It's A Very Zombie Halloween With George A. Romero's Original DEAD Trilogy

"When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth."

After spending a month watching almost nothing but horror films, I had big plans to cap it all off for Halloween.  The Brattle was showing Night Of The Living Dead with a live band providing an alternative score to the film on October 30th and, as luck would have it, the Coolidge was showing Dawn Of The Dead on Halloween night.  That was just too good an opportunity to pass up, so I made sure to grab Day Of The Dead from Netflix well in advance and planned to go through the entire trilogy in order.

Then the World Series went to six games.

If I had tried to squeeze in the Brattle screening I would have missed the first half of the potentially clinching game and then had serious trouble trying to get into a bar for the last few innings.  So I made an executive decision and skipped out on that evening's showing, but since I'd already purchased my ticket for Dawn Of The Dead the following night I had no choice but to pray there wouldn't be a Game 7 and settle for watching the three films out of order.  Certainly not ideal, but still better than nothing.

I love that all three Dead movies exist in a shared universe and that you can see the zombie infestation growing exponentially worse and worse over the course of the trilogy.  Not only that, but each story increases in scope as well.  Night introduces the very first zombie attacks and keeps the action isolated to a handful of strangers who've barricaded themselves into a remote farmhouse.  Their only objective is survival, staying alive long enough to find some kind of help.  They don't know exactly what's happening or why, but such concerns are academic when there's a horde of ghouls (the word "zombie is never spoken) banging down the front door.  We do hear some radio and television news reporters struggling to get a handle on exactly what's happening out there and in fact the initial reports are classified simply as mass murders with an element of cannibalism.  It's not until the president starts convening with NASA scientists that it becomes clear that something far stranger is afoot.

PS: Night clearly attributes the zombies to radiation carried by a satellite returning from Venus.  That's about one step shy of an alien infestation or biological attack.  Why didn't anyone ever tell me this?  How did I not know that Romero's zombies actually come from space??

These early zombies also exhibit behavior would be considered pretty a-typical these days; a few of them use rocks and clubs to smash in windows or beat down doors and one even stabs a woman to death with a gardening trowel.  You don't often see zombies using tools in that way and indeed such unique behavior would go on to become a major plot point for Romero down the line.  From a visual standpoint, Romero's first batch of zombies are almost charmingly simple compared to the kind of stuff now seen every week on The Walking Dead.  The makeup isn't overly complex and the majority of the zombies simply appear gaunt and pale with a detached look in their eyes.  There are a few standouts, but most of the extras don't feature severed limbs, rotting flesh or festering wounds.  That's fine though, because the black and white aesthetic gives Romero a lot more bang for his few bucks and gives the nighttime setting a stronger sense of menace.

Dawn Of The Dead immediately throws us right into the deep end of the apocalypse, with a local news station struggling to stay on the air and broadcast accurate and useful information to the masses while riot police storm through housing projects in an effort to mop up both criminals and reanimated corpses alike.  The national infrastructure is still somewhat in place and we hear reporters talk about the President sending legislation to Congress, however it's clear that this is no longer just a series of isolated incidents but in fact a full blown national emergency.  Trying to stay ahead of the disaster, news producer (I think?) Francine and her pilot boyfriend Stephen fly off with SWAT officers Roger and Peter and eventually settle down in an abandoned shopping mall.  They clear out whatever zombies are inside and then lock the place down to prevent any outsiders, living or undead, from breaching their little corner of security.  After that the group finds themselves stocked with an embarrassment of riches.  The world may be sliding into chaos outside, but inside they've got piles of food, guns, ammunition, TVs, fur coats and fancy champagne.  Along with having their run of the entire mall, they actually turn an isolated old storage room into a secluded little bungalow, complete with a living room, love nest and fondue set!  It looks like good times and smooth sailing, despite the growing number of corpses walking around outside the gates.  Eventually they even fall victim to the ennui of the wealthy, idly skating around the empty ice rink and trading hundreds of meaningless dollars in a game of cards.  Stephen actually proposes to Francine but she turns him down because "it wouldn't be real," implying that their emotional bond isn't enough reason for them to stay together and that without a ceremony full of adoring onlookers their marriage would somehow be considered a sham.  Yet they're not willing to go out in the world and search for other survivors despite having their own helicopter.  They're won't risk their own ivory tower in order to help those most in need.

