Shadow Of The Vampire “adapted” Nosferatu as a searing filmmaking satire
Director E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow Of The Vampire, a sly and meta interpretation of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, poses a question: When is a traditional adaptation of a famous story not enough?
It’s still a pertinent question, almost 25 years after that film’s release. Given that the film industry is replete with reboots and reimaginings, and cinema culture filled with regularly scheduled discourse cycles assessing the state of an industry built on the foundation of recognizable IP, to say some stories will never die is an obvious truism. Some stories, however, feel less like cash grabs and more like cultural touchstones—shared myths passed down through reinterpretation to resonate with new generations.
For example, whenever Dracula is dragged from the shadows into the brutal light of a new adaptation—such as Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu—it feels more like we’re paying another round of respect to one of our timeless legends. Whether under the Dracula or Nosferatu banner, the story always hits familiar beats: intimate violence, elements of yearning for desire and control steeped in the supernatural, and macabre novelistic qualities, such as its fragmented, multi-perspective structure and bifurcated storytelling. Typically, all of this rests at the heart of a vampire’s journey to a foreign land, with only incidental plot points shifting from version to version. The issue lies in how many more iterations of this classic story—such as Eggers’ film—can be made before losing its vitality, regardless of technical execution.
To be clear, Eggers’ Nosferatu bears a beautiful new coat of paint. If you like his style, it’s hard to resist. A director who has long since earned his genre movie bona fides dives headfirst into material that’s likely informed his entire career. It’s filled with painstaking production design, impassioned performances, and eerie gothic horror imagery, and anchored by the transgressive, monstrous desire and eroticism inherent to the story. But it can also feel like a pure stylistic exercise rather than a transformative work—a director indulging his passions by re-telling a story foundational to his artistic identity, without deepening its legacy. The story’s relevance is self-evident but well-worn.
In contrast, Shadow Of The Vampire takes a gleefully defiant stance against the idea of straightforward reinterpretation. It recognizes the innate power of the original film and reshapes it to tell a new story about the line between humanity and monstrosity as it pertains to the creative process. By directly contrasting a director with his dark creation, the film reveals how filmmaking itself can be a form of vampirism, draining life and humanity in pursuit of art. This refitting isn’t merely an exercise in novelty—though it does offer some fundamental thrills in how it plays with familiar history—but comes from a deeper recognition of how Nosferatu’s themes of consumption and transformation mirror the sacrifices demanded by artistic creation.
That’s not to say that the story’s traditional adaptations are pointless, or that there haven’t been exceptionally crafted ones. Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu The Vampyre and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula offer fantastic versions of the story—the former taking an angle of unexpected existential, lyrical despair and the latter a tone of pure erotic phantasmagoria. Important to the success of each is their individual sense of identity. Shadow Of The Vampire goes even further, making the act of creating Dracula inseparable from its more grounded themes of desire, power, and control.
Merhige’s and screenwriter Steven Katz’s postmodern Nosferatu retelling isn’t the first that comes to mind when considering Dracula adaptations, probably because it isn’t really a Dracula or Nosferatu adaptation. It takes a different approach: What if Murnau’s original 1922 film was recast as the backdrop for supernatural historical fiction? What if Max Schreck, the actor who played Dracula analog Count Orlok, were an actual vampire, hired for authenticity? With Willem Dafoe delivering an Oscar-nominated performance as Schreck—incidentally also appearing in Eggers’ film in another role—Merhige reexamines the mythology entirely. He guides the audience through a story about artistic creation and the cost of genius by reframing the iconography of a universally known story and figure. He finds new ideas to interrogate from the pure image of Nosferatu by making the identities of Murnau and Schreck inextricably linked—Schreck, the creature, masked under layers of performance, now at the whim of an exacting filmmaker. Art reflects life, right down to the fangs.
Shadow Of The Vampire does this by intertwining its vampire story with a filmmaking satire. Director F.W. Murnau (played with perfect, terse monomania by John Malkovich) is a creator obsessed with truth in art, and it’s what he seeks in adapting Stoker’s original text. His re-engineering of Stoker’s novel is founded in necessity—the author’s estate would not sanction a direct adaptation—but, in one of the film’s many self-referential flourishes, Murnau seeks new modes of authenticity through reinvention, in his case to the point of madness. Murnau is a man who celebrates an “end to the artifice” of having to shoot on sets. He describes filmmakers as “scientists in the creation of memory,” and assures his crew that nonprofessional extras are okay because “they don’t need to act, they just need to be.” He seeks to weave reality into the emotional fantasy of his craft, which is what leads him to hire Schreck, a real vampire.
The filmmaking crew and those around them face the same otherworldly terrors as the characters in their film. Early on, the crew and producers are scolded by the owner of a remote inn, where they’re filming on location, for taking down the crosses that adorn the building, hung out of the belief that they ward off the creature they call Nosferatu. When cameraman Wolfgang Mueller (Ronan Vibert) returns to the inn shaken by the crew’s eerie introduction to Schreck, she immediately knows the vampire is to blame. The tangible, threatening presence of Count Orlok still lurks within the shadows of this self-referential narrative, but he is repurposed to serve different ends, refracting the original story.
