Malkovich freely concedes that the vampire in Murnau’s movie is scarcely an object of desire. “Nosferatu is very different,” he says. “He’s not a sexy type of Dracula vampire. But that’s what I like about it. It’s about time and decay and corruption. Our film’s also much funnier, and has that ancient glamour of old movies.” For all the sense of decay and the almost farcical situations that Murnau’s pact with Schreck produces, the sexual charge is never far from the surface. Much as the fascination that adolescents have with films about people changing into something else (werewolves, monsters, whatever) is linked to the changes which their own bodies are undergoing at the time, so the parallel between the vampire’s bite and other forms of penetration has always been part of the appeal of such films.

But the genre underwent a big change with the advent of AIDS, reckons Katz. “The current crop of vampire films definitely came about post-AIDS,” he says. “Anne Rice wrote Interview With the Vampire in 1976 or 1977 and it became a cult novel. She wrote her follow-up, The Vampire Lestat, in 1982-83, which was right at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Suddenly, her books jumped to the top of the bestseller list. I really think the vampire is all about the dangers, guilt and illicitness of sex more than anything else - the idea that you can have sex with someone and you are changed the next day: you’re ill, or you’re not the person you were before.”

In an age in which studios struggle to cram as many ‘marketable’ elements as possible into their stories (even the most slam-bang of action movies now has the obligatory pause for either a romantic moment or, more likely, a strong sexual frisson), Shadow of the Vampire is a story which has it all - and has it effortlessly. It deals with artistic creation, posing the question: how far can and should an artist go to achieve a masterpiece; it deals with sexual tension and hidden desires; it has all the makings of a cult horror movie; it conjures up the strangely glamorous world of silent movies; and it is all put together in a style entirely in keeping with the new motion-picture millennium.

I’m not sure how Murnau would have reacted to all this: he was, by all accounts, an Artist with a capital ‘A’ who took himself fairly seriously and was not over-burdened with a sense of humour. But the person who discovered Nosferatu in the Brussels Musée all those years ago certainly approves.

SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE Saturn Films, Long Shot Films, in association with the BBC and Delux Productions with the Luxembourg Film Fund. Prod: Nicolas Cage, Jeff Levine; Exec prod: Paul Brooks, Alan Howden; Co-prod: Jimmy de Brabant, Richard Johns; Dir: E Elias Merhige; Scr: Steven Katz; Ph: Lou Bogue; Prod des: Assheton Gorton; Cost des: Caroline de Vivaise; Ed: Chris Wyatt; Mus: Dan Jones. With John Malkovich (FW Murnau), Willem Dafoe (Max Schreck), Catherine McCormack (Greta Schroeder), Udo Kier (Albin Grau), Cary Elwes (Fritz Wagner), Eddie Izzard (Gustav von Wangenheim), John Aden Gillet (Henrick Galeen), Ronan Vibert (Wolfgang Muller). International distribution: Lions Gate Films.