Shadow of the Vampire (2000)

A horror movie about making a horror movie? When I first heard about this, it sounded halfway comical, yet it clearly wasn't played for laughs. When I learned the focus more precisely much later, I became mildly intrigued.

In an assuredly alternate 1921, F.W. Murnau (John Malkovich again) is beginning to direct the classic Dracula knockoff Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Many of the people involved had expected him to be highly controlling but are perplexed by his secrecy, followed by his unusual process for dealing with the vampire's actor, Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe, in the role that got him into Spider-Man), whom they never heard of before. Schreck is creepily eccentric, but that just means he's an ahead-of-his-time method actor, right? ...Right?

Yeah, you know better. So does Murnau, who cares so much about making an awesome film that he'll knowingly make a deal with a real vampire. This does not make him Schreck's "Renfield" per se; the two of them argue in private a lot, because Schreck isn't big on following directions or leaving crew members intact. Sometimes he seems to forget he's supposed to be acting. Well, Count Orlok and his like do come across as less civilized if not less human than most vampires, perhaps because of advanced age even by their standards.

Unfortunately, that sort of geriatrics is better for shallow scariness than for pragmatic effect. With Schreck barely in control of himself, he does a poor job of hiding his nature and, in the end, not much better a job of defending himself. Has long-time success made him cocky?

If you've already seen Nosferatu, as I have, you may get a little extra enjoyment from recognizing certain things. If you haven't, you won't get lost. In fact, not knowing the source well may help keep things from getting too predictable for you.

On the plus side, watching the depicted production of a silent can be kind of interesting when the director feels free to do plenty of second-person narration, having little concern for what the actors say. Sometimes the feverish reactions to Schreck border on infectious. On the minus side, purists may complain of a few blatant deviations from known history, such as praise for Sergei Eisenstein before he had made a single picture. Heck, they may object to the vilification of Schreck and Murnau. Yes, there used to be rumors of Schreck being a real vampire, but he had acted many times before and since. And ironically, none of the scenes could be visibly shot by night.

Personally, I got only so much out of either version of Nosferatu, and I think this metafiction adds only so much freshness. The 6.9 on IMDb is about right for it.