All art plays with reality, but perhaps no medium creates the illusion of reality more persuasively than the cinema. “Flesh and blood, reduced to a shadow that is preserved and shined up on a screen where it becomes a phantom,” is how director E. Elias Merhige describes the alchemy of filmmaking. It is a telling remark from the director of Shadow of the Vampire, an inventive take on the making of the 1922 silent film classic Nosferatu.

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, who directed the original film, was the undisputed god of German Expressionist cinema (his other works included Sunrise, considered by many to be the greatest film ever made). A master of light and shadow, who pioneered the use of the moving camera, Murnau possessed a vivid artistic imagination as well as a thorough knowledge of technical matters. Nearly eight decades after Nosferatu premiered-- and despite countless Dracula-themed movies which have sprung up in the intervening years-- Murnau’s version remains the creepiest, most disturbing, most harrowingly believable vampire movie ever produced. Using the actual making of the 1922 Nosferatu as a jumping off point, Merhige imagines a Murnau so maniacally determined to create the most authentic movie ever made that he hires an actual vampire (played in Shadow of the Vampire by Willem Dafoe) to play the role of Count Orlock, the Dracula-like figure at the film within a film’s center.

John Malkovich, as the autocratic Murnau, does not reveal the count’s true identity to the rest of the cast and crew, however, introducing him instead as an unusually intense method actor named Max Schreck (the name of the actor who, in fact, played the vampire in the real Murnau’s horror film). Before long, members of the film crew begin showing signs of severe anemia and the question becomes: can Murnau finish the production before the Count finishes off the film company. In their wonderful evocation of the silent film era Merhige and screenwriter Steven Katz blur the lines between the real and the unreal, making Shadow of the Vampire one of several recent films which explore what might be termed competing states of reality.

Reality itself is a slippery concept, one that has occupied philosophers for centuries. “There is no absolute reality,” argues Dafoe, whose mesmerizing performance as Max Schreck/Count Orlock manages to arouse both horror and compassion in the viewer. “It’s a shifting thing that is conditioned by many [variants].” It needs a context [before it can be] defined. Schreck’s case is easy; he really is a vampire. And because his compulsion is a condition of his existence, his behavior is, if not socially acceptable, at least excusable. Not so with Murnau, whose obsession is every bit as destructive as his star’s but who can’t justify it on grounds of physical survival. “There is a purity to Willem’s character that Murnau does not possess,” suggests Merhige who, nonetheless, sympathizes with the director’s single-mindedness. “Flesh and blood dies and memories fade,” he notes ruefully. “Art is the only door to immortality. [It is] the shadow that outlives the subject.”

In fact, it is the promise of immortality which Dafoe thinks makes the vampire myth itself so potent—and so popular. “We are always motivated by our denial of death and our fear of death,” he asserts. “The vampire myth is totally opposed to what our reality is. The beauty of the myth [is that] in turning reality on its head, it is both familiar and fantastical.”

Matters of immorality rather than immortality drive the Marquis de Sade in Philip Kaufman’s wonderfully subversive Quills which, like Shadow of the Vampire, was inspired by historical figures and actual events. Given that the bulk of the movie takes place within the confines of an insane asylum, it isn’t surprising to find an unusual number of conflicting realities. The most horrific reality, however, is the one playing itself out across France. In an irony not easily lost on the viewer, the story opens in Paris in 1794 as the Reign of Terror is claiming its final victims.

In reading Doug Wright’s screen adaptation of his own Obie award-winning play, director Kaufman recalled a comment made by the late writer Nelson Algren: “Whenever you shut a human being out of the world, he will, for better or for worse, build one of his own.” The notorious Marquis de Sade (Australian actor Geoffrey Rush) has been living in his own world for quite some time before he lands in Charenton Asylum where, it is hoped he will be prevented from writing yet another morally offensive novel. The hospital is run by the Abbe Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix), a young priest with progressive ideas who believes the mentally ill should be treated humanely. When this approach fails to silence the Marquis, an irate Napoleon dispatches a less forgiving emissary to do the job.

Just as Shadow of the Vampire is as much about Murnau as it is about Schreck, so Quills is as much—if not more—the Abbe’s story than the Marquis’. The idealistic young Abbe (and what is idealism if not a utopian dream of reality?) finds himself caught between two morally abhorrent extremes, those represented by the Marquis, on one hand, and by Napoleon’s henchman, Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine), on the other. Not helping matters is the cleric’s growing attraction to a fetching young hospital laundress (Kate Winslet). Unable to reconcile his conflicting thoughts and feelings, Coulmier goes mad, ending up in the cell formerly occupied by the Marquis, begging for a quill.

Danish director Lars von Trier is no stranger to either madness or idealism. He seems almost perversely attracted to characters who are so far removed from reality that they seem always to be walking a fine line between fantasy and delusion. The real world offers Dancer in the Dark’s Selma (Bjork) nothing but injustice and misery: encroaching blindness, desperate living conditions and a cruel betrayal that sends her to the gallows. Is it any wonder she prefers to spend her time in a fantasy world filled with singing and dancing? “In a musical, nothing bad ever happens,” she reasons naively. Von Trier’s best-known heroines-- Selma in Dancer in the Dark and Bess in Breaking the Waves -- display the ingenuousness of a child and a saint’s selflessness. The director was quoted in the September issue of Film Comment as saying that his films often deal with ‘a clash between an ideal and reality.’ But what von Trier labels idealistic, most people would consider delusional.

In an extensive interview with Ken Scrudato in Flaunt magazine, Bjork, who walked off with the Cannes Film Festival Award as Best Actress for her performance in the film, talked about her character’s determined flights of fancy. “She firmly believes, in quite an innocent way, that that world is wonderful and that it’s a place where everybody’s dreams come true. When she goes to work she is a bit surprised that nobody sings and dances all the time, and that things are not so fantastic. Rather than accepting that the world isn’t like that, she just lets her own world take over.”

The characters in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream also create their own world, only to become prisoners of it. Adapted from the novel by Hubert Selby, Jr., the film reveals the lengths to which people will go to escape reality. A flirtation with drugs dissolves into a nightmare of hallucinations and degradation, a vision of hell that would make even Dante shudder. Primarily due to its mind-blowing visual style, the film has a brutality and force unlike any other film this past year, achieving a grueling—and gruesome-- level of psychological realism that takes the audience places not all viewers will want to go. That sense of emotional and psychological realism is perhaps cinema’s greatest gift. And not just cinema’s. Theater, literature, photography, music and painting share film’s ability to export emotions, philosophies and ideas, although film, the premier 20th Century art form, makes them come alive in particularly vivid fashion. Merhige notes that art and drama actually grew out of religion. “They were intended to dramatize the life, death and resurrection of the soul,” he explains. “They didn’t evolve out of a need to amuse ourselves; that aspect came much later on. It really was like medicine for the soul.”

For Merhige, it obviously still is. “What we see with our eyes isn’t all that is there,” he suggests. “What drama does is to take what you can’t see and turn it into a mask. It takes what you can’t think and turns it into words. It takes what you have never seen and turns it into a world.”