But as is customary when the 1% hordes necessary resources, eventually the 99% gets pissed and comes looking for a piece of the good life.  In this case, the common folk are embodied by a biker gang led by Tom Savini, who was also the film's head makeup artist.  (I'll forgive Savini the terrible blue-faced zombies only because the rest of his work is so outstanding.)  Once the bikers come upon the mall and realize that there are people living in there, they storm the gates and ransack the place, letting in a swarm of zombies in their wake.  But it's telling that the looters don't go after food, guns or essential supplies and instead snatch up jewelry, TVs and cold hard cash from the mall's bank branch.  It seems that everyone, from street thug to socialite, is preoccupied with a sense of crass materialism and ensuring their own comfort to the detriment of all.  They're willing to forego stark practicalities or deny the new status quo in order to cling to a reality that no longer exists, to say nothing of eschewing the simple morality of helping other people because there's safety in numbers.

Day Of The Dead escalates the scale of the zombie destruction even further.  The struggle between man and corpse has long since ended, with whole cities overrun by the undead and not a living soul in sight.  We meet a handful of survivors who've locked themselves away in an underground military bunker in Florida, the only remnants of a last ditch effort by the government to determine exactly why the dead are coming back to life and how to stop them.  These people, a hodgepodge of military personnel and research scientists, have all but given up searching for other people in the wreckage of civilization; the isolation, sleep deprivation and dwindling supplies have brought the group to the very brink of sanity.  The soldiers (one of which is played by effects artist Greg Nicotero) have devolved into screaming, violent lunatics who want nothing more than to abandon their post and satisfy their own bloodlust, while the scientists, led by Dr. Frankenstein, have come up frustratingly empty despite countless hours spent dissecting and studying the zombies they've trapped in an old mine shaft.  In fact, it's gotten so bad that Frankenstein has abandoned all attempts to stop the zombie outbreak and has instead turned to finding a way to domesticate the creatures.

Frankenstein asserts that since we can't get rid of the zombies we must learn to live in harmony by training them to perform menial tasks and not to think of living people as food.  (This same concept was amusingly realized at the end of Shaun Of The Dead.)  His star pupil is Bub, a.k.a. the single greatest character in the entire trilogy.  He's seems to exist in a state of childlike wonder, which makes sense considering that Frankenstein acts as a sort of father figure.  Watching Bub use a shaving razor, try to read Salem's Lot, or learn how to make music come out of a cassette deck is downright adorable and you almost forget about the creature's savage nature.  Of course the dark secret to Bub's success is that Frankenstein has been rewarding the zombie's progress by feeding him the remains of dead soldiers, the discovery of which sends Rhodes, Steel and the other soldiers completely over the edge and forces a final bloody showdown featuring unparalleled zombie carnage.  Most of the film is simply people arguing in a bunker (a setting that always feels like a cost-saving measure), so it's not until the film's final 15 minutes or so that we get any really good zombie kills.  But rest assured that your patience will pay off, as film's finale is an absolutely gleeful splatterfest of gore at the hands of a number of amusingly costumed zombies.  If you enjoyed the Hare Krishna zombie in Dawn, wait till you see some of the outfits in the finale of Day.

