Moreover, Merhige, whose credits include a music video for Marilyn Manson, plays the vampire motif beautifully, suggesting the movie camera is a vampire bestowing a kind of immortality on anyone it captures for the screen and that drug addicts exist in a sick, vampirelike netherworld. But the film's conceit also suggests that Murnau, who died in a freak car accident in California in 1931, was an unscrupulous madman. Murnau has promised Schreck the chance to feed on her when he shoots the final scene, in which Greta's heroine offers herself to the vampire in order to save the world from the plague he spreads. After the entire troupe travels by train to the Carpathian mountains, they set up shop in a tiny village inn. The shooting progresses, but Schreck can't keep his clawlike hands or teeth off Murnau's crew.
People start to disappear.
Murnau tries to exert his will over the vampire, but the maestro finds he has met his match. Dafoe, a longtime member of the avant-garde New York theater troupe The Wooster Group, is unrecognizable beneath his makeup. But the disguise seems to have liberated him.