In short: Shadow of the Vampire (2000)

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (John Malkovich) is filming Nosferatu, his great, unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”. Unbeknownst to anyone but Murnau, the man playing the vampire Orloff, Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe), is in fact an actual vampire playing an actor playing a vampire. Murnau has bought his cooperation by promising him his lead actress Greta Schröder (Catherine McCormack) once the shoot is over, perhaps with the thought to betray him.

Though once the vampire starts to become impatient and sets teeth to some of the crew, it becomes quickly clear that the director is willing to – quite literally - sacrifice anyone on the altar of his art, apart from himself, of course.

That latter bit is one of the things E. Elias Merhige’s strange (in all the good ways) horror film, drama, dark comedy Shadow of the Vampire understands much better than most films concerned with questions of art and sacrifice: how it’s very often others who pay his price, while the artist takes on the pose of suffering. Consequently, Merhige’s view on artistic production seems cynical bordering on the outright bitter, Dafoe’s Schreck embodying all kinds of emotional horrors, among them the worst sides of certain artist types that, like the film’s Murnau, would commit every atrocity as long as they can excuse it with their art, in classic horror film style externalizing internal horrors.

At the same time as Shadow of the Vampire is an appropriately horrific look at the dark aspects of the artistic impulse with a vampire as a metaphor, it is also a horror movie whose vampire is quite real, an often visually darkly poetic film, and also a comedy with a wickedly dark sense of humour.

All three of these aspects are embodied in Dafoe’s fantastic portrayal of a thing so ancient it has forgotten what it means to be human, a monster grotesque, pathetic, and dangerous all at the same time.

How Merhige manages to keep all these different aspects of his film in check without them tearing apart Shadow of the Vampire while dragging it in all directions, I’m honestly not sure. A pact with the devil, perhaps? In any case, he does, and leaves us with a film so rich I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed trying to make sense about it.

Feardotcom (2002)

Still haunted by his inability to shave properly catch a serial killer named The Doctor (strangely enough not Colin Baker, but Stephen Rea doing a silly voice and a silly accent, probably because he wanted something to do), despite the guy streaming his murders live on the internet, police detective Mike (Stephen Dorff or the piece of wood they painted to look like him) stumbles upon a series of very curious deaths. The victims seem to die in accidents or by somewhat natural causes, but all of them see terrible things before their deaths and bleed from the eyes. The last bit puts health inspector – or something – Terry (Natascha McElhone or a different piece of painted wood) on the case too, and she won’t stop helping Mike even though it’s clear after five minutes of investigation that there’s no illness involved in these deaths. The script will also very randomly drop a romance between Mike and Terry on us, even though none of the scenes between them suggest any emotional connection at all, let’s not even speak of chemistry. In fact, it looks as if the actors were just as surprised by the development as the audience is.

Anyway, some disconnected dialogue scenes that stand in for an investigation later, our heroes learn that the victims are killed by a haunted website with the rather awkward URL of “feardotcom.com”, an address that perfectly encapsulates the quality of the writing here. Apparently, the site is haunted (and designed?) by a ghost named Jeannine (sometimes Gesine Cukrowski in low level bondage gear, sometimes Jana Güttgemans, a little girl wearing a particularly obvious wig). Jeannine is a victim of the Doctor and uses her powers of net haunting to curse random people coming to her site. The curse will kill a victim after 48 hours of exposure via their greatest fear, unless, apparently, they catch the Doctor. Why Jeannine  thinks people like two German-speaking punks who have nothing whatsoever to do with law enforcement will be much help there, particularly since she doesn’t bother to actually tell her victims what she wants from them, is anybody’s guess. I’m not particularly hopeful the writers or director William Malone knew.

In fact, I have to hold myself back not to make a “you know nothing, Jon Snow” joke here, for the writing as a whole is so inconsistent, implausible and random in all the wrong ways, only utmost politeness can hold one back from heaping personal abuse on the people responsible. Consequently, the plot outline above is a best guess effort.

