Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
There’s some meta casting in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, as Willem Dafoe, who plays Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, also portrayed actor Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire, a fictionalized account of the making of Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. In Shadow of the Vampire, Max Schreck takes his role as the prowling vampire a little too seriously—so much so that he might actually be a vampire. This clever premise leads to humorous moments about method acting, with Schreck skulking around the set creepily and even eating bats, while John Malkovich’s F.W. Murnau gleefully captures it all on camera. The film builds to a chilling finale where fiction and reality blend in the most horrifying and violent ways, adding an unsettling layer to Dafoe’s connection to the Nosferatu legacy.
