Defanging the Vampire : The Crushing Gaze of Metadiegesis in Shadow of the Vampire (E. Elias Merhige, 2000)

Abstract

This article outlines the consequences and conditions of emergence of a meta-narrative in Shadow of the Vampire (E. Elias Mehrige, 2000), a film which invents an alternate version of the shooting of F.W Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). By positing Mehrige’s film as a primary film and Nosferatu as a secondary film, I bring into focus an interstitial third text by fully considering the film-being-filmed and opening up the textual and formal devices of metafiction to demonstrate their overpowering influence upon its subjects in an attempt to inscribe these findings in a larger ethics of metafiction. This article interprets the relation between fiction and subject in Shadow of the Vampire as a struggle between artistic supremacy and existential survival. The analysis of the historiographical dimension of the film leads to interrogate the enduring uncanny power of cinema and open up larger questions about the historicity of images and their survival through time.

Keywords

• American cinema
• German cinema
• Expressionism
• horror
• fantastic
• metafiction