Back by popular demand...tonight's post is another venture into celluloid murkiness for another episode of:
FREEKS ON FILM:
SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE
There have been Vampire films..about old count Dracula, teenage vampires, and even a little girly vampire (that we covered in a previous entry here), and just when you thought they'd sucked this genre dry (get it?..vampire ...suck dry? never mind!) comes along this little gem of a genre twister.
Imagine if you will, the shooting of the german classic horror movie Noserferatu, in the 1920s, with the cast and crew on a remote island, complete with an creepily authentic castle and nothing or no-one for miles..what if (yes, here's where the freek-o-meter goes into overdrive!) the actor hired to play the vampire, actually WAS A VAMPIRE!!
yes my freek-a-lings, The Shadow Of The Vampire directed by E. Elias Merhige is a freektionalised account of the shooting of Noserferatu, with John Malkovich playing the harangued movie director W.Murmau who, in a desperate bid to achieve movie authencity has sold his soul (or rather that of his lead actress) to an obscure German performer called Max Schreck (played freeking awesomely by Willem Dafoe) who is an actual vampire!
Dafoe - As Max Schreck - the Vampire
The movie is as much about the difficulty that the crew faces in shooting the movie in Schreck's remote castle lair, as it is about Schreck's increasing thirst for blood, which results in the director allowing him to "dispose" of those actors and crew whose services are no longer as the movie progresses! As a final reward, Murmau has promised to Schreck, the..ummm...neck of his statesque lead actress Greta (played by the yummy Catherine Mccormack)
Can Murmau hold of Schreck's blood-lust till the end of the movie? Will the cast eventually get a hint of the actual nature of their extremely talented lead star?? don't get your unmentionables in a twist, and go on to watch this little masterpiece. and fret not, oh yes, you can click on Dafoe's cutesy grin above, for the trailer!
A FREEKING MUST-WATCH!!
Extra Freeky: Dafoe was nominated for an Oscar, for his biting performance (get it...vampire..biting? argghh!!)
1 comment:
Speaking of little girly vampires: Remember Kirsten Dunst in an interview with a vampire? she was the most evil looking thing(vamperina?) in the that movie. Her shrieking & irritaing voice made your skin crawl and you completly empathised with Brad Pitt. That was some piece of acting that other equally deranged kids like: "i can see dead people" Haley Joel Osment; could learn from.
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