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The Last Voyage of the Demeter

A crew sailing from Varna (Bulgaria) by the Black Sea to England find that they are carrying very dangerous cargo. A crew sailing from Varna (Bulgaria) by the Black Sea to England find that they are carrying very dangerous cargo. A crew sailing from Varna (Bulgaria) by the Black Sea to England find that they are carrying very dangerous cargo.

André Øvredal
Bram Stoker
Bragi F. Schut
Zak Olkewicz
Corey Hawkins
Aisling Franciosi
Liam Cunningham
434 User reviews
195 Critic reviews
52 Metascore
2 wins & 11 nominations

Captain Eliot

Deputy Fisher

Deputy Hirsch

Fletcher - Whitby
Harbour Master
Old Romani Wiseman

One-Eyed Sailor
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

Trivia Dracula's look is based on Count Orlok from the unauthorized adaptation Nosferatu (1922) . This was also the model for the look of the vampire Barlow in the original Salem's Lot (1979) .
Goofs At about the 1h35 Wojchek locks himself inside the cargo hold by inserting a wooden board through the handles, but they're sliding doors, so they would still open.

Clemens : I... do not... fear you!

Dracula : You will!

Connections Featured in YellowFlash 2: FlashCast: Hollywood actors going BROKE from strike! Lizzo DUMPED on a beach! Disney BROKEN? (2023)
Soundtracks Hangin' Johnny Traditional Arranged by Thomas Newman Performed on Hardanger fiddle by Kathleen Keane

User reviews 434

Aug 11, 2023
How long is The Last Voyage of the Demeter? Powered by Alexa
August 11, 2023 (United States)
United States
United Kingdom
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Dracula: Quỷ Dữ Thức Tỉnh
Dreamworks Pictures
Reliance Entertainment
Storyworks Productions
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$45,000,000 (estimated)
$13,637,180
Aug 13, 2023
$21,786,275

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 58 minutes
Dolby Atmos

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter

Where to watch.

Watch The Last Voyage of the Demeter with a subscription on Paramount+, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

The Last Voyage of the Demeter finds a fresh angle on Dracula's oft-told tale, although lackluster execution often undercuts the story's claustrophobic tension.

A solidly scary Dracula movie, The Last Voyage of the Demeter will reward patient viewers with some intense scenes and plenty of eerie atmosphere.

Audience Reviews

Cast & crew.

André Øvredal

Corey Hawkins

Aisling Franciosi

Liam Cunningham

David Dastmalchian

Jon Jon Briones

Movie Clips

More like this, movie news & guides, this movie is featured in the following articles., critics reviews.

The Dracula Monologues

By Alan Ng | April 30, 2024

Based on the works of Bram Stoker, writer/director Brian Eck presents the stories of three well-known characters from Stoker’s world of Dracula in his short film, The Dracula Monologues .

Steve Bishop is the Captain telling the story of the final voyage of the infamous ship, Demeter. Robert Honeywell is R.M. Renfield recounts his encounter with his master to his doctor, John Seward. Finally, Carrie Johnson is Lucy Westenra, who speaks of her relationship with the mysterious Count Dracula.

“…presents the stories of three well-known characters from Stoker’s world of Dracula…”

Shot in the simplest way, our three actors are set against a black background, the camera is tight on their faces, and sound and lighting effects accent their monologues. Personally, I would have liked the emotion cranked up a notch or two; Bishop, Honeywell, and Johnson give excellent performances akin to radio dramas.

The no-frills cinema experience allows us to focus in on the story and the words spoken by the cast. The Dracula Monologues is a vampire must-watch for any Stoker fan.

The Dracula Monologues (2024)

Directed and Written: Bryan Enk

Starring: Steve Bishop, Robert Honeywell, Carrie Johnson, etc.

Movie score: 7/10

"…a vampire must-watch..."

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In Pushed Up the Mountain, writer/director Julia Haslett travels around the world in the hopes of opening everyone's eyes to how necessary the...

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HISTORY & CULTURE

The little-known shipwreck that inspired Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’

Stoker was moved by grim details from the world around him while penning his horror masterpiece. The real fate of a ship called the Dmitry played an outsized role in his imaginings.

The arrival of the Demeter in Bram Stoker's Dracula serves as a fundamental part of the titular character's story: the ship brings death himself to England.

Stoker drew inspiration for his genre-defining horror novel from his time in Whitby, and the dark 1885 fate of the real ship Dmitry on the town’s shore.

The death and tragedy around Stoker ultimately shaped the story that became one of the most famous pieces of English literature and set the stage for the next century of vampire lore.

The wreck of the Dmitry from Narva, now Estonia, aground on Tate hill Beach, Whitby, Yorkshire, UK.

