Your Daily Dracula – Caden Miller as ‘Max’, Connor Alexander as ‘Nosferatu #1’, Mimesis: Nosferatu (2020)

Your Daily Dracula – Caden Miller as ‘Max’, Connor Alexander as ‘Nosferatu #1’, Mimesis: Nosferatu (2020)

Douglas Schulze’s Mimesis (2011) – which, in retrospect, gets to be called Mimesis: Night of the Living Dead – was about a cult of film fan weirdoes staging live snuff theatre in a LARP version of the George Romero film.  Here, with Lance Henriksen transmitted in as a cult leader guru known as the Auteur, the merry pranksters set out to homage F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu by infiltrating a production of Dracula at the Harker Arts Academy and persuading director Frederick Kinski (Joseph Scott Anthony) to shift from a straight-up Stoker to a spin on Murnau’s vision … then having bald, made-up nosferates with skull-caps and pasty gray make-up plus functional fangs and talons let loose to kill folk.

It opens with a self-contained prologue (with its own credits, suggesting it was once a short) featuring Kristy Swanson as a mother worried that her son Max (Caden Miller) is being warped by staying in his bedroom watching Nosferatu projected on a sheet over and over, and the kid transforming himself into  murdering mini-Orlock … some years later, presumably, the new student who calls himself ‘Michael Morbius’ (Connor Alexander) is Max grown up and aligned with kindred spirits in the Auteur’s outfit.  Things burble along in teen movie fashion at Harker Academy, with Tara (Julie Kline) bitching to Kinski about being cast as Lucy when Amy (Mandalynn Carlson) – whose father is a big donor – gets to be Mina … Tara is supposed to be the heroine but a) it’s hard to sympathise with a theatre major who proudly admits to never having heard of Anthony Hopkins or Bernadette Peters and b) Lucy is a terrific part in Dracula (not so much in Nosferatu).  Ed Glick (Jordan Campo), the tech guy also cast as Renfield, suffers homophobic abuse from a closeted bully wrestler Jake Cullen (Jaron Gordon) and Tara’s nasty ex Quincy Starker (Ezekial Gordon) and is easily persuaded by Morbius to escalate things in a revenge scheme.

As in Nosferatu, Morbius is keener on ensnaring Tara-Mina in his evil than simply draining her – though he has a couple of back-up Orlocks with knocked-out front teeth and replacement fangs on hand as part of his plan to turn the performance of the show for Principal Dreyer (Crystal Lucas Perry) and other college authorities into a massacre.  Held over from the earlier film is Duane Rice (Allen Maldonado), who has been tracking the Mimesis mob and is drafted in to function as Van Helsing (not a great part in Nosferatu – especially the Herzog version).  Schulze seeds the whole thing with vampire movie in-jokes, though this mushes a couple of levels of reality – presumably, Max chooses a vampire pseudonym (he once called himself Kurt Barlow) as an in-reference, but almost everyone he meets has a similarly nod-and-a-wink monicker.  The turning-worm bit about abused students fighting back and going evil suggests Mimesis: Heathers, but it taken fairly grimly – even pouring sparkly glitter on the bully and making him up as a Twilight-reference ‘fagpire’ is more unpleasant than it is poetic justice.

It has a couple of properly nasty ideas – superglue in contact lens fluid – and the murder play gets properly gruesome, with even a few character beats as Kinski (switching Lugosi cape for Schreck baldness) finds biting out the throat of his department head less satisfying than he hoped.  Alexander, in a riff on Christian Slater in Heathers and maybe Nicolas Cage in Vampire’s Kiss, makes for a smoothly nasty chief psycho but is possibly creepier without the Orlock pancake.  That college stage production of Nosferatu – with audio-visual flourishes – actually looks like a pretty decent show.  Schulze has been around a while (Hellmaster, 1992), and always strikes me as an ambitious low-budget filmmaker – The Dark Below is a stab at a wordless horror film and Thorns has some theology/SF angles – who gets committed performances and stretches his meagre resources.  Co-written by Jeff Meyers.  There’s a sequel hook tease about the Auteur’s follow-up production.