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Every movie director who plans to make a vampire movie will most
definitely have read Bram Stoker's Dracula and branch off it with
their own wild imaginations. Shadow of the Vampire is a movie about
a German director filming his version of Dracula who becomes
obsessed with making the perfect silent movie that will capture death and
horror to the extent that the audience will say, "We have been
there."
The character and director in the movie, Friedrich Murnau (John
Malkovich) exemplified a deranged perfectionism. He's willing to expend his
crew members as if they were items, bargaining the life of one of his actors
for good "acting" skills, and drugging anybody who opposes (happens
twice). His desire is not fueled from a need for recognition in the
entertainment world, he's quite famous already, but by his need to capture
life and fear at the moment.
In order to satisfy his desires, Murnau recruits Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe) who will be filmed
only at night. Murnau explains that Schreck always stays in character, never
dropping his vampirish facade in order to immerse himself in his
character's personality. When that was announced to the film crew, there was
an automatic connection that Schreck was a real vampire and that the crew was
in deep poop. As members of the cast mysteriously disappear, fall
ill/delirious, and/or die, we learn more about the half-vampire, his
beginning, and his loneliness. While some might feel sympathy for Schreck,
his creepy obsession with the female lead Greta made me see him as an
aging adulterer. In one scene, Schreck could no longer restrain himself and
declared, "I want her now," in a nasally "seductive"
tone.
Some of the similarities to the book Dracula, are that both
vampires love to drink from beautiful women. Another was how women are
portrayed as weak tools, and used as bait. One thing I noticed was that in
Dracula, the distinction between good v. evil was very obvious. But
in Shadow of the Vampire, evil came in the form of both the dead and
the living. The film was very enjoyable, the characters were played
wonderfully, and their German accents were fun to listen to.
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