The Dmitry becomes the Demeter

During the summer of 1890, Irish novelist Bram Stoker vacationed at the seaside town of Whitby in northeast England. Despite spending only a month in the town, Stoker was enthralled by his surroundings: grand mansions and hotels lined the West Cliff while remains of the seventh century Whitby Abbey towered over the East Cliff. Nearby, the cemetery at the Parish Church also served as inspiration as the story of Dracula came to life.

Stoker was also enchanted by the many ships making harbor here. He reportedly visited the Whitby Museum to explore the history of these vessels, as well as a local library, where he came upon William Wilkinson’s book The Accounts of Principalities of Wallachia and Moldova. Stoker marked in his notes:

DRACULA in the Wallachian language means DEVIL. The Wallachians were, at that time, as they are at present, used to give this as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous either by courage, cruel actions, or cunning.

Stoker reportedly asked around the shore about shipwrecks in Whitby, notably the Dmitry , a ship that had wrecked five years earlier.

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The cargo vessel Dmitry had set sail from Narva in Russia (modern-day Estonia) in 1885. On October 24, the Dmitry was one of two ships run ashore at Whitby by “a storm of great violence,” according to contemporary newspaper accounts. The other vessel, the Mary and Agnes , was stranded in the raging sea and a lifeboat was sent to rescue its crew. When the crew of the Mary and Agnes was ferried to the shore , per the Leeds Mercury , “their safe landing [was] the signal for loud huzzas by the thousands of people assembled on shore.”

( Vlad the Impaler’s thirst for blood was an inspiration for Count Dracula . )

Those same onlookers watched on to see what would happen with the Dmitry . As reported by the North-Eastern Daily Gazette , the crew remained on board in the hopes they would be able to dock, but “the sea beat savagely against the vessel. Her masts gave way and fell with a crash over her side, and the vessel herself began to break up.”

Though unclear exactly how they were rescued, in the end, all seven members of the Dmitry’ s crew were safely brought to shore.

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There were several unique aspects to the last voyage of the Dmitry that appear to have stood out to Stoker. The Demeter originated in Varna (an anagram for Narva, where the Dmitry originated), and similarly carried “ballast of silver sand, with only a small amount of cargo—a number of great wooden boxes filled with mould.”

( The bloody truth about vampires .)

Through conversations with fishermen in Whitby, Stoker learned of an untold number of local deaths at sea. Stoker reportedly made note of some 90 names from gravestones in Whitby for future use in his story, including the surname “Swales.” Soon after the arrival of the Demeter in Dracula , he wrote “Mr. Swales was found dead… his neck being broken.”

What inspired Dracula’s canine form?

In Stoker’s novel, Dracula himself took the form of a dog to make his way from the Demeter to dry land, but there was no dog reported to have been on the Dmitry . According to Mel Ni Mhaolanfaidh and Marlon McGarry in 2021, the dog in Dracula may be an homage to the wreck of the Greyhound in 1770.

The Greyhound sailed from Whitby and sank off the coast of Ireland on December 12, 1770 (120 years prior to Stoker’s arrival in the town). Stoker’s mother, Charlotte, was from Sligo , a town in close proximity to the wreck. When the storm that sank the ship surged again, a young cabin boy was left stranded. The rescue effort failed, with only one out of the some 20 men sent to save him tragically dying in the process.

( Inside the fortress known as ‘Dracula's castle’ .)

Stoker made no reference to a dog in his notes until two months after he’d departed from Whitby. On October 15, 1890, Stoker wrote, “When ship ran in to Collier's Hope, big dog jumped off bow & ran over pier - up Kiln Yard & church steps & into churchyard…Local dog found ripped open & graves torn up…” It’s not clear if Stoker learned of these details from the Dmitry wreck, another Whitby wreck, or was his own creation.

In the nove l, the arrival of the Demeter was paired with a similarly remarkable incident: “The very instant the shore was touched, an immense dog sprang up on deck from below, as if shot up by the concussion, and running forward, jumped from the bow on the sand.”

The dog, a disguised Dracula, wrought bloodshed and death from that point forward. This dog resembled the barghest, a mythical monster often associated with Yorkshire. Spellings and specific forms of barghest vary but the dog-like being foretold of pain, disaster, or even death to all who saw it. The barghest also elicited howling from dogs in its vicinity, something Dracula protagonist Mina Murray reported took place soon after the arrival of the Demeter .

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DRACULA VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER

the legend of dracula is born

The crew of the merchant ship Demeter sets sail to London to deliver cargo. But they're not alone and soon, Dracula's presence turns the trip into a nightmarish fight for survival.

