Dracula Sets Sail

If you’ve read Bram Stoker’s original novel Dracula, you know it’s really episodic. Most adaptations focus on his time in London, because that’s when the Count attracts the attention of Van Helsing and Company. But the BBC’s recent adaptation of Dracula showed, there’s this big chunk of action that Stoker himself sort of glided over. That would be the voyage of the Demeter, carrying fifty unmarked crates in its cargo hold. One by one the crew disappears, as noted in the chapter called “The Captain’s Log.” (Dracula is heavily epistolary.)

After the empty ship drifts into harbor, a lone grey wolf wanders off in the fog. No character notes if it appears well fed, but it most surely is. F.W. Murnau used the Demeter to brief but great effect in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Indeed, from this trailer for The Last Voyage of the Demeter, it looks like director André Øvredal leans far more toward Murnau and Max Shreck’s Graf Orlak than the Universal Studios version of Dracula. Since it’s coming on the heels of Universal’s Renfield, that makes sense. You’ve got to do something different after it was clear that Nicolas Cage was going to make the more traditional image his own.

Isolating and expanding this chapter allows it to be a haunted house story — there’s nowhere to run (or swim) because the victims are trapped in the middle of the Atlantic. Yes, we know it’s not going to end well for the mortals (unless Dreamworks wants to somehow launch a franchise), but that means we’re promised a straight-up horror film. Hopefully, it will be a good one.

From Dreamworks:

The film stars Corey Hawkins (In the Heights, Straight Outta Compton) as Clemens, a doctor who joins the Demeter crew, Aisling Franciosi (Game of Thrones, The Nightingale) as an unwitting stowaway, Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones, Clash of the Titans) as the ship’s captain and David Dastmalchian (Dune, the Ant-Man franchise) as the Demeter’s first mate.

The film also features Jon Jon Briones (Ratched, American Horror Story), Stefan Kapicic (Deadpool films, Better Call Saul), Nikolai Nikolaeff (Stranger Things, Bruised) and Javier Botet (It films, Mama).

From DreamWorks Pictures and the producers of Zodiac and Black Swan, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is directed by Norwegian horror virtuoso André Øvredal (Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, Trollhunter), from a script by Bragi F. Schut (Escape Room), Stefan Ruzowitzky (The Counterfeiters) and Zak Olkewicz (Bullet Train), based on the chapter “The Captain’s Log” of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.