The progression of the zombie apocalypse and the human response to it over the course of all three films is pretty fascinating: the zombies begin to slowly evolve into actual people while humanity slips backwards and embraces its most base instincts.  Or at least all the white people do.  We've all grown accustomed to the horror trope of the black guy dying first, so you've got to give credit to Romero for giving each film a strong, intelligent black lead who always acts with dignity and never sheds his own morality just to stay alive.  Ben, Peter and John are all unflappable in the face of disaster and they're exactly the kind of guys you want by your side when you're fighting off legions of the undead.  It certainly stands in sharp contrast to The Walking Dead, a show that operates on the unspoken rule that the audience is only allowed to care about one black character at a time.  The fact that Michael and D'Angelo from The Wire are both still alive after four episodes feels like a minor miracle, but since they're both out on the same supply run right now I fully expect one of them to go down before they make it back to the prison.

I do feel like there's an element missing from Romero's original trilogy that The Walking Dead actually handles pretty well, and that's depicting an attempt to actually forge a life and perhaps even a community in the midst of the zombie wasteland.  Dawn spends a lot of time with the zombies as an almost abstract threat that only exists outside the safety of the mall.  Our heroes are insulated and able to live a life of idle contentment within the walls of their hideaway.  And while I don't necessarily think we're supposed to believe that the soldiers and scientists of Day are the last people left on Earth, they might as well be since we never meet anyone else.  Either way, those guys have already gone fully round the bend before the movie even starts.  But between Dawn and Day lies a middle ground, where zombies remain a threat and people struggle to survive but they're able to work together and maintain some semblance of hope for the future.  Zack Snyder's Dawn Of The Dead remake moves a little closer in that direction, but if my vague recollection of Land Of The Dead is correct then I think that's the droid I'm looking for here.  I'll have to give it another watch this week to be sure.

I'm reminded of my reaction to Contagion, in that it's fairly impossible to watch a zombie movie and not start coming up with your own zombie contingency plan.  I actually love the shopping mall idea if only because it would provide you with a wealth of resources, but such a place would also surely attract Savini-esque looters.  The trick is to find a secure, defensible location that lies outside of a major population zone.  Hopefully that would ensure fewer zombies to deal with but also perhaps fewer marauders.  As much as I criticize the callous and insular behavior of Dawn's heroes, I have to admit that in the same situation I would probably act in a similar fashion, wary of broadcasting my position to outsiders.  Sure I have an intellectual problem with that now, but when it's a matter of personal survival with no promise of rescue or safe haven, it's hard to imagine what I wouldn't do to protect myself and those closest to me.  You want to believe you can take in strays and help others, but as I just admitted we all have the capacity for ruthless action when our back is up against the wall.  In the zombie apocalypse, all bets are off.

I will say this.  My disdain for "fast zombies" has now grown exponentially.



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Title: Night Of The Living Dead
Director: George A. Romero
Starring:  Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, Keith Wayne, Judith Riley
Year Of Release: 1968
Viewing Method: Netflix DVD

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Title: Dawn Of The Dead
Director: George A. Romero
Starring: Ken Foree, David Emge, Scott H. Reiniger, Gaylen Ross, David Early, Tom Savini
Year Of Release: 1978
Viewing Method: Theatrical - Coolidge Corner

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Title: Day Of The Dead
Director: George A. Romero
Starring: Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander, Jospeh Pilato, Richard Liberty, Jarlath Conroy, Anthony Dileo Jr., Sherman Howard, G. Howard Klar, Greg Nicotero
Year Of Release: 1985
Viewing Method: Netflix DVD

I Watched THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL And Then The Red Sox Won The World Series

"The party's starting now..."

I was a senior in college when the Boston Red Sox won their first world series in 86 years.  The season before we had lost the ALCS to our longtime rivals the New York Yankees in a Game 7 heartbreaker, so when we were able to turn the tables and pull off an unprecedented come-from-behind victory over the dreaded pinstripes after trailing three games to none, suffice it to say the town went ballistic.  Literally.  Victoria Snelgrove, a classmate of mine at Emerson who was there covering the celebration as a student jounalist, was shot and killed after police in riot gear started shooting "non-lethal" rounds into a crowd in Kenmore Square and she took a pepper pellet to the eye.  It was an awful dagger of tragedy that slashed through what should have been a joyous occasion. The Sox would go on to sweep the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals and I've always maintained that the only reason the city of Boston didn't burn to the ground that night in October was because everyone felt so shitty about Victoria and because the clinching game hadn't actually taken place at Fenway Park.

