[COLUMN] In Shadow of the Vampire, the Camera is a Vampire | by Darren Mooney

Note: With Nosferatu in cinemas at the moment, it felt like a good time to revisit E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire, which is one of my favourite movies. It is streaming on Amazon now, after being unavailable for years. This piece contains spoilers for that movie. That said, it does not contain spoilers for the production of Nosferatu.

“If it’s not in the frame, it doesn’t exist,” proclaims director F.W. Murnau (John Malkovich) towards the end of Shadow of the Vampire, as he films the final scene of his vampire epic Nosferatu with actors Max Shreck (Willem Dafoe) and Greta Schröder (Catherine McCormack). It’s a deeply ironic observation, given that E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire offers an account of what was outside the frame of the classic film Nosferatu, albeit an entirely fictional version of events.

As the title implies, Shadow of the Vampire is a vampire movie. It is built on the conceit that Max Shreck, who played the monstrous Count Orlok in Nosferatu, was really a blood-sucking creature of the night. Desperate to create a masterpiece, ambitious director F.W. Murnau strikes a deal with this nocturnal predator to star in cinema’s first vampire movie. “What did you offer him in return?” asks cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner (Cary Elwes). Murnau responds, “Everlasting life...  and Greta.”

Although it has somewhat faded from memory, Shadow of the Vampire is an impressive piece of work. In particular, it marked something of a career revival for Willem Dafoe just before Spider-Man. Dafoe’s “Hollywood stock plummeted” after the failure of Body of Evidence in the early 1990s. (“What can I say?” the actor offers of the erotic thriller. “We tried.”) Shadow of the Vampire secured Dafoe an Oscar nomination, something that he still feels “a special pride” about.

Shadow of the Vampire is a deathly funny movie about making movies. At one point, Murnau finds himself bickering with Shreck over the production, as his star begins to make demands. “I don't think we need the writer any longer,” Shreck observes. Murnau counters, “I don't expect you to understand this, and I am loath to admit it myself, but the writer is necessary.” Shreck also has script notes. “I don't think the ship is necessary,” he opines, causing all manner of production headaches for his director.

However, there is also a profundity to Shadow of the Vampire, a vampire movie about the history of cinema as an artform. Unlike so many films about the movie industry, Shadow of the Vampire remains deeply cynical about its subject matter. In terms of the film’s basic plot, Murnau is an egomaniac who is willing to trade the lives of his cast and crew to Orlok to make his masterpiece. Thematically and stylistically, Merhige’s movie articulates a much deeper skepticism about the medium.

In Shadow of the Vampire, the camera is itself vampiric. It is parasitic, demanding something of all who are captured in its lens. When Greta laments leaving Berlin during the theatrical season, Murnau retorts, “Why would you possibly want to act in a play when you can act in a film?” Greta answers, “A theatrical audience gives me life, while this thing merely takes it from me.” Murnau is dismissive of her concerns., “Consider it a sacrifice for your art.”

In return for the life that it drains, the camera offers immortality. It captures images that will outlast the performers, the director, even any individual audience member. “We are scientists engaged in the creation of memory,” Murnau boasts. “But our memory will neither blur nor fade.” He rants to his producer Albin Grau (Udo Kier), “Time will no longer be a dark spot on our lungs. They will no longer be able to say: ‘You would have to have been there.’  Because, the fact is, Albin: we were.”

In some ways, this is a romantic idea. However, Shadow of the Vampire is layered with knowing irony. Most obviously, the pictures themselves are not immortal. In real life, Murnau’s Nosferatu was the target of a lawsuit from the estate of Bram Stoker, accused of ignoring copyright. A German court ordered all copies of Nosferatu to be destroyed. The version of Murnau’s Nosferatu that exists today has been patched together from scraps and fragments of reels scattered around the world.

Even today, audiences know that film is impermanent. There are completed movies that no audience will ever see due to the peculiarity of tax law. The streaming age and the collapse of physical media has made film and television an impermanent medium. For years, Shadow of the Vampire was itself “unstreamable”, legally unavailable on any online platform. Shadow of the Vampire was not some invisible film. It earned two Oscar nominations, including one for Dafoe.

Within the film itself, Shreck ruminates on the impermanence of art. He was converted into a vampire by a woman, however he has no memory of her, just as he has no memory of where he was born. All that is lost to time. “At first I had a painting of her in wood,” Shreck tells Albin. “Then I had a relief of her in marble. And then, I had a picture of her in my mind. But now I no longer even have that.” Wood, marble and memory do not last. It is arrogance to suggest film stock might fare better.

As such, both the film and its subject serve as a rejoinder to Murnau’s insane ravings. However, even if Murnau is to be taken at his word, Shadow of the Vampire argues that the preservation of an image means nothing while its context is lost to history. After all, that is the entire premise of the movie. Shadow of the Vampire is predicated on the longstanding rumor that Max Shreck never existed, widely circulated in film circles for decades, despite very obvious evidence of his existence.

