Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror

A. Shadow of the Vampire came to me through actor Nicolas Cage who had started his own production company called Saturn Films, a detail that I found to be most curious because Albin Grau, the original producer of Nosferatu, published an esoteric journal from 1925 to 1929 titled ‘Saturn Gnosis’. Personally, I found the sympathy of ‘Saturn’ as a reigning planetary force behind both Nosferatu and this mysterious script Shadow of the Vampire to be an uncanny association to say the least.

The history with Nicolas Cage and me is that he had been given a copy of my first movie Begotten (1991) as a present from either his wife or a friend and once he had seen it, he could not get this film out of his mind. When he created Saturn Film he used Begotten as an example, a template for the kind of filmmakers he would like to work with. After meeting with Nic’s producing associate Jeff Levine, Saturn Films sent over a first draft of Shadow of the Vampire written by Steven Katz. At first, when I met with Saturn Films Nic was very excited with my vision for this film and said: ‘I really want to see the film that is in your head.’

Q. How did you conceive your two main characters?

A. I wanted to explore the idea of the artist as ‘despot’, the director as a Promethean figure that will transgress and will stop at nothing in order to create something that will transcend his mortality and live forever in the culture of Humankind. I wanted my fictional version of Murnau to start out ‘human’ and become more and more of a monster as the story progressed and unravelled towards its conclusion in the final scene where we see the true ‘artist-as-monster’ reveal himself. We start Shadow of the Vampire with Murnau as a man, a film director, who sheds his humanity the deeper into the creative process he goes. He gets ‘lost’ in his own desire to create something so great that he manipulates and lies to his entire film crew deliberately keeping them in the ‘dark’ as to what his true intention is in making his film Nosferatu. As you follow the film and Murnau’s story arc in Shadow of the Vampire you see less and less a man in John Malkovich’s character and more and more a manipulative beast that will stop at nothing to get his film made and finished.

Now, Schreck, the vampire character played by Willem Dafoe, is of an entirely different nature. When he first appears on screen in Shadow of the Vampire, we clearly are chilled by his presence and our blood runs cold as he looms out of the dark hole, like a tunnel of the castle, to greet Hutter played by Eddie Izzard. Schreck’s arc in Shadow of the Vampire was to begin as a ‘monster’ and end as a ‘human’. Schreck becomes more ‘human’ as we see him interacting with the crew and struggling like a child to find both acceptance and love and truth from both his director and from the scenes he is to partake in. I wanted for the audience to feel that Schreck was more human and Murnau less human in the end; to trade places in a sense where the director begins as man and ends as monster and the monster begins as monster and ends fragile and all too human.

Also I wanted it ambiguous as to whether Schreck is in fact a real vampire. I wanted to leave the audience thinking he is either a real vampire OR a totally obsessed actor that has ‘become’ the monster he is hired to portray. The original screenplay was not conceived like this. The characters were more clearly defined in the sense that you come to realise that Schreck is a real vampire and that Murnau has a moral compass and is protective of his crew when things get out of hand. There were more traditional tropes of the vampire genre in the original first draft of the screenplay. And this I wanted to remove from the story. It was far more interesting to me to play with the idea of ‘artist as vampire’ rather than ‘vampire as vampire’.

Q. Were then significant differences between your ideas and Steven Katz’s script?

A. Yes, yes, yes. The original script was very much in keeping with the genre of the vampire film and I did not want to follow this line of aesthetic in both story telling and content. I mean, if you have an opportunity to turn a genre on its head and break the rules of a genre, then why not go for it. In Katz’s script there were moments when the vampire is looking at Greta from off stage and his eyes ‘glow blue’. With a gesture like this, suddenly it takes any guessing away. Obviously if Schreck’s eyes glow blue he is a supernatural figure and not a man. So he is not human and this creates a wall, a barrier in the audience that for me makes his character less complex, less layered and in a sense less interesting. It was important for me to present Schreck when he first appears to be undeniably a monster and then to follow his enigmatic presence and to reveal his fragility and his unquenchable desires and loss of memory as something that appears more human as the story evolves. This to me is the Human Vampire that I wanted to show in Willem Dafoe’s characterisation of Schreck.

Q. In Shadow of the Vampire the contrast between progress and tradition, for instance portrayed in the clash between cinema and theatre represented by Murnau and Greta in the film’s opening sequence, is a very strong recurrent theme. Would you agree?

