Shadow of the Vampire belongs to a curious subgenre of horror cinema: dramatized speculations on the inspirations of true-life horror artists. The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe told a wildly fictionalized account of splattery tragedies that would inform Poe's work. Gothic similarly dramatized a night of debauchery suffered by Mary Shelley that would inspire her Frankenstein. Gods and Monsters fictionalized the final weeks of James Whale's retirement, still haunted by the personal demons informing Bride of Frankenstein: World War One's trench warfare and Britain's class system.

Of the above films, Gods and Monsters hews nearest historic facts, whereas Shadow of the Vampire veers to the opposite extreme, tossing aside history in a brilliantly imaginative, revisionist retelling of the making of F.W. Murnau's classic vampire film, Nosferatu (1922).

In Nosferatu, German character actor Max Schreck played the vampire, Count Orlock. So compelling was Schreck as Orlock, and so completely did he subsume himself in the roll, that his career was destroyed by subsequent typecasting. (A common risk for actors, one that ended the career of Karen Lynn Gorney after Saturday Night Fever). Shadow of the Vampire posits that the reason for Schreck's compelling performance was that ... it was no performance. Schreck was a vampire, and his "makeup" was his real face.

It's an intriguing idea, sublimely executed. Shadow of the Vampire opens with Murnau (played by John Malkovich), shooting his final scene in Germany, without Orlock. No one on his set knows yet who will play Orlock. Murnau informs them that he's found an obscure Method actor who's craft requires him to always be "in character." Thus, this mystery actor (named Max Schreck, played by Willem Dafoe), will always be in makeup, and will only shoot at night.

The film company travels to the location in Czechoslovakia, where all are impressed with Schreck's "realism," even as they think he carries it too far. Such as when he goes overboard in attacking his co-star, or drinking a bat's blood. Murnau must control Schreck during the duration of the shoot, cajoling and bribing and threatening, at least until he has "his shot" and everything is "in the can."

John Malkovich's portrayal of Murnau is 90% perfect, but is hobbled to the extent that he plays a stereotype: the tyrannical, jackbooted, thick-accented German film director. Neither Malkovich, nor Merhige, nor Katz, do enough to raise the film's Murnau above this stereotype. One thing they might have done is lose the accents; since everyone in the film (except Orlock/Schreck) is German, there was no need for contrast. All could have spoken standard American English. But Shadow of the Vampire does little to contravene Teuton stereotypes, and the result is that Malkovich's Murnau is nearly perfect, rather than perfect.