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” Dutton Peabody (Edmond O'Brien) argues in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. An image has always carried even more weight than the printed word. That bestows upon film a tremendous amount of power and influence. It has the ability to distort and bend reality, to alter the historical record. Shadow of the Vampire is very consciously aware of this, threaded as it is with images of national and historical anxiety.

As a movie set during the production of Nosferatu, Shadow of the Vampire unfolds against the backdrop of Weimar Germany. Although the film never explicitly articulates this context, it informs a lot of the characters and actions. When screenwriter Henrik Galeen (John Aden Gillet) expresses his discomfort with the situation, Murnau is quick to counter, “Henrik, when you wrote this scenario, you had demons of your own to work out, did you not?”

Murnau himself is working through his own demons, including a crippling morphine addiction. Early in the film, he loses himself in a decadent burlesque house. For anybody familiar with the historical record, Murnau is likely trying to numb the pain that came from injuries sustained during multiple plane crashes in the First World War. “I think he took some painkillers and some of the opiates that were developed in World War I in order to help with some of the pain at times,” offers Merhige.

The vampire is a metaphor. In an essay written before working on Nosferatu, the real-life Albin Grau  described the war as a “monstrous event that is unleashed across the earth like a cosmic vampire to drink the blood of millions and millions of men.” Historical observers have also drawn a very obvious connection between the horrors depicted in Nosferatu and the trauma of the Spanish Flu epidemic that immediately followed the First World War.

However, the trauma in Shadow of the Vampire ripples both backwards and forwards. Nosferatu is not just an expression of unarticulated and unconfronted past traumas bubbling through the collective subconscious, it also speaks to something lurking in the shadows and just waiting to emerge. At one point, in the throes of drug-induced madness, Murnau decorates the walls of his room with chalk etchings. One of the prominent illustrations is a swastika.

The depiction of the vampire as an eternal parasite is loaded in the context of the time. “[Dracula] anticipates the mass destruction of both European Jews and sexual deviants at the hands of Nazi racial hygienists,” wrote Howard Malchow. “The teutonic Dr. van Helsing's surgical assault on the supine, immobile, and vulnerable form of Dracula, in a ritual murder outside conventional morality, without the sanction of law and due process, for the sake of the health of the nation, its youth, and its womenfolk, found a kind of realization 45 years later in the operating theater of Dr. Joseph Mengele.”

Nosferatu found many admirers among the emerging Nazi movement. Julius Streicher, future founder and editor of Der Stürmer, attended the premiere and fell so in love with the image of the vampire that he would dedicate an entire issue of the paper comparing Jewish people to vampires. Historian Eric Rentschler argued that, taken out of its original context, Murnau’s imagery became a staple of antisemitic propaganda, “a specter from Weimar cinema refracted through a Nazi prism.”

That said, perhaps there is a more obvious and more contemporary sort of cinematic monster lurking in Shadow of the Vampire. In order to facilitate the production of Nosferatu, Murnau makes a deal with Shreck. He agrees to sacrifice his star, Greta Schröder, feeding her to the monster. Murnau gets what he needs to complete his movie, and Shreck gets to consume the beautiful young actress. It’s a very literal #metoo twist on the classic vampire movie premise.

Although sexual abuse in Hollywood obviously extends far beyond one individual, it does feel notable that Shadow of the Vampire was released at the height of Harvey Weinstein’s power. The same year that Willem Dafoe picked up an Oscar nomination for playing Shreck, Weinstein exerted enough influence to secure a surprise Best Picture nomination for Chocolat. This was just two years after his infamously effective campaign that helped Shakespeare in Love claim the top prize.

In late 2017, Hollywood was rattled by public revelations that Weinstein had been sexually harassing and assaulting women for years. Of course, this wasn’t really a surprise. In April 2015, two years before the allegations would be made public, Gawker wrote about Weinstein’s “open secret.” In October 2017, Rebecca Traister admitted that she had been “having conversations about Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment for more than 17 years.”

An investigative report by The New York Times uncovered a pattern of behavior stretching back “over three decades.” Weinstein’s activities were well-known within industry circles. Brad Pitt had to confront Harvey Weinstein after he propositioned Gwyneth Paltrow, Pitt’s then-girlfriend. None of this is to suggest that Shadow of the Vampire is specifically about Harvey Weinstein. Instead, it is just to demonstrate that these sorts of activities were long-whispered-about within the industry.

As such, Shadow of the Vampire is very overtly about the horrors – both existential and material – that underpin the act of filmmaking. It is one of the most caustic movies ever made about the process of making movies, deeply cynical about the artform and the mechanics that guide it. In that sense, Shadow of the Vampire is a true cinematic horror story.