*SPOILERS AHEAD*
I’m a sucker for the admittedly rather blunt moral “humans are the real monsters,” and that’s precisely what we are offered in E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire. Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck (as Nosferatu) gives the best performance of his career, and yet somehow he’s still overshadowed by John Malkovich in the role of F. W. Murnau.
Throughout the course of the movie, Murnau watches on as Count Orlok begins to murder his crew members one by one. Indeed, in the final scene Murnau calmly films while Orlok kills two members of his team on camera and then proceeds to reproach the dying individuals for not helping him compose the shot. In the moment after he finishes filming, he appears almost post-coital in his bliss. His rather ominous utterance “I think we have it” ends the film on a haunting note.
The obvious moral here is that Orlok was only acting in accordance with his nature, whereas Murnau purposefully and knowingly endangered the lives of his cast and crew in order to assure his legacy as a legendary director (a depiction, by the way, that is wildly untrue; Murnau was known to be a very sensitive and caring person). We’re never bludgeoned over the head with this moralizing, but it seems quite clear to me that Orlok is meant to be a likable, if not lethal, buffoon who simply wants to drink some blood (who doesn’t?), whereas Murnau is calculating, dispassionate, and self-obsessed - the archetypal sociopath, representing the worst in humankind.
This film is not “scary” by today’s rather banal standards. The horror relies entirely on the stellar performances offered by the cast and the nocturnal atmosphere of the film sets. Yet Shadow of the Vampire is a reminder of the heights that the horror genre can achieve when approached with intent, purpose, and an unwillingness to rely on played out tropes and cheap jump scares.