I'll always remember that night.  I actually had a ticket to Game 5 and I was in the car with a bunch of friends heading down to St. Louis.  We'd gotten a late start so we were just passing through Worcester and listening to the game when the eighth inning rolled around and it became clear that Game 5 wasn't going to happen.  Someone in the car knew a guy who lived nearby, so we pulled off the highway and invaded this guy's living room in time to watch the bottom of the ninth.  Sox closer Keith Foulke fielded a ground ball to the mound, tossed it to first, and we promptly went apeshit in the middle of a stranger's home.  We jumped up and down, screaming and hugging for about two minutes before piling back into the car and tearing ass back towards Fenway.  We made record time back to the city and joined the masses in Kenmore Square until the police formed a barricade and forced the crowd down Beacon St. and Comm Ave, in the opposite direction of my apartment.  When people refused to move, tear gas canisters were tossed in to disperse the crowd.  I'm still not entirely sure how it happened, but somehow I ended up outside Gate B by the statue of Ted Williams placing his cap onto the head of a small boy with cancer.  (Williams was a fierce advocate for The Jimmy Fund.)  I just stood there, still blinking away tears (from the gas...) and reveling in a moment that I might never see again, when the hometown heroes and perennial losers overcame unbeatable odds and were crowned champions of the world.

I have a very strong connection to the Red Sox.  Of all the sports teams in Boston, the Sox were my favorite growing up and easily the team I got see play in person most often.  Just a month before that 2004 World Series victory I had worked as a production assistant on the Farrelly Brothers film Fever Pitch, starring Jimmy Fallon as a die hard Sox fan who falls in love with a baseball neophyte played by Drew Barrymore.  It was the first time I'd ever been on a professional film set and it was an absolute dream come true.  Not only did I get the chance to experience Hollywood filmmaking up close and personal, but I got to spend two weeks with an all access pass to Fenway Park.  I even got to watch a game from the owner's seats on the right field roof deck, with Fox picking up the tab for all our food and drinks.  That was a magical season, and a few weeks after it was all over, with my  move to L.A. looming large on the horizon, I went to Harvard Square with a buddy and got my first tattoo: the Red Sox "B" right at the top of my spine.  I'd always wanted a tattoo but had never been able to settle on a design I knew I'd still be happy to have in my twilight years.  Suddenly it seemed like a no-brainer.  Not only was it a symbol of the team and their incredible accomplishment, but of the city I loved and would soon be leaving behind.  I've spoken before about our community of Boston ex-pats in Los Angeles.  It was a huge part of my identity in that place and when the Sox somehow managed to pull off another championship victory in 2007, we were absolutely flabbergasted.  We all wanted to be home celebrating, but we didn't mind being 3000 miles away because we had each other.

I moved back to Boston in 2010 and the Sox continued to be an active part of my life.  Over the course of our friendship and subsequent courtship, Jamie had become a bonafide member of Red Sox Nation, especially since New Orleans doesn't have its own baseball team.  When it came time for me to propose to her, Fenway seemed like the ideal location, although I knew that going to a game and proposing on the jumbotron in frot of 37,000 fans would give her an instant panic attack and might result in her passing out before she got the chance to answer me.  So shortly after the season had ended I talked to a friend who worked for the team and told her my plan.  She got us in under the guise of a private tour and once we got up onto the Green Monster, I took out a cupcake with an engagement ring placed atop the frosting.  Obviously that worked out pretty well for me.  A few months later the same friend hipped me to a job opening in the team's IT department and before I knew it I had quit my job at the Apple Store and had an office overlooking the concourse behind third base.  I only stayed with the team for about half a season, but it was a helluva rollercoaster ride.  The team started the year 2-10, then clawed their way to the best record in baseball by the All-Star break. That's right around the time I was lured away from Fenway by the promise of higher pay and shorter hours at my current place if employment.  I loved working for the Red Sox and I learned a lot in a short time, but once the season kicked into gear I was working about 70 hours a week for a paycheck that would have been fine if I was working half that.  And with my nuptials right around the corner and some intimidating credit card debt hanging over my head, I had to make it all about the money.  It really pained me to leave and I still feel bad about it even today, but I ultimately made the right choice.  This site certainly wouldn't exist if I hadn't left.

