Vampires are ideological short-hand for an exploitative and often-violent ruling class, found throughout history, around the world. But the last century of cinema has seen significant and expensive efforts at the behest of studios and producers to transform them into tragic, sympathetic victims. Shadow of the Vampire is a forgotten classic, which delves into the process, and why exactly so many films end up offering sympathy for the Devil.
In his short story Le Joueur généreux, Charles Baudelaire describes a chance meeting with Satan, in which after a delicious meal, and a great deal of drink, he gambles away his immortal soul. During this meeting, the Devil passes on an ominous phrase he heard from a preacher: “The finest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.”
At the end of the meeting, the Devil resolves to prove he is not really so bad, by offering Baudelaire’s narrator the stake he would have won “had fate favoured you” in compensation for his lost soul. Satan pledges to deliver him from boredom, and supply him with a life of wealth and luxury. The narrator leaves elated, but soon finds himself praying to God – not to redeem his soul, but to ensure the Devil maintains on his promise.
For me, the preacher’s great warning – since paraphrased famously in The Usual Suspects – sells short the Devil’s greatest lie set out in the story. Perhaps The Old Goat himself even deploys it as a means to obscure what he is really doing. Because, the Devil’s victory does not come from vanishing into the shadows to become some invisible puppeteer. He prevails by convincing his victims that his way of life is actually benevolent, and in their interests.
This is the same ideological sleight of hand that society’s dominant class benefits from, as they seek to naturalise their position at the top of the pyramid. The powerful and the exploitative do not only secure hegemony by hiding, or through acts of cruelty. They most importantly depend on convincing us that their domination, their drives and impulses are actually desirable – romantic even. It’s a potent formula, so much so that Baudelaire fell for it hook line and sinker – happily selling his soul to the splendour of reaction, and ironically proclaim two years before releasing Le Joeur généreux, “There is no form of rational and assured government save an aristocracy.”
More than a century later, we can see this same ideological intoxication play out in the minds of contemporary artists – in how film directors interact with the concept of the vampire. I would argue there has never been a more singularly perfect distillation of the wider population’s justified fear and revulsion at the ruling class of the era, than the vampire.
Through every class-based society where a minority of wealthy parasites live high and wide on the life-force of their underlings, or wherever the forces of imperialism have arrived to drain the resources from the land, fearful stories of blood-sucking monsters pervade. There is the Pistaco of Peru, probably inspired by the arrival of the Conquistadors who ravaged the Incans. The Jiang Shi in Hong Kong, which often turned up in the uniform of an imperial Mandarin bureaucrat to drain its victim’s qi. The CIA even murderously leant into the vampire myths of the Philippines, to bring the country under control and quell a potential rebellion. And of course, most famously of all, there is the Slavic-style vampire – expropriated and popularised by Dracula and/or Nosferatu – draining the blood of the peasantry at night, before returning to its resting place in some great ruin during the day.
The odd thing, though, is however obviously, repulsively clear the essence of the vampire myth is – a base fear of a wealthy or powerful social caste, who thrive through the misery and exploitation of the poor and vulnerable – Hollywood’s filmmakers have a peculiar obsession with needing to paint them as romantic. Vampires have spent the last 100 years of cinema steadily being recast as tragic victims, hopelessly trapped in an intoxicating web of desire – and who might actually just need to be loved.
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for instance, Francis Ford Coppola re-imagined the rapacious Count of the book as a lovelorn wretch, who had “crossed oceans of time” to find the re-incarnated version of his deceased wife. In the wake of this, Anne Rice’s eternally whiny Interview with a Vampire was brought to the screen by director Neil Jordan – further proliferating the poor me, I am immortal but without a lover that is hell narrative. And trapped in a similar feedback loop, Catherine Hardwicke adapted Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (itself enabled by this re-casting of vampires as great romantics) for a film in which being groomed and controlled by a centuries-old ‘teenager’ is presented as not just normal, but greatly desirable.
All this begs the question: just why are the people behind the billion-dollar Hollywood machine so invested in redeeming the reputation of this class of Millennia-old, parasitic demons?
