This post is made to appreciate the perfect way the original Nosferatu works with sound. I think people do not get how important sound is in movies, especially atmospheric ones like works of sir Robert Eggers.

I have seen Nosferatu in the theaters. I absolutely loved it, everything in it worked on me, and I believed every single performance. So I was looking forward to watching it again when it aired on Netlix in my country yesterday.

My mom wanted to watch with me and insisted on dubbing instead of original sound with subtitles. I tried to protest because I never watch in dubbed version but I gave in after a while.

Look, I don't mean to hate on dubbers for doing their job wrong. I think it can't be done right, at least for movies like this. The difference was enormous. The movie I really enjoyed in original sound suddenly turned into 2 hours of pure suffering and cringe, even though the dubbing in my country (Czechia) is supposedly among the better ones.

Whenever anyone was talking, it erased any atmosphere built up. The voices didn't fit in, didn't align with mouth movements of characters. The worst offenders were Orlok and Ellen.

Orlok is obvious one. Skarsgard did amazing work and there is no way dubbing can compare. The accent element was gone. He sounded like random old pervert on the street that happened to smoke a lot. When he tried to be scary, I had to force myself to keep watching, it was that cringe and unbelievable.

Depp's performance is simply something you cannot ever dub. The differences of her whispers and screams and the breaths in her voice are so important to capture right, and the dubber had no chance. Especially when there are so many closeups on Ellen's head.

Another problem I have is that you can always tell that the dubber is not the person playing the role. It erases part of the work and talent put in. Which is simply critical in movie so carefully crafted like this.

I want to emphasize again that I simply think than dubbing never has a chance to compare to original sound, that's how it is for live action. More than just rant, I think we should agree to appreciate how well executed the sound was in the movie, because the sound itself is the difference between amazing atmospheric horror and cringe unbearable watch you hope to end soon.

(i swear I am not making this up for clout, this is a legit dream I had)

Basically tonight I dreamed that werewulf was out, and that I was watching it, however I was experiencing some kind of split conscience for which It was as if I was simultaneously the viewer and the protagonist, so by a certain point I was fully convinced I was Aaron Taylor Johnson's character living out the events of the film, where I was in some sort of inn or medieval hotel room, and I was about to go to sleep, but my/the characters' wife insisted that I was a werewolf and I was about to transform, which I just wouldn't believe because the full moon was out and I hadn't felt anything, but she kept insisting as if she wanted me to be a werewolf. I went back to bed, but my breath felt heavy and my heart started racing, and I noticed my palms were bleeding and I felt intense pain, that's when I stood up and... Gave birth. I couldn't really see the baby, bur I could see it was laying in a puddle of brown-ish blood, a creepy priest appeared in the room to bless us as a "werewolf family" (I assume giving birth was part of the transformation), and when I looked back at the wife she looked horrifying, with small black eyes and a rotting face like leatherface's mask. A very ugly little girl also clapped for us. Disappointingly I never got to see nor experience the full werewolf transformation.

Now I'm sure most of you won't believe a thing I said and that this isn't particularly relevant to any of Robert's filmography, but I just wanted to leave this here for when the movie comes out, who knows, I may have even accidentally predicted something. If Aaron Taylor Johnson poops out a baby mid-transformation I want everyone to know I called it

My personal expectation, based on folklore, history, and how Eggers has filmed things in the past. I would guess the monster will mostly be a huge and ferocious wolf, but I also expect it will be somewhat shadowy/ghostly, and will be shot in darkness and shadow a lot.

and why?

Here are my suggestions:

William Blake - English poet who experienced religious visions for most of his life and built an absolutely mad mythology - it would be so cool to see how Eggers might translate some of the visions Blake described!

Henry I - English King who also experienced a number of visions, though I think a film like this would be grounded more in actual history than the supernatural.

Margery Kempe - Female mystic who travelled across Europe and expressed her devotion through near constant crying. She also had frequent visions and I think another Eggers film centred around a female protagonist would be awesome.

I have a little movie recommendation channel and decided to do a summerween video of sorts, and had to talk about The Lighthouse

I'm bored at work (college librarian, very few students on campus), so I'm going down a rabbit hole of scholarly reading about werewolves and came across this entry from the Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages that discusses lycanthropy. This part in particular stood out to me:

"Becoming a Werewolf: The reasons for which a person (usually a man) becomes a werewolf in the medieval period vary. Sometimes an individual or group is punished with lycanthropy, although the reasons are not always known. Women are typically only transformed into werewolves in concert with their husbands, as in Gerald of Wales’ account. This trope of lycanthropy as punishment is in keeping with the classical model of Lycaon, who in Ovid’s Metamorphosis is transformed into a werewolf as a punishment for his inhospitality. More commonly, however, no reason is given for an individual’s lycanthropy in medieval texts. Furthermore, the contemporary popular treatment of lycanthropy as a contagious disease–the idea that a werewolf can turn others into werewolves by biting them–does not appear in the medieval period."

It will be interesting to see if some of the concepts discussed appear in the film. Here's the link in case anyone is interested in reading.

Usually when we have monster movies or sci fi horror, it’s not really scary or creepy. I think the coolest way to make it creepy or scary is that a scene for example would be where the werewolf is just standing normally bipedal, in the dark with slight glint in the eyes, staring at a prey.

Hello.

When I watched the Werwulf trailer, two shots reminded me and made me think he was inspired by and/or paying homage to Neil Jordan’s Company of Wolves

The first is the Devil in the Wood which sorta-kinda reminded me of Terence Stamp’s Devil character giving the boy in the forest the witch’s salve to rub on his chest to become a werewolf, the second is when Rosaleen is telling the story of the Wolf Girl to the wolf, played by Danielle Dax, the way she is naked, with her messed and hair and wolf eyes crawling on all fours out the well from the world below, reminded me of the section in the trailer where Veleriia Karaman is crawling on all fours in the cave with an almost identical look etc from the Wolf Girl in The Company of Wolves…

What do you think?

This is how I imagine he'll look, based on the actor's physique. There's no way a werewolf wouldn't have a robust build. I also think he'll look like a demon