Editorials
If It’s Not in Frame It Doesn’t Exist: ‘Shadow of the Vampire’ at 25
Everybody has that movie that they will always champion, always recommend, always love unconditionally. For me, that movie is Shadow of the Vampire, which was released in theaters twenty-five years ago.
This fictional account of the making of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu remains one of the most incisive, thought-provoking, and hilarious vampire films ever made, all while somehow maintaining the creeping, undeniable dread of the film it is revering and, to some extent, satirizing. It is a film about filmmaking, the “war of art,” and perhaps most compelling, a film about reality and artifice. So, what could a twenty-five-year-old movie about the making of a one-hundred-year-old movie possibly have to tell us about life in the year of our Lord 2025? As it turns out, quite a bit.
Throughout the film, F.W. Murnau, brilliantly played by John Malkovich, insists that he is intent on capturing reality. The film opens with the end of shooting on a set built on a stage where Greta Shroeder (Catherine McCormack) gleefully and tenderly dangles a bauble in front of a kitten until Murnau calls, “end.” At that moment, her expression transitions to one of disdain for everything she feels she has been reduced to by being forced to participate in the burgeoning motion picture industry. In other words, everything is fake. The buildings are facades, the people are actors, and even the cat has been drugged to make it more docile. Murnau’s cry of “at last an end to this artifice!” as the company will be heading out onto location the next day implies that he intends to capture reality and reality only. The rest of the film, however, proves otherwise.
When they arrive in Czechoslovakia, Murnau insists to his producer Albin Grau (Udo Kier) that the inhabitants of the village do not need to act; they only need to be. But when one of these villagers walks into a shot to protest that the crosses on the walls of her inn have been removed, he shouts, “Albin, a native has wandered into my frame!” Grau then assures the woman that the crosses would be returned, but that they “overwhelmed the composition.” These are early indications that reality may not actually be foremost on Murnau’s mind. Everything is artifice, everything is manipulation. Except for the one thing he cannot control: Max Schreck.
The great conceit at the center of Shadow of the Vampire is “what if Murnau was so insistent on reality that he hired an actual vampire to play the role?” Willem Dafoe, in his Oscar-nominated role as Schreck, gives one of his most unhinged performances, which is saying something considering his filmography. It is a performance that leaves room for the audience to believe that Schreck could either really be a vampire or be such a committed method actor that he believes himself to be one. In reality, the idea of vampirism goes far beyond this character, serving as a metaphor that extends to the very nature of filmmaking itself. In the opening scene, Greta laments that the live audience of the theatrical experience gives her life “while this thing,” referring to the camera, “takes it from me.” So, the camera itself is a vampire, a technological wonder whose mechanisms slowly drain the life, humanity, and will away from those it ensnares while simultaneously giving them the illusion of eternal life.
The film implies that the filmmaker can be a kind of vampire as well, or at least a Renfield-like servant to its bloodsucking master. Murnau may have the illusion of control, but as Schreck notes, as the shoot descends into chaos, “This is hardly your picture any longer.” Then who does the picture belong to? Is it Schreck? Or is it perhaps the all-consuming act of filmmaking itself, enabled by the mechanical beast that Murnau wields?
By the end, Murnau has become so consumed by his vision that he allows Schreck to kill Grau, Shroeder, and his cinematographer, Fritz Arno Wagner (Cary Elwes), before the vampire himself is destroyed by the sun. Even as Schreck is strangling Grau, Murnau tells his star, “Frankly, Count, I find this composition unworkable,” and tells him to return to his original mark. He then asks the dead Albin Grau to return the prop stake to the bed beside Greta. His reasoning—“if it’s not in frame, it doesn’t exist.” Or perhaps we could put this in modern parlance, “Pic, or it didn’t happen.”
How like a vampire film our lives have become. Or at least the life we curate for others to see. How much of what we post on Instagram is real, and how much is just beyond the frame? Shadow of the Vampire came along before social media took over our online landscape. Within a few years, YouTube and MySpace would begin their journey to immortality, only to be taken over by Facebook and Twitter and the expansive, Hulkified, Googleized version of YouTube we now have. Our online selves can give us immortality, but at what cost? Like Schreck, do we even know who we are anymore?
In the film, Schreck cannot remember how he became a vampire. He can’t remember where he came from or who he was before. Now he is too old even to create more vampire companions. In one of the film’s many memorable sequences, Schreck discusses the novel Dracula with Grau and writer Henrik Galeen (Aden Gillett) and how it made him sad that Dracula had no servants. The two men puzzle at this point, noting that they believe Schreck has missed the point of Stoker’s book. But Schreck tells them that when Harker arrives at Castle Dracula, the Count would have been without servants for hundreds of years, but would have to put on the airs of humanity for his guest, despite not remembering what it was like to be human. “He has to feed him when he himself hasn’t eaten food in centuries. Can he even remember how to buy bread? How to select cheese and wine?” He notes that Dracula remembers the glories of his armies but not the simple acts of humanity, even the most basic personal interactions.