Sadly that season ended in misery and scandal, with the team going 7-20 in the month of September and just barely missing the playoffs.  It was the season that drove beloved manager Terry Francona out of Boston after it came out that some players had been drinking and eating Popeye's in the clubhouse during games.  It will forever be known as The Season Of Fried Chicken And Beer.  And the less we say about the following year's trainwreck under Bobby Valentine, the better.  Suffice it to say, when GM Ben Cherrington traded most of our expensive free agents to the Dodgers and hired former pitching coach John Farrell to take over the team, the Fenway Faithful prepared themselves for another "rebuilding year."

Man, we were WAY off.

It's been an unbelievable season, with the Sox grinding out wins all year long.  They were never very flashy about it and at first a lot of us didn't even realize what was happening.  After all, we had the Bruins making a serious bid for their second Stanley Cup in three years, then a special Senate election to fill the seat left by John Kerry when he was named Secretary Of State.  And then there was the Marathon bombing.  The team always plays an early game on Marathon Monday, and for a lot of folks it's a yearly tradition to leave Fenway and head down to Copley to watch the runners cross the finish line.  When those twin explosions rang out on Boylston Street and shook the city down to its foundation, it was the Sox and the Bruins who were there to prop us all up and remind us why Boston is one of the greatest cities in the world.  They helped raise money for the One Fund, the players visited victims in the hospital and the team invited first responders and civilian heroes onto the field to throw out the opening pitch, drop a ceremonial puck onto the ice or kick off an afternoon at the ballpark with a rousing, "Play ball!"  The Sox held a ceremony before the start of the first home game after the attack, where David Ortiz grabbed the mic and thanked the city officials who worked so hard to sort out the aftermath and bring those responsible to justice.  And then he gave Boston a rallying cry:

"This Is Our Fucking City!"  

As time marched on the team's wins increased with the length of the beards until suddenly we were running away with the entire American League.  And after the Bruins had come up short, it seemed like the Sox were destined to win it all once more for the city that loved them so.  They made short work of Tampa Bay in the divisional series and then faced down Justin Verlander and the aces of Detroit with an unrivaled temerity.  It looked dicey there for a minute, but after Big Papi's game-tying grand slam in Game 2 that sent Tori Hunter flipping over the bullpen wall while Officer Steve Horgan raised his arms in triumph, well there was just no turning back.  I was really hoping for a Sox-Dodgers World Series, if only so that all my Boston friends still in L.A. would get the chance to see our boys at Dodger Stadium, but the boys in blue eventually fell to St. Louis in the NLCS.  So just like in 2004, it would be the B's versus the Birds once more.

We all joked that the Sox should just throw two games so that they could clinch the series at Fenway for the first time in 95 years, and after Jim Joyce's obstruction call it was assured that the boys would in fact be coming back to decide their fate on their home turf.  The series will be remembered as a pitching duel, with most games still tied 0-0 or 1-1 heading into the sixth or seventh inning.  Lackey and Lester were virtually unhittable, and Clay Buckholtz turned in one of the gutsiest starts I've ever seen, using precise pitch control to confound batters after a sore shoulder had robbed him of his usually dependable fastball.  And oh yeah, let's not forget about closer Koji Uehara, who was supposed to be a setup guy and morphed into the most dominant closer the team has ever seen.  The man is absolute strike machine, stonewalling one hitter after another and throwing only a single walk since the All-Star break.  While the Sox bats were often slow to get started, each time it was the unlikeliest of heroes that stepped up at a crucial moment.  The largely hitless Johnny Gomes smashed a three run homer to tie the series after coming in as a last minute replacement for Shane Victorino, who would return three days later and knock a bases clearing double in Game 6 after sitting out the last two games with a sore back.  And Big Papi was an absolute BEAST, hitting for a jaw-dropping .770 in the series and coming up with one clutch hit after another.