A. Ah, yes. I am obsessed by the end of the Enlightenment and how with it you have the discovery of the unconscious hand in hand with the birth of psychoanalysis and all happening side by side with the birth of the motion picture camera. Swiftly, painting is replaced by the novelty of photography as portraiture and with the persistence of vision created by the motion picture projector. The ‘still’ photograph is given motion. If you look at the history of the cinema, it began in nickelodeons and peep shows where men could view women stripping off their clothing. Cinema began with an unseemly and audiences were highly suspicious exercising a kind of fear and reservation towards its engrossing power. There is a famous anecdote from a theatre in 1906 that showed a short movie depicting a train coming into its station. It was reported that as the train pulled in people cowered in their seats as if the train were in front of them in their seats. If cinema was the demonic bastard child, then theatre was for sure its angelic legitimate form of art.

Murnau never successfully obtained the rights from the Stoker family to film Dracula and so, under the banner of his new film company that he shared with Albin Grau, they changed the name to Nosferatu. The Stoker family thought it vulgar and unseemly that a film should be made from Dracula. Their main interest was seeing it as a theatrical play in London. What is interesting here is that Murnau who has begun his career as an artist in theatre saw the future of movies as the dominant art form of the twentieth century. There are a lot of references in Shadow of the Vampire to the camera as a demonic force that takes life in order to preserve it and in preserving it life becomes embalmed, a dead thing that exists only in shadows. There are references also, that Murnau makes in Shadow of the Vampire that the camera is the key to immortalising our temporary state as living beings. He calls the cinema the new cave upon which man paints his dreams and that the movies are the cave painting of the twentieth century. I find it very interesting in my own experiences as a film director when I see one of my actors staring with their complete attention into the camera performing for a completely dead thing. I contrast this with the theatre where my actors address a living audience whose camera is living eyes that record the experience of the drama and biology of their living memories. I find it interesting in the twenty-first century that whenever I go to a performance, musical or theatrical, there are so many younger members of the audience recording a theatrical event on their smartphone. I find it prescient that their eyes are on the screen of their smartphone, not on the stage. The virtual reality has become more dominant over actual reality.

Q. Due to its very nature, cinema bears a series of striking parallels with vampirism. Was this aspect a relevant element in Shadow of the Vampire?

A. Yes. Greta in the beginning of Shadow of the Vampire expresses her displeasure over the motion picture camera by saying to Murnau, ‘[…] the theatre audience gives me life, while this THING (pointing to the motion picture camera) takes it from me.’ I’ve always been fascinated with the camera as some kind of divine and magical device that both steals and immortalises our struggle as dying creatures.

Q. How did you select and use the extracts from Murnau’s film that found their way into Shadow of the Vampire?

A. When Hutter meets Nosferatu for the first time, I wanted to recreate Hutter’s approach to the gate, his hesitation, his trepidation, his repression of abject fear. This transgression through this gate into the home of Nosferatu represented my transgression into Murnau’s original movie and that was the bridge between the historical Nosferatu movie and my recreation. I am reopening the gate to Nosferatu a second time so that I may reveal another aspect, an alternate one that I hope will somehow deepen the way we view Murnau’s Nosferatu. I am reopening the gate like the detective in my search to find the ‘true vampire’.

I have recreated the scene of Hutter waking up in the morning in Nosferatu’s castle having been scared the night before by the world of shadows and being falsely reassured by the light of day. There is brilliant humour to it, there is something beautiful about an excess of optimism in the face of death. Towards the end of the movie, I chose to recreate the scene where Greta laying in the bed has her heart squeezed by the shadow of Nosferatu’s hand as a prelude to her character’s actual death in my film. Art imitates life in this last scene of Shadow of the Vampire. In Shadow of the Vampire I made Greta’s sacrifice literal, removing all metaphor. In the original Nosferatu it is the metaphor of Greta’s pure heart that vanquishes the vampire, in Shadow of the Vampire it is Greta’s opium rich blood that leads to the death of the vampire.

One of the most important recreations that follows is Nosferatu’s death scene as he is exposed to the sunlight in the original Nosferatu, but in my film it is not only sunlight that kills, it is the lamp of the motion picture projector. This scene is where the heart of the vampire lies in my film Shadow of the Vampire, meaning that the cinema itself with its unholy trinity comprising the motion picture camera, the projector and the director are the true vampiric monsters. It was in post-production of Shadow of the Vampire that I saw it as a gesture of High Magic when I took original camera negative of Willem Dafoe as Schreck and using an optical printer I took the very fine flame of a blow torch to that original negative burning it, while I filmed those seven frames being burnt to ash. Ultimately these seven frames became the death scene in my film. The magic that I speak of is that you have the film director (me) burning the film’s original negative and filming the burning of the original negative of his own film’s movie star in order to create the death of this new Nosferatu – the cinema.

Q. In an article on your first film Begotten (1991) for Movie Scope magazine you write: ‘I ask you to look at the motion picture camera/projector not as a machine or a tool, but as a cipher, a door, into the innermost workings of the universe itself.’ Would you consider this approach to be also relevant in Shadow of the Vampire?