This all makes me wonder, are we giving ourselves over to a vampire? Are we allowing the technology of our day to suck us dry of our humanity? It’s always a challenge to navigate a new technology. It’s a constant theme throughout history. What was intended to draw humans together so often drives them apart. This has been true from the automobile and the telephone to the motion picture and television to the internet and the smartphone. None of these things is made with nefarious intent, but we as humans have a knack for twisting good things into new problems to grapple with.
Lately, these things seem to be coming at us with a rapidity that we as the human race are not equipped to deal with thoroughly before being overtaken by them. Forty years ago, it was home computers that rapidly spread to every aspect of life, then it was the internet, then social media, then smartphones, and now the sudden pervasiveness of Artificial Intelligence. Like the spinning mechanisms of Murnau’s camera in Shadow of the Vampire, these are simultaneously enticing, beneficial, and dangerous.
It has always been the case that we live in a world overwhelmed by vampires, be they human, technological, or some combination of both. The human spirit, however, is strikingly resilient. We have tamed our monsters before, and we surely will again. The question is how much damage will these vampires of our own making do before we are able to expose them to the sun? Perhaps I am too much of an optimist, but I believe that light can overcome darkness. The road is long, and the progress is slow, but I believe that the better angels of our nature will prevail. By naming our vampires and identifying them for what they are, we begin to see through them and break the Faustian bargains we have made with them.
This isn’t to say that we should just abandon our innovations, but if horror movies and genre cinema have taught us anything, from Frankenstein to The Terminator to Jurassic Park, to Shadow of the Vampire and beyond, it’s that we must be responsible for our innovations and not allow them to overtake us and destroy our humanity. All these stories ask the vital question: Just because we can, does it mean we should? The answers to that question can be complex. There will always be benefits, but there will also always be consequences.
Pandora’s Box is already open, and there’s no turning back, but there are ways to proceed forward. To do so intelligently, we must go beyond our knowledge to guide us and explore something that I fear has been lacking in much of our contemporary age—wisdom. What that will look like remains to be seen.
It is striking how every time I return to Shadow of the Vampire, which is fairly often, I find more depths to mine and insights to uncover. This article is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the discussion of this film. I have barely touched on its insights into the filmmaking process, the nature of silent filmmaking, life in the Weimar republic and the shadow of authoritarianism to come, its examinations of art as a “battle and struggle,” the nature of memory, the roots of method acting, pervasive drug use and addiction, and only barely mentioned the biting humor throughout the film. And these are just its themes and ideas. There is even more to say about the film’s craft in front of and behind the camera, from its superb cast of actors, its brilliant writing, and its excellent direction from E. Elias Merhige, a truly fascinating filmmaker.
I really don’t like to throw this word around, but I believe that Shadow of the Vampire is a masterpiece that will only continue to have relevance to our current obsessions, challenges, and triumphs.
Horror was thriving so well in the 1980s that movies like Pen Densham’s The Kiss (1988) would understandably get lost in the shuffle, only to then gain their fans later on in life. Even still, this one Canadian-American curio has had a more challenging time than others, as far as contemporary reevaluations go, which is very likely due to the movie’s limited availability—at least as of this write-up.
However, the scarceness of The Kiss, while a bit annoying, makes it like catnip for ‘80s horror completists everywhere. Hopefully, a lot of them will walk away satisfied after watching this hidden gem.
Even though The Kiss was intended as the first of several horror collaborations between Astral Pictures and TriStar, as well as the first feature produced by Densham, Richard B. Lewis and John Watson’s Trilogy Entertainment Group, it ended up being the only one produced from that former union. Once the movie was released, TriStar’s distribution jitters—they opted for a regional rollout—did the $6-million flick no favors. TriStar’s cold feet toward horror releases have been well noted, but The Kiss still did a tad better than Night of the Creeps (1986), another genre outing that flopped due to its regional opening.
Shot in Montreal, but set in Albany, New York, The Kiss—which was still called The Host just a few months before its October premiere—concerns an average middle-class family and their forthcoming situation. The uncanny problem in store for them was, in fact, set in motion some years earlier. As that hot and dusty flashback to the Belgian Congo shows, a familial curse was set upon the two Dunbar sisters well before Meredith Salenger’s teenage character was born.
Meredith Salenger, Nicholas Kilbertus and Mimi Kuzyk in The Kiss
The Kiss, which was based on a story by co-writer Stephen Volk (Ghostwatch) and penned by both Volk and Tom Ropelewski, has the outward appearance of The Stepfather (1987). This movie, though, is anything but a gender-flipped retread of that classic domestic disturber. For starters, The Kiss is far less grounded in reality—that much is clear from its unsettling opening scene. There, a trusting girl (Priscilla Mouzakiotis) is the victim of her own deceptive aunt (Céline Lomez); the movie’s titular act, and the story’s first shock, becomes the means of transferring an ancient evil from one host to another.
