SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE
IFC, 8:00 p.m. ET
What a clever idea for a movie – film fans, especially horror film fans, should love this, especially with Willem Dafoe’s outrageously committed portrayal of an actor who’s been cast to star in a vampire film, and turns out to be very long in the tooth for the part. In this 2000 movie written by Steven Katz, John Malkovich plays the director who fears his star has a secret and deadly type of night life – and what makes this plot even juicier is that it uses, as its imaginative jumping-off point, a real vampire film, and a real director. The film is the 1922 silent classic Nosferatu, Malkovich plays director F.W. Murnau, and Dafoe plays actor Max Schreck – who, in real life, was not a vampire. Not that I know of, anyway.