Travis Betz & Max Landis recreate no-budget “American Werewolf In London” transformation

I missed this when it first came out last summer but it’s the sort of thing that keeps indefinitely. Screenwriter and director Max Landis stood in for David Naughton in a bare-bones shot-for-shot remake of the famous transformation scene from his father’s film An American Werewolf in London.

The video was directed by Travis Betz for the CineFix series Homemade Movies, which “serves up creative remakes of your favorite trailers and movie scenes.” In order to extract maximum entertainment value from the premise, “All videos are exact shot-for-shot remakes created at home without any visual effects.”

The result is painstaking, ridiculous, hilarious, and as AV Club writer Rob Dean puts it in the post where I learned about this, it “shows a real devotion to the original, something that will never be said for An American Werewolf In Paris”. I especially enjoyed Landis’s efforts to recreate Naughton’s facial expressions and vocalizations. In trying to duplicate them they’re exaggerated in a way that treads the line between pastiche and satire.

You can see Betz and Landis’s recreation embedded at the top of this post, or a side-by side comparison below.