Shadow of the Vampire

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

It's a mesmerizing spectacle.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Manages to turn a highly dubious concept into a subtle and deliciously mordant comedy.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

Paints a vivid and darkly humorous picture of a world where directors are all-powerful and vampires are real; whether you want to buy into either fantasy is up to you. I did, and had a grand old time.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

"Willem Dafoe is Max Schreck." I put quotes around that because it's not just a line for a movie ad but the truth: He embodies the Schreck of "Nosferatu" so uncannily that when real scenes from the silent classic are slipped into the frame, we don't notice a difference.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

He's (Dafoe) the stuff bad dreams are made of. He's also the best movie vampire since Schreck's original. He deserves a bloody Oscar.

Mr. Showbiz Michael Atkinson

Might be the most original film of the year.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Kicky, elaborately constructed fantasy.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Diabolically amusing without plunging into the Mel Brooks zone, and it's smart without being pedantic. And it's genuinely scary at times.

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

Without question, Shadow of the Vampire is a stately and elegant horror film, interwoven with delicious strands of black comedy.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

At once wildly metaphorical and distressingly literal-minded, Shadow of the Vampire tries, with mixed success, to be scary, funny and profound all at once.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Hypnotic and fun.

USA Today Susan Wloszczyna

Feast upon a career-peak Willem Dafoe performance as a bat-eared fiend who is foul, funny, ferocious, forlorn and unforgettable.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

His (Dafoe's) re-creation of Schreck is an Oscar-level performance, but more than that, it's an unforgettable one: great, scary, horrifically funny.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Malkovich is wryly amusing as German director F.W. Murnau, and Dafoe steals the show as a vampire playing an actor playing a vampire.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Works on several playful levels. Most obviously, it is a horror movie in which life imitates art on a movie set.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

Dafoe never reverts to campy, movie-monster gestures but seems liberated, consumed by his character, inspired to give a performance that's intuitive and otherworldly.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

A clever, funny, extended joke about ruthless directors, method actors and the power of the cinema.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

A creepy, clever, film buff's delight of a fantasy.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Willem Dafoe's performance in Shadow of the Vampire is so irresistible it not only breaks that cycle but turns an otherwise just adequate film into something everyone will want to take a look at.

Film.com Peter Brunette

It's a great ride, gorgeous, silly and deeply intellectual by turns, but, for all its inventive fireworks, sad to say, it finally doesn't quite work.

LA Weekly Paul Malcolm

Malkovich and Dafoe play off each other with a devilish hamminess.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Built on an absolutely marvelous idea but manages to make only about two-thirds of a good movie of it.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

For all its stentorian performances, though, Shadow of the Vampire is a bit much, from the detailed period sets to the final, bloody scene.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

A bit of a one-joke wonder.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Worth seeing for Dafoe's performance alone, a singular mixture of camp and pathos that echoes the tragic, romantic allure of vampires in literature and film.

Film.com Ernest Hardy

If only this movie were rich enough, strong enough to be worthy of this (Dafoe's) performance.

TNT RoughCut Andy Klein

In the end, the performances and the basic strength of the premise make Shadow of the Vampire a relatively diverting ninety minutes. But there is the inescapable feeling that it is a shadow of the great film it might have been.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

It's a marvelous, resonant joke that never quite succeeds: Stretches of the film resemble a Dario Argento horrorfest crossed with a Mel Brooks spoof. But the director, E. Elias Merhige, and his screenwriter, Steven Katz, occasionally bring some rapture to the creepiness, and Dafoe's vampire, with his graceful, ritualistic death lunges, is a sinewy, skull-and-crossbones horror who seems to come less out of the German Expressionist tradition than from Kabuki.

Slate David Edelstein

There are times when Dafoe's accent strays into Billy Crystal Yiddish, but the notion of Vlad the Impaler aging into a finicky old Jew has its own kind of piquancy.

Chicago Reader Mark Peranson

It's odd that a movie featuring a great classical director is notable for some extremely contemporary acting.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

An academic exercise driven by adolescent ideas that never shape themselves into a narrative: in short, a movie that can never dislodge the art fatally wedged up its butt.