At the time it came out, Feardotcom was positioned as an attempt of getting at some of that sweet money reserved for bad US remakes of markedly superior Japanese horror films without actually having to buy any rights (or, one might add, perhaps with a degree of unkindness, without actually having a script). In practice, there certainly are some plot parallels to Nakata’s Ringu or Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo but there’s exactly zero of the complexity or aesthetic achievement of these films visible on screen. In fact, the film seems more in the spirit of Italian rip-off cinema of the 70s – with the little difference that where Italian rip-offs of successful movies were often highly entertaining, Feardotcom is mostly boring.

Much of that boredom is what happens when a cast of characters consisting of non-entities mostly lacking the single character trait even a slasher movie victim gets wander through thematically indifferent set-pieces which in turn meander between vapid and unexciting horror sequences shot in very dark rooms, third-rate would-be Seven-style serial killer non-thriller scenes shot in very dark rooms, and flash cuts too embarrassing even for a White Zombie or Marilyn Manson video clip.

I could probably live with the total lack of thematic coherence, the film’s disinterest in its own narrative, and the non-characters if the visual aspects of the film suggested anything beyond Malone having seen some music videos, and a David Fincher film and probably once having heard of Japan and Italy and now crapping it all back on screen without rhyme, reason, a concept, or even an idea of mood. The courageous handful of defenders of Feardotcom (and all power to defenders of hopeless causes like this) tend to argue the film is actually a rather stylish affair but to my eyes and ears, there’s no coherence to its style, and therefore no style at all.

In short: Octane (2003)

Senga Wilson (Madeleine Stowe) is driving her daughter Nat (Mischa Barton) home from a stint with Nat’s father/Senga’s ex-husband. The two have quite the night drive in front of them, a situation that isn’t made any more pleasant by the fact that Nat and Senga are in perpetual battle - this evening’s casus belli being Senga forbidding Nat going to some sort of music festival with her friends - nor by Senga running on no sleep and a lot of psychopharmacology.

After a heavy row, Nat steals away with a teenage hitchhiker she just met an hour or so ago and her said hitchhiker’s freakish friends . Unfortunately, these guys belong to some sort of highway cult led by a man calling himself The Father (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, rather unfatherly). They’re into brainwashing, dressing up as cops, ambulance drivers or truckers, causing car accidents as well as staging fake accidents. In a thematic curve ball, they are also heavily involved in bloodletting but cults all too often ignore the aesthetic pleasures of a coherent field of symbols.

After first being tricked by a fake cop who is part of the cult – not that the actual cops will turn out to be any help - Senga takes up the pursuit of the cult herself, a project that is made somewhat more difficult by her tendency to hallucinate a peculiar motivational speaker (Martin McDougall).

All the while, a man in a recovery van (Norman Reedus) is watching everyone involved, loitering sinisterly.

Marcus Adams’s Octane (working from a script by the great Stephen Volk) is a somewhat peculiar film that attempts to enrich a basic thriller plot with plenty of weirdness as well as a thematic emphasis on the strangeness that seems to be common when driving through the US by night. At least if you follow this British movie shot in Luxembourg.

Often, the film’s basic strangeness and willingness to aim for the dream-like instead of the gritty is quite a strength, providing it with a mood very much its own, and perhaps even a degree of actual thoughts underpinning it. From time to time, though, Octane drifts off into what feels like needless obscurity; at a few other times (particularly when it comes to Nat’s silly adventures in the cult’s brainwashing truck) its surrealism is rather on the silly side, with an adorably conservative idea of sex and drugs.

This is certainly no film if you want a straightforward thriller with a logical plot. When it works, it’s all strange ideas and waking dream-like direction and stuff that somewhat makes sense on a metaphorical or thematic level, and not so much on the field of narrative logic. Which is often the kind of thriller I prefer, so I found myself rather taken with Octane, not despite but because its plot logic breaks down repeatedly, if it ever existed at all.