It sounds like Hitler's armies on their blitzkrieg march, doesn't it? Instead it is a movie called Shadow of the Vampire, a fictional view into the psyche of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, the filmmaker and visionary who brought an illegal adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula story to the screen, and called it Nosferatu. The horror and violence of that film shocked audiences in 1922. Munrau’s struggle for realism through this medium of make believe changed film forever.
So why then am I talking about Nazis? The Nazi connection might seem an odd tangent to pursue in a movie about the 1921 filming of a vampire movie, but keep in mind that it is a film made by Germans between the two Great Wars. And if there is a connection, then what might the director Edmund Elias Merhige be trying to say to us? So many intriguing questions appear. Is Count Orlok the Hitler persona preying upon the fears of Germans and drinking the blood of innocent Jews and gypsies? Or is F.W. Murnau the representation of the Fuhrer, a director whose obsession to an ideal drives him to create the most realistic horror on the grandest scale possible?
These are not idle speculations. The allusions to the Nazis in Shadow of the Vampire come fast and furious. E.E. Merhige seems acutely conscious of the historical setting, when in 1921 Germany was a decaying and shamed country struggling to deal with its past losses and growing toward a new hideous strength.
The switch from Romania, the actual setting of Nosferatu and Dracula, to Czechoslovakia is the most egregious example of the Nazi connection. The location of the movie has been moved to Hitler’s staging point for the invasion of Poland and the beginning of the war!
But there are even more examples… like when Murnau is depicted smacked out on opiates, and he has drawn crosses on the walls of his room to protect himself from the vampire and we see that some of the crosses have curved ends like swastikas. Or when the cast and crew of the film persist in being unaware that their lead actor is in fact a real vampire; this is a clear representation of the European elite who could not believe that Hitler was anything more than a great politician with a silly moustache. Then there is the use of one of the last Nazi strongholds in 1944, a place that was never mentioned in Nosferatu, which becomes the final death scene of the vampire Max Schreck/Count Orlok.
Once we've established this thread through the film, then the real challenge becomes to understand what purpose drove E.E. Merhige. What inspired the director to recreate the filming of an old classic movie just so that he could fill it with these mad allusions to the Third Reich?
At first it seemed like the release date might be a possible clue. Perhaps December 29th, 2000 was a possible anniversary of the original film and some Nazi atrocity. But no correlations appeared. So perhaps there was a connection between Murnau and Hitler’s regime and the film sought to expose a sordid history. That trail led nowhere when it turned out that Murnau died in a strange car accident shortly after the premiere of the Nosferatu, when his 14 year old Filipino valet drove his car off a cliff.
But then I chanced upon a news clipping that referenced E.E. Merhige’s German-American upbringing. Could there be a relation between the director himself and Nosferatu?
Yes! Max Schreck is the director’s grandfather. Max Schreck, who played the vampire in 1921 and who also starred in Nazi war films during the 40s, appears as the Original Sin which has haunted Merhige’s family for generations. Suddenly Shadow of the Vampire reveals itself to be the expiation of a deep seated family guilt.
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