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Shadow of the Vampire Quotes (2000)
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Famous Shadow of the Vampire Quotations
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Clever, engaging, and boosted by the sublime casting of Willem Dafoe as Nosferatu actor Max Schreck, Shadow of the Vampire is a film full of good ideas that are only partially developed. Its premise is ripe with possibilities, but the movie's too slight to register much impact, so you're left to relish its delightful performances and director E. Elias Merhige's affectionately tongue-in-cheek homage to a landmark of German silent cinema. John Malkovich is aptly loony as the eccentric director F.W. Murnau, whose passion in filming the 1922 classic Nosferatu leads to the extreme casting of Schreck as the vampire, a vision of evil who, in this movie's delightfully twisted imagination, actually is a vampire, sucking the blood of cast and crewmembers who've dismissed Schreck as an overzealous method actor. As these on-set maladies and "accidents" continue, Schreck wields greater control over Murnau, who descends into a kind of obsessive art-for-art's-sake madness until diva costar Greta Schroeder (Catherine McCormack, doing wonderful work) is served up as the actor's ultimate motivation. Merhige and his actors (including Cary Elwes, as intrepid cameraman Fritz Wagner) have great fun with this ghastly escapade, and the humor is kept delicately subtle to balance the movie's artistic aspirations. To that end, Dafoe is just right, his bald pate and gaunt features a perfect match for the mysterious Schreck, his grimace and talon-like fingers suggesting a human vulture on the prowl. Likewise, the re-creation of Nosferatu's expressionist style is both fanciful and brilliantly authentic. Too bad, then, that this movie suffers a mild case of vampiric anemia; if it shared the depth and richness of, say, Ed Wood, this might have been a cult classic for the ages. --Jeff Shannon
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- Albin: What is the most wondrous thing you ever saw?
Henrik Galeen: I once saw Greta Schroeder naked.
Albin: That beats ectoplasm! »
- F.W. Murnau: Albin, collect the wooden stake and return it to it's rightful place; it is necessary for the final frame, to remind us of the inadequacies of our plans, our contingincies, every missed train and failed picnic, every lie to a child. »
- F.W. Murnau: Death of centuries! Moonchaser! Blasphemer! Monkey! Vase of prehistory. Finally to Earth, and finally born. »
- F.W. Murnau: Go ahead! Eat the writer! That will leave you explaining how your character gets to Bremen! »
- F.W. Murnau: I think we have it. »
- F.W. Murnau: I will not allow you to destroy my picture!
Max Schreck: This is hardly your picture any longer. »
- F.W. Murnau: If it's not in frame, it doesn't exist! »
- F.W. Murnau: Ladies and gentlemen, this is Max Schreck, who will be portraying our vampire, Count Orlock. As you no doubt have heard, Max's methods are somewhat... unconventional, but... I am sure you will come to respect his artistry in this matter. »
- F.W. Murnau: Our battle, our struggle, is to create art. Our weapon is the moving picture. Because we have the moving picture, our paintings will grow and recede; our poetry will be shadows that lengthen and conceal; our light will play across living faces that laugh and agonize; and our music will linger and finally overwhelm, because it will have a context as certain as the grave. We are scientists engaged in the creation of memory... but our memory will neither blur nor fade. »
- F.W. Murnau: Time will no longer be a dark spot on our lungs. They will no longer say 'you had to have been there', because the fact is, Albin, we were. »
- F.W. Murnau: Why him, you monster? Why not the... script girl?
Max Schreck: Oh. The script girl. I'll eat her later. »
- F.W. Murnau: Why would you possibly want to be in a play when you could be in a film?
Greta Schroeder: An audience gives me life. This...thing only takes it from me. »
- Greta Schroder: Hey, who died? »
- Max Schreck: Did I kill one of your people, Murnau? I can't remember. »
- Max Schreck: Go to hell, Murnau! »
- Max Schreck: I feed like an old man pees -- sometimes all at once, sometimes drop by drop. »
- Max Schreck: I told you, I feed erratically, and often enormously. »
- Max Schreck: I would like some makeup.
F.W. Murnau: Well, you don't get any. »
- Max Schreck: It made me sad.
Albin: Why sad?
Max Schreck: Because Dracula had no servants.
Albin: I think you missed the point of the book, Count Orlock.
Max Schreck: Dracula hasn't had servants in 400 years and then a man comes to his ancestral home, and he must convince him that he... that he is like the man. He has to feed him, when he himself hasn't eaten food in centuries. Can he even remember how to buy bread? How to select cheese and wine? And then he remembers the rest of it. How to prepare a meal, how to make a bed. He remembers his first glory, his armies, his retainers, and what he is reduced to. The loneliest part of the book comes... when the man accidentally sees Dracula setting his table. »
- Max Schreck: There was a time... when I... fed from golden chalices. But now... Don't look at me that way! »
- Murnau: They don't need to act. They need to *be*. »
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