Jamie and I really wanted to be in the city when we clinched it, so Wednesday I left work and immediately headed toward Fenway to scout out the bar situation.  At 5:15 the place was already a mob scene, with lines around the block for every watering hole in a two block radius of the park.  I walked around a bit, got myself a hot dog on Landsdowne street as well as a souvenir program, a World Series pennant and some rally cards, then hightailed it back to Boylston Street and slipped into McGreevy's before the lines started there too.  Jamie was meeting me there along with Lauren and Bryan, two friends who are regulars at my Tuesday night trivia show, so it was up to me to find us a spot and then hunker down until reinforcements arrived.  I missed getting a booth by about ten seconds to a pair of crafty girls named Liz and Katie, but they took pity on me and let me hang with them until another table opened up.  One guy paid a group $100 to let him take their booth after they left, and at that point everyone was settled in and nobody was leaving until the game was over.  But by then Liz and Katie and I had become fast friends, and when the rest of our respective groups arrived we all shared the table and cheered together between pitchers of Octoberfest and shots of Dr. McGillicuddy's.  When Uehara came in for the ninth, we knew it was all over.  When he struck out the last batter, the place erupted into chaos.  Witness, and enjoy gazing down my screaming throat.

After about ten more minutes of sheer madness, we finished our drinks and exited the bar.  Instead of turning right and fighting our way into the celebrating hordes of Kenmore Square, we turned left and walked down to Copley Square, cheering and high-fiving passing pedestrians.  We reached the Boston Public Library and stopped at the Marathon finish line, where a crowd was already starting to form.  Cars drove through, flashing their lights and honking their horns while the passengers leaned out their windows with big dumb smiles on their faces.  People laid their jerseys down on the pavement and took pictures in front of the blue and yellow concrete.  Jamie and I were no exception.

Six months ago this had been the site of a horrifying tragedy.  Tonight it was bathed in euphoria.

I can't wait for next season.

...
...
...

OH RIGHT!  I almost forgot.  Before the game started I watched the original House On Haunted Hill.  Vincent Price is totally awesome but I was disappointed at the lack of actual ghosts.

The bit with the skeleton is also super fun.  I wish I could have seen it in the original Emergo.



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Title: The House On Haunted Hill
Director: William Castle
Starring: Vincent Price, Carol Ohmart, Richard Long, Alan Marshal, Carolyn Craig, Elisha Cook Jr.
Year Of Release: 1959
Viewing Method: Amazon Prime Instant Watch

NOSFERATU Needs More Vampire While SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE Needs Less Cary Elwes

"It will cost you sweat and tears and perhaps...a little blood."

I'm gonna keep this short and sweet because I'm fucking exhausted.  This is the time of year when sports has the ability to slowly take over my life.  Right now there's college football, NFL games, the start of the NHL and oh yeah, THE RED SOX IN THE WORLD FUCKING SERIES.  On top of all that, I've still got to watch a movie a day.  And write them up.

Yikes.

This past weekend was a busy one, with USC playing Notre Dame on Saturday night at the same time that the Red Sox clinched the ALCS, followed on Sunday by the Head Of The Charles Regatta and a Patriots loss to the Jets in a controversial play that still has analysts scratching their heads.  Somehow amidst all that testosteroniness I managed to squeeze in viewings of the silent vampire classic Nosferatu as well as Shadow Of The Vampire, a fictional account of Nosferatu's production based on rumors that the title character was played by an actual vampire.

