NOSFERATU RE-ANIMATED (2020)

With Disney & Universal turning old animated properties into Live Action mediocrities (or worse, see under Dr. Seuss), it’s fair play for Live Action Horror to go animated.  Especially when choice classics are lying in Public Domain.*  Ergo, this decade-long Passion Project with indie filmmaker/musician Fran Blackwood writing, producing, animating, directing, coloring, backgrounding & scoring (on his own or heading the department) on a one-man band redo of F.W. Murnau’s gasp-inducing 1922 Dracula ripoff.  ‘Re-animated,’ not re-imagined, the odd, compelling silent proving as undead as ever with only a bit of reediting, but largely a pretty straightforward hand-drawn/computer-assisted exercise.  (Think high-tech RotoScope.)  A new Heavy-Metal tinged music track and the old inter-titles replaced by subtitles over the image the main difference.  At times, the old subfusc image is gratefully clarified (a ship’s interior brought into the light; herky-jerky under-cranking smoothed out), but the process also seriously diminishes the ‘Creep Factor’ that’s kept NOSFERATU alive for a century.  Not an unpleasant reminder of inspired moments you may have forgotten, but with the horror largely neutered, what’s the point?  The man really behind this one-man show not Blackwood, but F.W. Murnau.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINKLINK: *Compare for yourself with trailers for the latest 1922 restoration and for this.  1922 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npxhdRMYHy0   2020 -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfsNn4BYAA0   And here's our 1922 NOSFERATU Write-Up.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/12/nosferatu-1922.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *NOSFERATU was always in Public Domain since Murnau & Co. never secured rights to DRACULA from the Bram Stoker estate, hiding behind a barely altered storyline & a new title.  Losing in court to Stoker’s widow, the negative & all copies ordered destroyed, leaving only a couple of seriously compromised prints as source elements.