Supernatural
Man Vs. Beast

Barbara Crampton Inducted Into Monster Kid Hall Of Fame For 22nd Rondo Hatton Awards

Big congrats to all the 22nd annual Rondo Hatton Awards winners! More than 6,500 ballots arrived this year, shattering previous records. Our very own Scene Queen, Barbara Crampton, will be inducted into the Monster Kid Hall of Fame. Something about write-in/advisory votes carries a special weight of added honor. The Monster Kid of the Year and Monster Kid Hall of Fame categories both fall in this camp, and the voters have spoken. Barbara is a national treasure and a Monster Kid Hall of Famer! Congrats, Queen!

Fango is humbled to win the Best Magazine (modern) category, with our pals at Rue Morgue snagging the runner-up spot and Horrorhound, Delirium , and Scream rounding out the honorable mentions. Congratulations to all our peers and colleagues on their wins and noms! Read on for more highlights below.

The Best Film of 2023 is a heavy-hitter category. Godzilla Minus One stomped its way to the top for ultimate victory. This year’s runners-up were Poor Things and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny , with honorable mentions going to Renfield , Evil Dead Rise , and Last Voyage of the Demeter , starring Fango fam and Monster Kid David Dastmalchian .

Speaking of Renfield — Greg Mank’s article “Dwight Frye and the Curse of Renfield from FANGORIA #19 and “Leatherface: How the Legendary Trailer Came to Be” by Amanda Reyes, which appeared in FANGORIA #18 , each received an honorable mention for Best Article. “Black Sabbath: 60 Years of Nightmares” by Ernie Rockelman for HORRORHOUND #99 took home the honor.

Top 10 Horror Movies Ranked by Heart Rate

Scene Queen by Barbara Crampton and Exordium by Michael Gingold, were runners up for Best Column! Kim Newman’s Dungeon ( The Dark Side ) was awarded this year’s Best Column trophy.

Gary Pullin’s cover art for FANGORIA #18 was an honorable mention in the Best Cover category, which went to Scary Monsters #133 by Scott Jackson featuring some of horror’s most iconic vampires.

Big congratulations to our Fango Fam and everyone on this year’s ballot! We are so proud and honored to feature the work of so many incredible contributors. We say it all the time, but just looking at this year’s ballot, we can’t help but say it again. Damn, it’s a good time to be a horror fan. Cheers to celebrating good folks creating wonderful work around the genre we all love.

Find a full list of winners and the original 22nd Rondo Hatton Awards ballot on their official website . A Rondo Awards Ceremony will be held June 1 at the WonderFest Convention in Louisville, Kentucky.

Angel Melanson is the Digital Editor of FANGORIA.com. When she’s not running the website, you can find her being our resident online creep in various capacities. From hosting red carpet interviews and our Convo x Fango interview series, chatting with horror royalty and up-and-coming creators to watch, to moderating live Q&As, and occasionally writing for the magazine.

After sneaking peeks at FANGORIA while hidden in store aisles, she spent a few years running her own website and podcast under the HorrorGirl Problems banners before hosting interviews for Fango and eventually joining the Fango fam full-time. A true nightmare come true.

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THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER’s David Dastmalchian On The Supreme Dracula

Entertainment
How <i>The Last Voyage of the Demeter</i> Revamps a Chilling Chapter From <i>Dracula</i>

How The Last Voyage of the Demeter Revamps a Chilling Chapter From Dracula

Liam Cunningham as Captain Eliot, Chris Walley as Abrams, and Corey Hawkins as Clemens in 'The Last Voyage of the Demeter'

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Last Voyage of the Demeter .

The seventh chapter of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula , titled "The Captain's Log," chronicles the fate of the crew of the doomed merchant ship the Demeter through a series of logbook entries detailing the vessel's disastrous voyage from the Black Sea port of Varna to Whitby, England.

Unaware that Dracula is onboard, the captain writes how, over the course of their journey, crew members went missing until just he and the first mate were left on the Demeter. After the first mate caught sight of "a man, tall and thin, and ghastly pale," he jumped overboard rather than die by the vampire's hand. Eventually, the captain lashed himself to the wheel with a crucifix in hand to try to bring the ship into port.

"I shall tie my hands to the wheel when my strength begins to fail, and along with them I shall tie that which He, It, dare not touch," reads the captain's final log entry, which is found rolled up inside a corked bottle in his pocket after the Demeter arrives in Whitby with no one alive onboard. "And then, come good wind or foul, I shall save my soul, and my honour as a captain. I am growing weaker, and the night is coming on. If He can look me in the face again, I may not have time to act."

