By Buzz Drainpipe (Ethertown Film Notes No. 6)
“The first image ever made was of death.” — E. Elias Merhige
There are filmmakers, and then there are cosmogonists — artists who create entire universes just to watch them burn. E. Elias Merhige belongs to the latter. Across three strange, haunted films — Begotten (1989), Shadow of the Vampire (2000), and Suspect Zero (2004) — he constructed a secret gospel of image and annihilation. Each film inhabits a different cinematic plane, yet together they form a single Gnostic arc: creation → imitation → perception.
I. Begotten — The Demiurge Bleeds
Before light there was flicker. Before story, convulsion. Begotten is Genesis told through the medium of entropy. The film opens with God disemboweling himself in a shack, birthing a Mother Earth who then brings forth a Son of Man from his remains. It is a cycle of mutilation, gestation, and decay — creation as a wound.
Merhige’s visual alchemy—overexposed, degraded, and rephotographed 16mm—feels like scripture burned onto celluloid. He sought to erase authorship itself, to make a film that looked discovered, as if it had survived an ancient apocalypse. Watching it, you sense not narrative but transmission: a message from a pre-verbal world.
If Gnosticism teaches that the material world is a flawed copy, Begotten is cinema’s confession of guilt.
II. Shadow of the Vampire — The Copy That Consumes
After the void of Begotten, Merhige turned his eye to the machinery of illusion itself. Shadow of the Vampire dramatizes the making of Murnau’s Nosferatu — with a vampiric actor who might be literally undead. Willem Dafoe’s Max Schreck becomes cinema’s first ghoul, feeding on the act of representation.
The film plays like a darkly comic exorcism of the filmmaker’s soul. Murnau (John Malkovich) sacrifices his crew to achieve “truth” in art, while Schreck hungers not for blood but for meaning. The set becomes a cathedral of celluloid and cruelty.
Where Begotten birthed the image, Shadow exposes its parasitism: art as a feeding mechanism. The artist must destroy to illuminate. The camera drinks life through the lens.
III. Suspect Zero — The Oracle in the Machine
Merhige’s final feature to date is disguised as a serial-killer thriller, yet beneath the procedural lies the same cosmic dread. A psychic FBI agent glimpses murders through a gift that feels more like a curse. Sight becomes contamination; empathy, infection.
Ben Kingsley’s haunted killer murmurs of a greater predator, “Suspect Zero,” who murders with such patternless perfection that he becomes invisible — the pure void made human. The film’s grainy landscapes and dissolving perspectives evoke Begotten’s wastelands, but now filtered through FBI databases and surveillance footage.
The divine wound of the first film has become data; revelation now comes through screens. The demiurge’s shack has evolved into the bureau’s briefing room. Vision has gone digital, but the sickness remains.
Coda: The Hidden Architect
Merhige’s silence since 2004 only deepens the myth. Like a mystic who burned his own manuscripts, he withdrew into rumor — occasional music videos, whispers of lost projects (Din of Celestial Birds, Polia and Blastema). His cinema feels less like a career than a transmission: a triptych of visions received and exhausted.
In a world where image has conquered every surface, Merhige remains a heretic — the one who tried to unsee the world by filming it.
“The eye,” says the Gnostic, “was the first sinner.”
E. Elias Merhige merely pointed a camera at that sin and pressed record.
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