Your Daily Dracula – Forrest McClain as ‘the Pale Man’, Abraham’s Boys (2024)

Your Daily Dracula – Forrest McClain as ‘the Pale Man’, Abraham’s Boys (2024)

In 1915, decades after the destruction of Dracula, Abraham Van Helsing (Titus Welliver) has moved – fled? – to California, but is ever-conscious that the evil he has devoted his life to fighting will eventually find him and his family.  He is the second husband of Mina (Jocelin Donahue), who is more deeply marked by her brief encounter with ‘the Pale Man’ (Forrest McClain) than by whatever happened to her first husband (or, unmentioned, her canonical son Quincey).  Abraham and Mina have two boys, teenage Max (Brady Hooper) and younger Rudy (Judah Mackey), who are being raised to be wary, and eventually take over the family crusade against the undead.  However, it seems Abraham isn’t only wary of vampires but has come to this remote part of a shrinking world to be away from everything and everyone – he practically spits when he mentions Amsterdam or London and is coldly angry when visited by still-traumatised Arthur Holmwood (Jonathan Howard).  Early on, a woman working as a railroad surveyor (Aurora Perrineau) brings her injured brother (Corteon Moore) to the doctor for emergency treatment, which he administers in an unhygeinic barn with the same expertise in puncturing a chest that he has developed in staking the undead.

In Natasha Kermani’s film of Joe Hill’s short story, we pick up the threads of Dracula – but are also asked to question just how much of what we know is simply hearsay.  Arthur is now tormented by the thought that he might have needlessly beheaded Lucy.  Mina is a shadow who evidently has strange notions about all the men who have revolved around her, and is wasting away without even nightly visits from the Count to hurry her along.  Max, beginning to kick against his stern father’s mission, just doesn’t have enough information to form any independent conclusion … but asks ‘where were her fangs’ after a vampire in the basement has been staked, and is beginning to break away in a manner which echoes the set-up of Bill Paxton’s Frailty, in which the children of a puritanical demon hunter wonder whether their old man isn’t just a common or garden serial killer.

Kermani made Imitation Girl and Lucky, which similarly come to grips with sub-genres – alien visitation, slasher franchise – to throw a different light on the real world.  She seems slightly less in tune with the teenage male protagonist here than with the women of the other films, though character actor superstar Welliver (Deadwood, Bosch) gives a terrific, quietly chilling performance as a patriarch whose sense of mission almost but not quite covers his cold delight in dismembering or impaling vampires.  Donahue’s Mina Van Helsing – the name has a wrongness which is interestingly disturbing, though there’s a precedent in the character mix-up of John Badham’s Dracula where Mina is Lucy and also Van Helsing’s daughter – is interesting too.  It’s a risk in an adaptation of any work of fantasy to strip out all the fantastical elements – and Kermani still allows for the minority opinion that both Brams (Stoker and VH) are right, and the Nosferatu-look spectre of Dracula still stalks California.  And there’s still horror in the loss of certainty, with Welliver flashing a feral, proud grin at his heir’s eventual rebellion as if the point (of the stake) wasn’t learning to kill vampires but overcoming a hesitation to kill anyone.

With its remote, unpeopled landscapes and horse-and-buggy characters, Abraham’s Boys is as much an elevated Western as it is elevated horror – and Kermani takes what’s now an unusual approach by actually filming in California rather than passing off New Zealand and the far end of the West.