Shadow of the Vampire (2000) is an American horror film directed by E. Elias Merhige and written by Steven A. Katz, and starring John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe and Udo Kier. The film is a fictionalized account of the making of the classic vampire film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, directed by F. W. Murnau, in which the film crew begin to suspect that their lead actor is not all that he seems. The film borrows the techniques of silent films...
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Shadow of the Vampire (2000) is an American horror film directed by E. Elias Merhige and written by Steven A. Katz, and starring John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe and Udo Kier. The film is a fictionalized account of the making of the classic vampire film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, directed by F. W. Murnau, in which the film crew begin to suspect that their lead actor is not all that he seems. The film borrows the techniques of silent films, including the use of intertitles to explain elided action and iris lenses. The scenes of Nosferatu being filmed are shot in black and white.
The film is set in 1922. German director F. W. Murnau takes his Berlin-based cast and crew on-location in Czechoslovakia and Poland in order to shoot Nosferatu, an unauthorized version of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula. He informs them that the person playing the part of the vampire Count Orlok, an obscure German theater performer named Max Schreck, is a highly professional method actor, but in order...
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