel; when the Stoker family balked, he merely changed the names of the characters.) Worse, the whole production is headed for Czechoslovakia to shoot on location. Even worse, Murnau is the only one who knows who will play the role of the vampire, and what he looks like.
On arrival in Czechoslovakia, Murnau briefs the cast and crew. The vampire, they’re told, will be played by an actor named Max Schrek (Willem Dafoe), a disciple of Stanislavsky and the Method. Schrek will stay in character at all times, and all scenes with Schrek will be shot at night. Only Murnau (and the audience) knows the truth; Schrek isn’t an actor at all.
It might seem that a mistaken-identity comedy and a German Expressionist horror film would make a mismatch, but that’s not the case. Director Elias Merhage has grasped an important point about today’s audiences — the same point, of course, that Wes Craven realized in making the Scream movies. Movie audiences are now much more likely to laugh at scary moments than they ever were. Accordingly, Merhage plays the first half of Shadow of the Vampire strictly for laughs. Half the humor comes from the weirdness of having a vampire on the set, and the unusual lengths that Murnau must go to keep him happy. The other half comes from the role of the director in the silent film. Directors back then could actually direct, could shout instructions to the actors while the cameras were rolling. Malkovich does a lot of this, especially with the gifted English comic actor Eddie Izzard on the receiving end, and the results are spectacularly funny. Most of Shadow of the Vampire plays like a Gothic version of Shakespeare in Love, and the two movies are about equally funny.
The rest of the movie presents directors Murnau and Merhage with parallel problems. For the fictional director, the problem is how to vanquish the vampire at the end of principal photography, but not before. For the real director, the problem is how to make a vampire movie with the power to shock and horrify a jaded Generation X audience. Shadow of the Vampire works because the solution to one problem is the solution to the other. Shadow of the Vampire is no Being John Malkovich, but it’s got spine-tingling wit and spine-chilling terror, in addition to being well-acted and beautifully shot.