In the present day, Salenger’s role of Amy Halloran, a religious schoolgirl, is dealt a harsh blow in life once her mother, Hilary Halloran née Dunbar (Pamela Collyer), suddenly dies in a freak accident. But rather than a complete stranger sweeping the Halloran widower (Nicholas Kilbertus) off his feet some months later, Joanna Pacula’s character is that chosen temptress. Here, Pacula plays the grown-up version of the afflicted girl last seen in the movie’s opener. Since Amy’s mother is insistent about there being no reunion between estranged sisters, and she even contemplates buying a gun shortly before her tragic demise, it’s presumable that Aunt Felice poses a threat to her family.
The Kiss isn’t a movie ever too concerned about its own predictability. The audience is indeed often one step ahead of the story here, but also keep in mind how every one of those steps is loud. Take, for instance, the death of Amy’s mother; the Halloran matriarch goes out in garish, gruesome fashion, as a supernaturally commandeered truck sends Collyer’s character through a store window first, then leaves her one leg short. The directorial enthusiasm truly comes out in horrific moments such as these.
The Kiss is always sure to revel in its characters’ ills and misfortunes. So if the plot doesn’t impress, then its lurid parts should. Amy’s mother’s exit scene was proof of an eager, first-time horror director proving his worth. Then, bestie Heather (Sabrina Boudot) survives to tell the tale of a bizarre escalator mishap that, despite showing relatively less gore, spikes viewers’ empathy meter. The wilder bits of this movie, however, commence with that inevitable hookup between Felice and Amy’s bewitched father; their kitchen coitus is paralleled by Amy’s feverish classroom terror. The outcome there is a disquieting cross-cut of sex magic and a young woman’s menstrual onset plus hallucinations.
Sabrina Boudot in The Kiss
From foam appliances to bladders, that parade of special effects in The Kiss casts its own spell on the audience. Felice’s familiar, a visibly malevolent cat, was realized here with several models, some more articulate than others. Admittedly, the demon cat’s not as convincing as most of the effects here, but accepting that artifice, as opposed to fighting it, will make the whole experience way more enjoyable. As for the makeup used to manifest Felice’s inner villainy, it is more minimal and subtle than one might like; yet the work done to turn Pacula into an antithesis of herself is nonetheless compelling.
The otherworldly perils and dreadful goings-on wouldn’t work half as well as they do in The Kiss without the story’s contrast effect. Finding frights in picturesque, extremely ordinary settings was something that took off in the ‘80s, thanks to that sweeping shift to locales like the suburbs. And Amy’s home, a replica of a real Montreal suburban house, is the ideal battleground for any proper good-versus-evil story. It’s also prime real estate for this movie’s satanic panic-inspired horrors.
Because of their ostensibly similar plots, The Kiss has been compared to The Exorcist (1973). Except in Densham’s movie, the sinister, non-Christian entity targeting a teen girl lies within something less apparent and, perhaps, more devastating upon its exposure. To an outsider, Pacula’s Aunt Felice is too beautiful and unobjectionable to ever suspect of being a monster. More suspicious is how quickly she rips into the fabric of the Halloran home. Felice’s mere presence upsets the “texture of family life,” according to the director.
The demon cat in The Kiss
Taking out Amy’s mother and best friend, and distracting her father, would suggest The Kiss is playing by a different set of rules. It is initially leaving its adolescent target unsupported in a rather grim scenario. In contrast, though, this story offers up a surrogate parent who does her best to fill in the holes of Amy’s eroding home life. Mimi Kuzyk does good work as that family friend and doctor, Brenda, who guides the lost child without also steering her in any one direction; she is naturally skeptical of Amy’s accusations until it’s almost too late to do anything about them. So although The Kiss does an admirable job of undoing the main character’s support system, it never leaves her without a lifeline. This dark movie, in spite of everything that’s transpired, doesn’t deprive itself of light and hope.
The Kiss is a potent mélange of familiar ideas. If not for the director’s surprise flair for horror, though, the movie would have been less effective. What a shame that Pen Densham didn’t continue with the genre. As for Joanna Pacula, she is, too, owed credit as the wicked vixen opposite Meredith Salenger’s pitiable Amy; she never fails to be unsettling in her role. Pacula makes Aunt Felice a sexy yet intimidating character.
For horror that steadily doles out madness and menace, while also delivering a flashy and ghastly conclusion, The Kiss is certain to please. Yes, it’s cheesy all the way, but most favorably, everyone involved plays everything straight. That kind of commitment goes a long way with this movie.
The Kiss
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