From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Edmund Elias Merhige, known as E. Elias Merhige, (born June 14th, 1964) is an American film director born in Brooklyn. Merhige is best known to mainstream audiences for the 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire, and to underground audiences for the cult-classic 1991 film Begotten. As he says in his audio commentary to the Shadow of the Vampire DVD, Merhige views cinema as the only meaningful art form of the present era. He regards literature and drama as once-needed forms which are past their time and which have been superseded by film. He is also very interested in the occult and the paranormal, and images and themes derived from these traditions suffuse his films. Merhige currently lives in Los Angeles, California. Description above from the Wikipedia article E. Elias Merhige, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.