Merhige graduated top of his class at SUNY in 1987 and has divided his time since then between making music videos, most notably for Marilyn Manson (whose tour settings he has also designed), teaching and directing for the stage. He has also made the aforementioned feature, Begotten, which quickly became a cult classic and ended up on Time’s ‘Top Ten Films of the Year’ list.

“What I love about Shadow of the Vampire is that it speaks on so many different levels,” says Merhige. “There is a lyricism and a poetry in it without it being weighty or slow in any way. The producers, cast and everyone I worked with on the film are all of an artistic mind, so everybody’s interests were in making a great film. There was nothing to impede that. I was given a great deal of freedom in terms of whom I should hire and the way the film would look and feel.”

In addition to Malkovich and Dafoe, Merhige hired Catherine McCormack (Mel Gibson’s murdered wife in Braveheart) to play Greta, the conceited, strung-out leading lady; Cary Elwes as Fritz Wagner, the cameraman brought in after an encounter with Schreck sends his predecessor into a mental hospital; and British comedian Eddie Izzard as Greta’s hammy co-star, Gustav von Wangenheim. And, in a wonderful instance of casting against type, he also hired Udo Kier, who has played nightmare figures in any number of recent movies (arthouse regulars will remember his sadist aboard the Russian boat in Breaking the Waves), to be the apparently straightest man on the set of Nosferatu, Murnau’s producer Albin Grau.

Before long, however, Kier had discovered that even Grau may not have been as straight as he seemed. “The first thing I did was a good amount of research,” says the German actor, who made his name in Fassbinder’s films in the seventies and in Paul Morrissey’s Andy Warhol-produced gorefests, Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood of Dracula. “Grau found the money for the movie, but nobody knows where it came from. He belonged to so many lodges that you can just imagine secret meetings in cellars...”

The idea was for Dixon to concentrate on the relationship and Wimmer to deal with the heist. “But it turned out to be a collaboration in the truest sense of the word,” says Wimmer. Brosnan then sent the first draft to McTiernan, with whom he had last worked in 1986 on Nomads, the actor’s third movie and McTiernan’s first. McTiernan committed overnight.

As for Malkovich (he actually bears a striking resemblance to Murnau, who died in a mysterious car crash in 1932), the actor reckons that at least part of the fascination of vampire movies has to do with that strange triangle which links fear, pain and sexual excitement. “Our collective fascination with vampires is probably due to the fact that we like to be frightened,” he says. “It’s a form of arousal.”