Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
Date: Saturday 29th September
Time: 2.00pm
Location: The Assembly Rooms
Event Duration: 2 hour 15 mins with interval
Certificate 15
Price: £3.50
A humorous metafiction horror film from Suffolk-based film producer Richard Johns. John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe and Eddie Izzard star in a film about the making of a German all-time classic silent horror film from 1922. Richard Johns will be introducing the film and there will be a Q&A with him following the screening.
The torturous production of the classic 1922 vampire film Nosferatu is recreated in this stylised account of director F.W. Murnau and his obsession with creating realistic horror by any means necessary, even if those means include actual bloodletting.
The film begins as Murnau (John Malkovich) is ready to take his unauthorized interpretation of the Bram Stoker tale on location in Czechoslovakia. The director has arranged for his cast and crew to live in the same castle in which they will shoot their parts and they have all assembled and are waiting for their co-star, Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe), Murnau's choice to play Count Orlok, to arrive. The director has warned them that Schreck is a student of the Stanislovsky method of performance and will not respond to them out-of-character. Nothing, however, can prepare them for the real thing: when the actor arrives, he's already in full Gothic regalia, asserting that he is indeed a vampire.
Schreck makes good on his claims by terrorising the cast and crew, attacking Murnau's original cinematographer (Wolfgang Muller) and plucking bats out of the air for midnight snacks.
Refreshments will be available before the performance and during the interval.
"An imaginatively twisted lesson in film history and a glorious gothic comedy-drama."
Daniel Etherington, Film 4