Stepping up to deliver a delicious (if perhaps obvious) answer to this question is Shadow of the Vampire. Serving as a fictionalised behind-the-scenes look at the making of the 1922 Nosferatu, the film gives us an insight into the nascent re-imagining of the vampire as a figure of relatable, romantic desires – he can only be defeated by the loving embrace of the woman he has moved across Europe to be with. But from the very beginning, director E. Elias Merhige and writer Steven Katz set out to make it clear what forces are at play in the crafting of this new mythos.
Weimar director Frederich Wilhelm Murnau (an imperious John Malkovich) is shown to be every part as sinister as the vampire he is seeking to depict. An opening text crawl notes that – as was the case in real life – Murnau had hoped to adapt Dracula, but had been denied by Bram Stoker’s estate. Murnau decides to press on, simply changing the names in the script (something which would later lead Stoker’s widow to sue, and a court to unsuccessfully commission the destruction of every reel of the film). The following opening scene sees Murnau preside over an opening shot of the movie-in-this-movie, for the ease of which it transpires he has had both the cat and the actress given laudanum. He then gives a speech about what he is trying to do, how with the science of film he can now make moments transcend time itself.
This immediately tells us all we need to know about the ‘great’ director, a single-minded hack, who will stop short of nothing to get what he wants: immortality. And when doubts emerge about the identity of Max Schreck as Count Orlok (an eerily patient Willem Dafoe), it does not take long to figure out that Murnau is concealing a deadly truth from his cast and crew – that perhaps the role and the actor might have been reversed on his credits sheet.
Dafoe rightly received a nomination from the Academy for Best Supporting Actor – he is a delight to behold, and it is clear why for the sake of a 90-minute run-time, so much of the connective tissue in the plot seems to have been cut away, instead of the moments he lingers and limps through the lens. As much as I would love a two-hour cut, where I get both Dafoe and some smoother, more patient transitions between scenes and locations, if it had to happen, this is the way round it needed to be done. The rigid, corpse-like shuffle of Orlok; the lack of ease he clearly feels at never quite knowing what to do with his hands, which jut out at an odd angle; the raspy, nasal huffing of his breath; and every Albert Steptoe-like sneer he shoots at the mortal who believes he is giving him orders are poetry.
But the impact of this performance hinges on the booming super-ego of Malkovich, who I would argue deserves just as much credit. Nagging and belittling his cast and crew where necessary, where he needs to, he lies to them, traps them, drugs and even strays beyond figuratively robbing their life-force via their labour, to literally offer them up as food to get what he needs – he is an ideological vampire. Murnau seeks to similarly domineer Schreck/Orlok – the embodiment of the exploitative thirsts that he adheres to – and Orlok pantomimes deference for as long as he needs, but in the end, he knows it is he who is in control, as becomes clear in the increasingly desperate manner Murnau attempts to assert his dominance.
The film’s conclusion does not give us an outright answer as to which prevails. Materially, you might say it is clear. One of the combatants is reduced to cinders, while the other has created a film people will revisit and remake for over 100 years. But the final moments find Murnau far from elated. He has his film, he has found a way to deliver a moment through time, to move beyond the idea “you had to be there” because with film, “you were”. But there is no pleasure in this, only a cavernous silence. Perhaps there is a realisation that Murnau has immortalised something, but not what he had been hoping for.
He is the monster through whom the vision of the filmmakers is realised – and for all his illusory talk of escaping a primitive past through high ideas of scientific technique, he has been blinded by his own privileged position. He has normalised the same processes as the vampire, and has therefore produced nothing new, just another part of that ancient and abusive world he convinced himself he was moving beyond. The best Murnau is left with, as with every Devil who has followed in his footsteps since, is the opportunity to re-frame his same base instincts to extract and exploit as innovative, artistic, and desirable. Shadow of the Vampire is a remarkable piece of its own mythmaking to that end, reclaiming the vampire as something to be feared and distrusted – robbing those apparent ‘greats’ of cinematic history, who so often embodied the nightmarish desires, of their romance.