the 2000 project #1: shadow of the vampire

in which method acting is invented

It’s about every other week, isn’t it? Brian Cox, on his latest press tour, has taken another shot at his erstwhile Succession co-star Jeremy Strong. Jeremy’s a great actor, but he takes it all too seriously. Real actors don’t go in for all that business. They punch the clock and go home. Acting is a job.

Look, I get it. Method actors are tiresome. We’ve all read the innumerable stories about Jared Leto sending anal beads to fellow cast members in character as the Joker. Sometimes actors just need to chill out.

And sometimes actors are real vampires you found in a real castle, to whom you’ve promised famous actresses’ life and blood at the end of filming. All of which is to say, maybe Brian Cox has a point. And maybe there’s worse out there than Jared Leto.

Part one of The 2000 Project is Shadow of the Vampire, directed by E. Elias Merhige, starring John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe.

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It’s a great premise, isn’t it? We’ve all thought it at some point, when an actor brings a monster to life vividly - where the hell did that come from, and how were they able to pretend? Shadow of the Vampire simply takes that one step further, introducing a leading star who does not need to pretend. He’s got that lifestyle down.

I would actually argue that this is a film where the premise is too good. It’s one of those cases where the pitch gets in the way of how the story is developed - just restating the notion that Nosferatu is a real guy sucks the oxygen out of the room.

This is a film that starts somewhere incredible, but doesn’t progress terribly far from that point of origin. Nosferatu is a real guy and the director made a deal with him for the ultimate realistic vampire movie - this is as much true of the third act as it is the first. Only in the last 15 minutes or so does the film really move into another gear, bringing its cynical satire of the pursuit of authenticity to an end point that is impressively confident in its bleakness. Before that, it’s mainly just atmosphere and mood and good character actors offering reliable work.

Doesn’t seem that bad, does it? Well, exactly. Shadow of the Vampire still works, despite its limited ambitions. The detailed production design and clever interpolations of silent-era filmmaking tropes build out the pastiche nicely - it’s not easy work to feel contemporary to Murnau’s time, but this does. The cast are all strong, with Malkovich (very much in his bag at the time) a sweaty, nervous, weird wreck at its centre, and Cary Elwes and Udo Kier making a lovely double act towards the end of the film.

A fun link between ‘24 Nosferatu and Shadow, of course, is the presence of Willem Dafoe, who plays the role of Max Schreck aka Real Guy Nosferatu here. It is just very pleasing to me that he received an Oscar nomination for this - it’s true that this film’s cine-history theme makes it a bit more of an appetising prospect for the tony crowd, but this is still a horror film with a big hammy lead performance.

Secondly - what fun! This is peak freako Dafoe, a couple of years out from Spider-Man. He goggles and leers - and frankly - goons away, his elongated fingers waggling, a pulsating figure of off-putting threat that draws attention in his direction in every scene in which he’s involved. It’s a performance nicely in tune with the silent film era - big and bold and exaggerated to burst through the barrier of sound and colour that had not yet been surmounted at the time.

Shadow is a success, but a qualified one - more of an amusing curiosity than a compelling portrait of the pursuit of filmmaking turned sour at the dawn of the art. It proposes an endlessly entertaining question and offers fairly unsurprising answers - that if Nosferatu were a real guy, then it would be a real problem, and not a great deal more than that. Glad we had that cleared up.

I would like to introduce the ‘chad count’ (hanging chads, remember), which measures how easy it is to link the film we’re covering to the contemporary political climate of the day. This is not a scientific measure.

Chad count: MEDIUM. A leader out of his depth who summons a vampiric figure to bring gravitas to his project only to discover the vampire has a destructive will of his own and uses his power to feed upon the weak - are we describing F.W. Murnau and Max Schreck, or George W. Bush and Dick Cheney? You decide.

Next week: Enter the Riddick-verse with David Twohy’s Pitch Black, as Vin Diesel makes one giant leap towards Hollywood stardom.