Film: Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
Apr. 30th, 2012 09:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseI have to admit that I was less interested in this film due to its fictionalisation of the making of Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, than because it stared Udo Kier and John Malkovich, who is always good in the strangest of things. I do recall watching Nosferatu but it didn’t make half as much of an impact as Metropolis really so it’s probably just as well that Shadow of the Vampire was less about film history than it was about a little bit of hokey horror.
The atmosphere begins reasonably seriously, even when the titular vampire is first introduced, and then shatters entirely when said vampire turns out to have an opinion of his own about the filming process. There was still a sense of serious threat but of a different tone. This wasn’t a gloriously gothic, undead, voivode but rather a dangerous, unpredictable, inhuman murderer. There was still the taste of horror to the whole affair but tempered by a wonderful black humour. In contrast to the ‘lighter’ humour of the vampire himself, the really chilling part came at the end, in the director’s insistence that all that matters is that everything be authenticated by the cinematic record. The lengths that the director was prepared to go to for authenticity, as well as his almost frantic determination that what he was recording was a record for posterity, had a depth of fatalism about it that formed the underbelly of the narrative.
This is also one of those films where the understated score helped the theme along considerably and I may have to track down a copy sooner rather than later. Likewise, the stylised openings and use of text screens really were a nice nod to the setting and the film within a film structure. The opening itself is worth watching a few times just to pick the details out.
Overall, Shadow of the Vampire is the sort of film that I’ve been wanting to watch for quite some time now, entirely without realising it. And I’m glad that, at last, I have done.
The atmosphere begins reasonably seriously, even when the titular vampire is first introduced, and then shatters entirely when said vampire turns out to have an opinion of his own about the filming process. There was still a sense of serious threat but of a different tone. This wasn’t a gloriously gothic, undead, voivode but rather a dangerous, unpredictable, inhuman murderer. There was still the taste of horror to the whole affair but tempered by a wonderful black humour. In contrast to the ‘lighter’ humour of the vampire himself, the really chilling part came at the end, in the director’s insistence that all that matters is that everything be authenticated by the cinematic record. The lengths that the director was prepared to go to for authenticity, as well as his almost frantic determination that what he was recording was a record for posterity, had a depth of fatalism about it that formed the underbelly of the narrative.
This is also one of those films where the understated score helped the theme along considerably and I may have to track down a copy sooner rather than later. Likewise, the stylised openings and use of text screens really were a nice nod to the setting and the film within a film structure. The opening itself is worth watching a few times just to pick the details out.
Overall, Shadow of the Vampire is the sort of film that I’ve been wanting to watch for quite some time now, entirely without realising it. And I’m glad that, at last, I have done.
