Have a Daily Scream for your daily-streaming recommendation for spooky season! (Explore last year’s Daily Scream films.)
What if you were making a horror movie and just, you know, hired an actual bloodsucking creature of the night to star in it? That’s the delicious premise of 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire, a bone-dry black comedy that reimagines the making of the 1922 silent-cinema classic Nosferatu as an exercise in extreme filmmaking authenticity.
Willem Dafoe’s skulking performance as “actor” Max Schreck is one-note, but what a hilariously creepy note it is. John Malkovich portrays obsessed-with-realism director F.W. Murnau as a sort of mad scientist. The rest of the cast — Catherine McCormack, Eddie Izzard, Cary Elwes, and Udo Kier — kill with variations on classic-era Hollywood cool and/or histrionics.
Filmmaker E. Elias Merhige plays it all more for wicked-sharp satire than scares, but his parodying of the lengths to which some of us will go for movie fame and fortune, or just for a chance to bask in Hollywood’s glow, is pretty darn terrifying.
US: rent/buy on Prime
UK: rent/buy on Prime
See Shadow of the Vampire at Letterboxd for more viewing options, including in all other global regions… though this one is quite limited at the moment.
