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.
The great Ernest Dickerson turns seventy-five years old this month, so we’re looking back at his most memorable contribution to the horror genre – 1995’s Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight!
The film hit screens while the Tales from the Crypt series was winding down its run on television, and it stands apart with a story that feels a step or two removed from the franchise norm. That was the smart play, though, as the show’s stories – and those from the original EC comics – work best in short bites. The result is a film that holds up beautifully as a gory good time.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995)
Commentator: Ernest Dickerson (director), Michael Felsher (moderator)
1. Dickerson was in post-production on Surviving the Game when he got a call from his agent saying that producer Gil Adler wanted to meet about a Tales from the Crypt feature film. It went well, so Dickerson met with Joel Silver next and secured the job.
2. The original screenplay for the film came to the producers as a spec script wholly detached from the Tales from the Crypt brand. They added the Crypt Keeper (voiced by John Kassir) bookends to make it fit.
3. Dickerson was more familiar with the original EC comic books having read them as a kid, but he had watched a few episodes of the HBO series, so he knew what the current vibe was for the project.
4. Adler directed the film’s wraparound segments, meaning Dickerson never actually got to work with the creepy puppet. “Gil and the Crypt Keeper had a great relationship,” he adds, “they worked together for years.”
5. While he was new to the Tales from the Crypt family, Dickerson had previously worked as a director of photography on the Tales from the Darkside anthology series. That show is underappreciated in my humble opinion, and I will go to bat for both it and the equally underloved Monsters.
6. A big appeal of the horror genre for Dickerson is the idea of dark mysteries that challenge our imagination. For this film, that came down to the mythology being created between the characters.
7. Five executive producers are listed in the opening credits, but Dickerson says the only two he had dealings with were Silver and Richard Donner. The other three were Walter Hill, Robert Zemeckis, and David Giler.
8. Dickerson had only ever seen Billy Zane in movies with a full head of hair, so he was surprised when Zane showed up on the first day with a bald head. “He had this case, and he opened up the case that he had all these hair pieces in, and he says, ‘So which one of these do you think I should use?’” Dickerson looked at him and suggested he just go bald for the character.
9. While the bulk of the opening exteriors were filmed in a desert just outside Los Angeles, the shot of the old church at 11:26 was created on a warehouse hangar soundstage where the film’s interiors were shot.
10. When he had read the script, Dickerson pictured the character of Jeryline (Jada Pinkett Smith) “as a little, tough lady.” He had recently seen Smith in Menace II Society, and while the producers had someone else in mind for the role, he fought to get her instead.
11. Just as Zane surprised Dickerson with his hair (or lack thereof), Smith arrived on the first day with her hair dyed platinum white. He “liked the idea” but asked her to please get it tweaked so it looked more yellowish blond. “It’s definitely a statement.”
12. He had seen Brenda Bakke in the 1989 sci-fi/action film from Japan, Gunhed, and thought she’d be great here as Cordelia. The rest of us might recognize her from Death Spa or Trucks.
13. Felsher comments that the film’s setup does a good job not telegraphing who’s going to live or die, and he uses the “nice guy” (Charles Fleischer) and “the kid” (Ryan O’Donohue) as examples. “You don’t play by those rules here,” he says, and Dickerson replies that he wanted to subvert those rules. That extends to Smith as well because she’s Black, “and usually in movies like this they’re the first folks to die.”
14. Dickerson says they had forty days of filming, “which, the way I’m used to working, was a very generous schedule.” It was budgeted at around $10 million.
15. This probably won’t surprise you, but Zane improvised the bit at 26:25 after he jumps out the window and says, “Fuck this cowboy shit! You fuckin’, hodunk Podunk, well, then, motherfuckers!”
16. In the original script, the demons that The Collector (Zane) raises from the dirt actually looked more like the people they used to be. “They were more human,” but the very smart decision was made in pre-production to make them look far more unique instead.
17. The demons are killed by shooting their eyes, but Dickerson felt there should be one more element to it. “Shoot out their eyes, you gotta duck because the souls come shooting out, and if it hits ya, boom, it can kill ya.” This is a fun touch.
18. He’s been asked more than once if these demons are where Peter Jackson got the idea for how the orcs would look in his Lord of the Rings movies. “They do look like orcs.”
19. He recalls having seen Ronny Yu’s The Bride with White Hair shortly before going to work on Demon Knight, and he hoped to bring some of that staged style into his own film. An example of that in practice is Brayker’s (William Sadler) brief flashbacks to Christ on the cross.
