The Plague and The Sun
Categories
For no particular reason, I didn’t make this post earlier. But, now it will have a second part.
Nosferatu the Vampyre
A remake of the original Nosferatu by Werner Herzog. The remake was very faithful to the original. A number of the scene could have easily been shot for shot remakes of the source material. The beginning of the film is very unsettling and kind of hard to watch. I say this from a film perspective, not from a horror perspective (I will expand on this later). However, once Jonathan makes it to Transylvania and meets Dracula things get much better, becoming creepy and unsettling from a horror perspective. Klaus Kinski joins Herzog again (Aguirre: The Wrath of God) to play Dracula and does a great job of it. These two work together very well to produce characters that draw you in and see something that is out there.
After finishing the film, as I do with all the movies on the list, I went to Wikipedia to read up on the film. This lets me learn fun facts about the production and read some input on why the film was added to the list. The fact I learned this time directly related to why the start of the film felt very stiff and uneasy.
At the request of distributor 20th Century Fox, Herzog produced two versions of the movie simultaneously, to appeal to western audiences. Scenes with dialogue were filmed twice, in German and in English, meaning that the actor’s own voices (as opposed to dubbed dialogue by voice actors) could be included in the English version of the film. However, many consider the performances in the German language version to be superior, as Kinski and Ganz could act more confidently in their native language.
The beginning of the film contained most of the dialogue and felt poorly acted. However, coinciding with the arrival of Dracula, the dialogue becomes a second player to the visuals and the acting improves.