There is shockingly little vampire stuff in Nosferatu.  Max Schreck's Count Orlok is utterly fantastic with a creature design that is singularly creepy, from his giant rabbit fangs to his spindly fingers and long nails.  Tragically, he's AWOL for too much of the movie, spending a big chunk of the story locked away in the hold of a ship bound for Germany.  In the meantime we get a lot of Hutter the estate agent falling down while trying to beat Orlok back to his wife Ellen, who's largely stuck at home with neighbors while getting psychic premonitions about her husband's doom.  When Orlok does arrive he brings a herd of plague rats with him, while also putting Hutter's boss Knock under some kind of spell that turns him into a raving lunatic despite never actually sharing a scene with the vampire.  The townsfolk decide to sacrifice Knock in order to bring an end to the plague (?) while Hutter returns home and warns Ellen that Orlok is out to get her, leading Ellen to eventually sacrifice herself in order to distract the Count the rising sun.  Day breaks and and the monster is disintegrated, which also magically lifts the plague from the land.

Considering that the whole script hinges on the lethal effects of sunlight, it's astounding just how much of this movie was shot during the day while pretending to be night.  In fact, when Hutter first meets Orlock, the Count immediately complains about the late hour and claims that it's after midnight, a statement that's immediately followed by the two men walking across an open courtyard while casting shadows on the ground.  It's pretty distracting, although the restoration I watched on Netflix Instant did an admirable job at recreating the original color tinting; the film was obviously shot in black and white, but most day scenes are colored yellow while night scenes are colored blue to help compensate for the wonky lighting.  Also, I have to wonder if most audiences were functionally illiterate in 1922, as most of the title cards remained on screen long enough for me to read each one about four times.  Has average reading speed increasing over the last 90 years?  Were they catering to people who couldn't read very well?  I'm curious only because it really grinds down the pace of the film - trim the title cards down to reasonable lengths and the movie would probably be about 15 minutes shorter.  The effects are truly impressive for the time, including one scene where Orlok appears as a transparent spectre and another where he climbs into a coffin and then levitates the lid into place.  And all the use of Orlok's freaky shadow is awesome.  But mostly I just wish that Nosferatu had a little bit more actual Nosferatu.

In that regard, Shadow Of The Vampire does not disappoint.  The always great Willem Dafoe stars as Max Schreck and it's a supremely creepy performance.  Apparently it was his work here that helped land him the role of the Green Goblin in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, and it's little wonder as Schreck and the Goblin bare a striking resemblance to each other.  In fact, I wish that Raimi had used some of the Schreck prosthetics instead of that silly metallic mask, as Dafoe might then have had even a nominal ability to display human emotion.  Dafoe plays Schreck as a tragic character, an evil beast grown somewhat weary with age who finds motivation in his obsession with Greta Schroder, the film's leading lady.  She's dangled in front of his face like a carrot by the obsessive F.W. Murnau, played with a kind of manic focus by John Malkovich.  There's an admirable effort to recreate many of the shots in the original film, right down to grain of the film stock.  Unfortunately, the Shadow Of The Vampire vacillates between true horror and pure camp.  It's almost as if Dafoe and Malkovich are in one movie while Cary Elwes and Udo Kier are in another, and poor Eddie Izzard is stuck somewhere in the middle.  It's odd to say the least.  Then again, it was produced by Nicholas Cage.

Still, I feel like I haven't done enough justice to some of the horror classics this month.  We're about a week away from Halloween and it's becoming clear that I'm just not going to get around to any of the Universal Classic Monsters, which is a real shame.  Hopefully I'll get a chance to dive into a few before my year is up.

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Title: Nosferatu, A Symphony Of Horror
Director: F.W. Murnau
Starring: Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schroder, Alexander Granach
Year Of Release: 1922
Viewing Method: Netflix Instant (TV)

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Title: Shadow Of The Vampire
Director: E. Elias Merhige
Starring: Willem Dafoe, John Malkovich, Udo Kier, Eddie Izzard, Cary Elwes, Catherine McCormack
Year Of Release: 2000
Viewing Method: Netflix DVD