20. Character deaths were mostly based on the idea that “each person’s downfall was going to be predicated by their weakness.” The Collector discovers someone’s weakness and then uses it against them. Cordelia wants to be loved, Jeryline wants to travel, Uncle Willy (Dick Miller) is a horndog for both liquor and ladies, Danny loves horror comics, etc.
21. Dickerson says that plenty of genre classics were in the back of his head while making the film, including Assault on Precinct 13, Alien, Aliens, and more.
22. Cordelia is possessed into a demonic form, and Dickerson’s idea for how she’d look was originally a bit different. “Since Cordelia was a prostitute, I thought that her mouth should actually be a vertical slit that was in her stomach… which would open up with teeth and a tongue.” It was nixed, he says, when “the wife of one of the producers read that and said ‘no way you’re putting that in the movie.’”
23. The key makes an appearance in the followup, Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood, but it wasn’t originally meant to. Apparently, early test audiences expected it to be a more connected sequel to Demon Knight, so the filmmakers added it in to appease them. This is where I go on record saying that Bordello of Blood is a fun time. Can’t touch Demon Knight, obviously, but it’s more entertaining than its reputation suggests.
24. They had to film Uncle Willy’s bar scene “dream” twice, once with the women topless and once with them in bikinis, to have versions for both theaters and television broadcast. “Dick’s a pro.” (To be fair, Dickerson says this in regard to Miller having to endure the makeup application, but the sentiment fits both situations, so…)
25. Dickerson says he’s “always amazed at the love that people show this film,” and adds that fans bring it up to him incredibly often. This is great to hear, as we should always be telling artists how much their work means to us while they’re still alive and able to hear it.
26. Zane also suggested the gag at 1:08:21 with the sponge coming out of his mouth. The beat reminds Dickerson to praise the actor even more, adding that he was an “ally” to the director when “bad ideas” came down from the studio suits.
27. He didn’t get any pushback on killing little Danny. He did insist on one added element, though, as he wanted to immediately follow the boy exploding in the air with a shot of his bloody and torn sneaker hitting the ground below. “And the sneaker had to be a hightop.”
28. Dickerson says there’s “something kinky sexy about” Smith being covered in blood, and then the two commentators go quiet for almost two minutes out of respect for the scene. It’s a good opportunity to reflect on how Dickerson had previously mentioned Alien and Aliens as films being in the back of his head during filming, and how two scenes here reflect that – Jeryline stripping down to her underwear for the final confrontation feels like a nod to Ridley Scott’s film, while an earlier scene with Irene (CCH Pounder) and Dep. Bob (Gary Farmer) realizing they’re surrounded and choosing to blow themselves up alongside some of the demons is something of a callback to the air vent sacrifice in James Cameron’s film.
29. Asked about the film’s critical reception at the time of release, Dickerson says it received good reviews from horror-loving critics and then talks about the importance of horror in general. “Horror has always been a great way of putting out ideas, of talking about some of the things that affect us as people. Some of the best horror, like the best science fiction, talks about what it’s like to be human. Some of the best horror gets very political.”
30. The original ending would have featured The Collector showing “his true self, which is a demon made of fire.” They spent a lot of time trying to make it work, but it was “extremely difficult… back in the day of analog effects.” It was rewritten into the faceoff between him and Jeryline featuring the dancing, the crotch fire, Zane’s attempts at saying “love,” and his eventual demise from her bloody spit.
31. They both agree that a direct sequel to Demon Knight could be a lot of fun, but Dickerson says he’s unaware of any talk on the possibility.
32. Dickerson was super excited about this new Scream Factory Blu-ray in 2015, and he mentions that before its release, he had imported a Blu-ray from Germany presumably to enjoy the film in HD. He’s just like us! (Or am I the only one here who’s imported a German Blu-ray of the much maligned werewolf flick Big Bad Wolf…)
Quotes Without Context
“I was so happy to get Dick Miller for this movie.”
“There was a time when guys used to put ketchup on everything.”
“I’m a big student of Hitchcock, and the best way to make a moment of horror work is to lull the audience into a false sense of security.”
“A villain should always be the most interesting person in a movie.”
“They were a really great bunch of performers who were performing on these little leg-extension stilts wearing a diaper that had a radio-controlled tail that was being manipulated by a special effects tech right out of the frame.”
“It’s hard to direct air; it doesn’t do what you want.”
“The only censorship problem came from the producer’s wife, who didn’t want the vagina dentalis [sic] in the movie.”
“One of the executives wanted to know why the devil didn’t try to have sex with Jada.”
“It always starts with the script.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
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