Your Daily Dracula – Javier Botet, The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

Your Daily Dracula – Javier Botet, The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

This project was in development for twenty years – Robert Schwentke, Marcus Nispel. Neil Marshall, David Slade and others were attached to diect at one time or another – and seems to have as much trouble crossing running water as vampires are supposed to.  Wen the music stopped, the capable Andre Ovredal (Troll Hunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe) was in the director’s chair, but distrubutor bankruptcy meant its UK release was scuppered – though it’s now available on import BluRay.

Like Renfield, it’s a Universal film so could be considered as yet another reboot for their monsters franchise: one element (a significant prop) even positions it as a possible prequel to The Wolf Man (1941), or maybe it’s just an in-joke.  In the event, like Dracula Untold and Renfield, Last Voyage didn’t do much business in the US – but it’s not a write-off.  Many have noticed that the Captain’s Log chapter of Dracula is a sketch for Alien – and other monster-on-transport pictures, not to mention about a dozen Doctor Who serials – as Dracula preys on the crew of the ship transporting him from Bulgaria to Britain.  It makes for eerie, if brief bits in Murnau’s Nosferatu and Browning’s Dracula, which feature Stoker’s key image of the dead captain lashed to the wheel.  Many have floated the idea of a whole film retelling this section of the story … there was a decent Radio 4 afternoon theatre play a while back, and an episode of the BBC Dracula was also set entirely on the Demeter (albeit with a new plot).

This opens with the Demeter running aground at Whitby – the course in the novel is bizarre, contrived because Stoker took his holidays in Yorkshire rather than, say, Eastbourne – and the retrieval of the captain’s log.  In an odd bit of business, a policeman scans the terrifying pages as rain soaks the ink as if this weren’t also likely to be evidence in an investigation.  Then, in ‘fou weeks earlier’ flashback, we meet a bunch of characters who either flesh out the sketches in Stoker or are wholly new.  Writers Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz trying to fill in a few gaps Stoker left, like why Dracula is picking off the crew of a ship he needs to make it to its destination.  We know the ship is doomed, but the introduction of new characters not mentioned in Stoker means the possibility of one or two surviving … with educated black doctor Clemens (Corey Hawkins), stashed-in-a-box Roma ‘stowaway’ (ie: packed lunch) Anna (Aisling Franciosi, from The Nightingale and Stop Motion) and angelic cabin boy/captain’s grandson Toby (Woody Norman) all in categories of characters who don’t always die in films like this.

The crew are more archetypes: gruff but kind Captain (Liam Cunningham), whose announcement that this will be his last voyage before he retires to a cottage ought to set off more alarm bells of doom than the many boxes marked with a dragon sigil loaded aboard … loyal first mate Wojchek (David Dastmalchian), interestingly prejudiced against Clemens not because of his race but because he’s an inexperienced landlubber … a crucifix-clutching cook (Jon Jon Briones) who worries that the ship’s rats have unnaturally disappeared (after the livestock is butchered) … a big-hearted Russian (Stefan Kapicic) and a drunken violent Rssian (Nikolai Nikolaeff) and a few others who plainly won’t last long.  Anna is discovered and we learn of the uneasy relationship between her people and Dracula – a revision of Stoker’s depiction of gypsies as an inherently bad lot in thrall to the vampire, though giving the monster a girl to bite during the voyage is nastier than anything the Roma minions do in the book.  With his intended food supply gone, Dracula has to resort to going after the crew every night.

Javier Botet, a specialist in CGI-augmented double-jointed monsters, is billed as ‘Dracula/Nosferatu’ and his look is Max Schreck-derived – though he comes over as a cross between Reggie Nadler in Salem’s Lot and DC Comics’ Man-Bat.  He’s a crawling, flapping, gnawing presence – wirily naked, with a mouthful of fangs and little to say for himself (though Anna cautions the crew not to think of him as a mindless animal).  Botet is creepy and vicious, especially in the few tiny moments when he conveys that there’s a nasty personality inside the feral beast, but somehow doesn’t have the super-villain stature a screen Dracula needs (Nicolas Cage at least managed that, while his Dracula was interestingly enormously petty).  This being 1897, no one has seen a vampire movie, so even Anna – whose village has been dominated by Dracula for generations – isn’t too clear on how to kill the things (hey, maybe shooting Dracula will work).  Sunlight, which doesn’t kill the Count in the book, causes spontaneous combustion in those he’s bitten here, suggesting we’re on Murnau rules rather than Stoker rules.

Detaching the Demeter section from the rest of the novel means there’s no contrast between the shadow stalking the crew of the ship and the chatty old relic who imprisoned Jonathan Harker in his castle.  Similarly, there’s an issue with us knowing what happens after Dracula – who isn’t here seen as a big dog – gets ashore and that it doesn’t involve any characters or plot elements introduced in this film … which could easily be screened as a curtain-raiser for John Badham’s movie (which also starts with the shipwreck).  Last Voyage has a lot of spirit and it’s decently serious, old-fashioned gothic horror combined with strange sea story, but it’s also a little too CGI-sparkly and derivative of other vampire spinoffs (a key sequence is very like 30 Days of Night) to register as its own thing.  Orlok striding on-deck in Nosferatu, Dwight Frye cackling in the hold in Dracula, and Herzog’s ship drifting into dock all add elements to Stoker’s inset horror on voyage tale which work well because they fit into the rest of the story.  As a standalone (or sink-alone), The Last Voyage of the Demeter can’t match these lasting chills.

PS: is it really that difficult to write a script set in 1897 without using expressions like ‘tasked with’ or ‘repurposed as’?