A. I would say that this is true of my entire approach to making films. There is some process in me that recognises the technology of film as an extension of my own spiritual sense of the deeper nature and deeper penetration into understanding what it means to be alive in this dream that is manufactured by our biological substance. With the motion picture we are able to extend our eyes to places that were previously invisible in all the centuries before its invention. Not only do optics allow us to see deeper than ever into space and even deeper into the microscopic formats of things but we have film emulsions that allows us to see X-rays, gamma rays, infrared light waves. We are able to slow down time, make it stop, make it freeze, we are able to speed up time, make days and weeks and years pass in seconds. The cinema is a cosmos created by man to the genius of technology. It is precursor and foundation to all the virtual worlds that we begun to enter into the twenty-first century.

I find myself at this moment extremely melancholic realising that when I made Shadow of the Vampire I was shooting with real film, real emulsion, nothing digital. I felt so much closer to the days of Murnau, of Nosferatu, and now I feel so much more distant, unchained from the analogue as the film as exists today is moving almost entirely into digital age.

Q. In the audio commentary of Shadow of the Vampire you mention a series of esoteric details and references scattered around the film. What is their function?

A. I have a small group of friends, all of us esotericists with whom I studied many texts in alchemy and the hermetic tradition. We also studied the Tarot and when the time came to making Shadow of the Vampire I wanted to infuse this film with esoteric subplots. One of them being the creation of a new grimoire filled with ciphers that would be my answer in my conversation with Albin Grau’s use of symbols and ciphers as a means of using magic symbols in his grimoire in Nosferatu. Albin Grau was a deeply spiritual man, some of his closest friends were great esotericists of the time. A follower of the Ordo Templi Orientis (Order of the Temple of the East) he actually filmed Aleister Crowley in 1925. That film of Crowley has somehow disappeared. I felt it important when I created my grimoire for Shadow of the Vampire to create a living body of symbols that would communicate backward through time opening the door to a living conversation that would exist between my film and Nosferatu. Strangely the grimoire that was created for my film never made it into the movie. I did shoot scenes with Udo Kier as Albin Grau showing his preliminary drawings for his grimoire, and also showing him throw the Tarot to predict the destiny of the filming of Nosferatu but in the end the scene seemed too laborious and out of place, stalling the narrative during the final edit of Shadow of the Vampire. One of my closest friends, Leigh McCloskey, who himself is an artist and accomplished esotericist had at the time created for me a very special grimoire that emerged out of very many conversations he and I were having, conversations that focused around the esoteric implications of the film that I was setting out to make. Though this grimoire painted and created by Leigh never made it into my film, it eventually (years later) caught the attention of Keith Richards and made it into the collective psyche by being admired by The Rolling Stones who used its images in their live show.

In Shadow of the Vampire the inn which the cast and crew of Nosferatu stay in is called ‘Han Budala’ which would roughly translate in a Slavic language to ‘The Inn of the Fool’. In my mind this is representative of the ‘Fool’ card in the Tarot which to me represents the foundation of all great creative inquiry. It was also the dominant card interpreting a future outcome for the making of Shadow of the Vampire when I threw the Tarot before casting and making the film. As an interesting coincidence preceding the casting and shooting of Shadow of the Vampire I was on the flight from Los Angeles to New York. The gentleman sitting next to me made inquiry about my reading of a Shadow of the Vampire screenplay. He was quite astonished to tell me of his fiancée who was the great great niece of Walter Spies, the great love of Murnau’s life.

I conceived Schreck’s cave with an alchemical depiction of the sun painted in the background. The sun in my mind, being the representative of the projector lamp of the cosmos and the cave itself being the archetypal source of all projection, the ‘primal cinema’. Even the gift of blood given to Schreck by Murnau is contained in the old hand blown alchemical alembic used by early alchemists.

Q. Has your relationship with Murnau changed in the years that have passed after completing your film?

A. My relationship to Murnau’s work has only deepened over the years, like the leitmotif that returns perennially reminding me of how timeless and beautiful Murnau’s work is. I particularly enjoy watching Sunrise and Tabu for these films resonate with the timeless ache for love.

Q. Does the subject of vampirism still interest you or Shadow of the Vampire was the result of a very specific but circumscribed interest of yours?

A. What attracted me to Shadow of the Vampire was that the material lent itself to me in a way I can go beyond just making a genre film. Making a genre vampire movie held little interest to me, yet the bigger questions on the nature of vampirism and its relationship to art making and being an artist in general very much appealed to me. I can say that taking the material of Shadow of the Vampire away from the traditional vampire genre and making it my own is what excited me the most.