For his part, Schreck is framed as the ultimate Method actor to serve Murnau’s unyielding fixation, as it’s explained to the crew and producers that he will be entirely immersed in his character on and off-camera and will only be filmed at night. There’s a nontrivial amount of Schreck’s presence that’s played for light ironic humor as the iconic face of Nosferatu begrudgingly takes notes from his director and strains the patience of his costars. The tongue-in-cheek critique of Schreck’s supposed acting methods, mirroring real-life instances of performers taking their roles too far, is amusingly on-the-nose. It recalls now-infamous stunts from actors going to irresponsible lengths to perpetually connect with their character—think of Jared Leto as the Joker sending his Suicide Squad castmates used condoms and anal beads, or the crew of Man On The Moon having to deal with Jim Carrey claiming he was possessed by the ghost of Andy Kaufman and constantly derailing the production. Murnau is all too willing to overlook the danger Schreck poses to the production. “Schreck’s peculiarities are like lovemaking games,” he explains to his testy crew. “You believe them when they happen but they always stop short of anybody being seriously hurt.”
This, of course, is immediately proven to be a deception—or at least naive, wishful thinking— from Murnau. Filming the scene in which the character Thomas Hutter cuts open his thumb at dinner with Orlok, Murnau startles actor Gustav von Wangenheim (Eddie Izzard) so that he really pricks his finger. Schreck immediately lunges for his blood—a scripted part of the scene, but one taken too far as he continues to fight Gustav to get at his wound. After the lights suddenly go out, Schreck is found at Wolfgang’s throat. To the crew, this is another indictment of a performer who has taken their craft to the brink so as to become an actual threat. Murnau admonishes his behavior, going so far as to directly threaten him when Schreck challenges his ego and command, but the dynamic of a director utilizing a dangerous monster in his film for the sake of authenticity has long been established—he will do whatever it takes to make a film in the name of legitimacy. The show must go on.
Shadow Of The Vampire is about destructive obsession, but the script is also privy to how filmmaking itself can be a violent and ravenous act. As Merhige himself has put it: “It was very consciously made with the idea that this film is about the nature of cinema itself; the vampiristic nature of the camera…it takes the flesh and the blood away and just leaves the shadow. It doesn’t have a life pulse…The camera drinks your essence away from you, but leaves this eternal shade.”
The allegory of the camera and the vampire serving similar functions is the film’s lifeblood, particularly resonant when its climax intersects with that of Nosferatu, in which Orlok drinks the blood of his obsession Ellen Hutter. Nosferatu and Shadow Of The Vampire echo each other as the true extent of Murnau’s bargain with Schreck is made apparent: Schreck would star in Murnau’s film if he could have Ellen’s actress, Greta Schrӧder (Catherine McCormack). The film again extrapolates classic thematics to new ends: the imagery of Orlok drinking Ellen’s blood is now an extension of Murnau’s dangerous obsession, which the climax morphs into an indictment of filmmakers that willingly work with performers that contribute to an unsafe working environment.
Shooting becomes pure savagery as Murnau coldly films Schreck feeding on his victim, even after the remaining crew’s plot to burn the monster in the sunlight fails and Schreck kills everyone. Everyone except Murnau. Surrounded by the bodies of his crew, Murnau instructs Schreck to return to his mark for another take. His fanaticism overwhelms any remaining sense of humanity as he reminds Schreck, “If it’s not in the frame, it doesn’t exist.” Extraneous crew members arrive and allow sunlight to flood the set, Murnau capturing the creature’s death as part of the take. Strangely, his brutality is even more pronounced in the way he allows Schreck to die for the film alongside his crew, as this affords the murderous Schreck an unexpected sense of pathos concerning the lonely nature of living in eternal darkness. Murnau manipulates everybody: his crew, the melancholy and estranged vampire, and the audience bearing witness to the production. The director becomes the ultimate monster, and Shadow Of The Vampire ends in the graveyard of a dreamscape.
Merhige and Katz’s perspective isn’t necessarily that filmmaking is an irredeemable act of exploitation, but rather that it’s disturbingly easy to cross that line when wielding such control. It’s true that Murnau was known as a methodical director—just read the reported history that he would have his Nosferatu performers act to metronomes and used music on set as a baseline in “an attempt to transmit tonal chords in space.” (There’s a reason Nosferatu is subtitled A Symphony Of Horror.) Shadow Of The Vampire extrapolates his personality into a critique of a broader archetype, insinuating that an inescapable darkness lies at the heart of the director figure, always on the verge of emerging. It takes a capable grasp of one’s humanity to wrestle that in.
Merhige described vampires as being most effectively portrayed through film: “You have this battle between dark and light, and what more perfect a battleground than the cinema?” The Dracula narrative is a natural conduit for the stark contrast that Merhige describes, a vehicle for the reliable visual motif that effortlessly communicates good versus evil. What Shadow Of The Vampire adds is the suggestion that our own transition from humanity to monstrosity isn’t some distant fantasy—it's a step into the darkness that any of us could take. Cinema’s lineage of Dracula adaptations has long served as fertile ground for transmitting new perspectives of this essential conflict but here, the focus is shifted. Merhige directly involves the audience in the conflict by prompting a self-reckoning: how far removed are we from the grotesque hearts of Orlok or Murnau? Upon examination, those hearts are so easily mutated and adaptable because this struggle is universal—the constant tug of evil against the essence of humanity. As Merhige says: “That’s all it is, shadow and light.”