The Last Voyage of the Demeter , in theaters Aug. 11, takes this chilling interlude in the original story and turns it into a full-length fright flick. "I wanted to make a genuine horror movie about this little part of the novel," says director André Øvredal ( The Autopsy of Jane Doe , Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark ). "I found that to be a great challenge and a great way of doing something that could be part of [ Dracula 's] huge, wonderful legacy, but wouldn't risk standing next to giant movies [that have come before]. It's its own thing."

The long journey of The Last Voyage of the Demeter

Øvredal signed on to helm Demeter from a screenplay by Bragi Schut Jr. and Zak Olkewicz in October 2019, nearly two decades after Phoenix Pictures acquired Schut Jr.'s original script in 2003. Prior to Øvredal's involvement, a variety of directors, from Robert Schwentke to Neil Marshall to David Slade, had been attached to the project at different points in time.

The single chapter is such a captivating one that Demeter producers Mike Medavoy and Bradley J. Fischer say they were determined to get a movie adaptation made no matter how long it took.

" Dracula is obviously a very iconic and well-tread piece of IP that's been in the public domain forever. But this particular story was one that hadn't really been dramatized. It's been used as connective tissue in other Dracula adaptations," says Fischer, referencing scenes in 1922's Nosferatu and 1992's Bram Stoker's Dracula . "But no one had told the story of what happens on this ship across the body of a single film."

David Dastmalchian as Wojchek, Chris Walley as Abrams, and Corey Hawkins as Clemens in 'The Last Voyage of the Demeter'

Demeter traps its characters in a contained, isolated setting at the mercy of an elusive monster, a narrative arc that Medavoy says brought to mind one iconic horror movie in particular.

"It reminded me of Alien with Dracula in it. Dracula is the alien on the ship," he says. "That's what drew me to the story."

Dracula at sea

Demeter stars Liam Cunningham as Captain Eliot, David Dastmalchian as first mate Wojchek, and Jon Jon Briones, Martin Furulund, Stefan Kapicic, Nikolai Nikolaeff, and Chris Walley as the ship's crew. It also introduces some additional main players who don't feature in the book: Captain Eliot's grandson Toby (Woody Norman), Dr. Clemens (Corey Hawkins), and a stowaway named Anna (Aisling Franciosi) who is smuggled onboard by Dracula as a food source.

The role of Dracula (or Nosferatu) belongs to veteran creature actor Javier Botet, who has terrified audiences for years playing monsters in movies like 2013's Mama , 2016's The Conjuring 2 , 2017's IT , and 2018's Slender Man . "[Botet] breaches that careful relationship between human character and monster," Øvredal says. "He can find intelligence just through body language in how a creature is portrayed on screen."

Javier Botet as Dracula in 'The Last Voyage of the Demeter'

That's a quality Øvredal needed in his Dracula, as Demeter paints the vampire as a vicious, bloodthirsty beast rather than the sophisticated, seductive count he often appears as.

"Depicting Dracula as a monstrous, more freaky character was very alluring," Øvredal says. "I wanted to lean into the fact that he's lived for 400 years. I didn't want to see a beautiful Hollywood actor being charming and suave.

"We also removed the sexuality that Dracula is often depicted with because it's essentially just a survival tale for everyone, including him," he adds. "I wanted to see that he has survived and survived and that he will survive this journey as well because, as we know, the story of Dracula continues on."

How The Last Voyage of the Demeter ends

In Stoker's Dracula , the Demeter arrives in England amid a great storm. Witnesses see a large dog disembark from the ship and find only the corpse of the captain still on board.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter offers an inside look at all the horrors that play out on the ship throughout its final journey.

Corey Hawkins as Clemens and Aisling Franciosi as Anna in 'The Last Voyage of the Demeter'

"One of the great thematic elements of the story that is profound in its horror is the way that Dracula takes from each character the thing that person loves the most, including turning the ship itself into a living nightmare of the sea," Fischer says. "It's not enough that it's sustaining itself off of the blood of these people. It wants them to suffer in a way and enjoys it."

However, unlike in the book, the movie ends with one person who was onboard the Demeter, Clemens, surviving the passage and making his way to London with the intent of hunting Dracula down. When asked whether this twist opens the door for a sequel, Øvredal says it would be "quite a revisionist take" on what happens in the book from that point on.

"We try to stay reasonably true to the novel in this depiction," he says. "This movie is really about honoring the novel. But if you go further with Clemens' character, he obviously doesn't exist in the book."

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How The Last Voyage Of The Demeter Changes The Original Dracula Book

This article contains major spoilers for "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" (and also for the 126-year-old novel "Dracula.")

" The Last Voyage of the Demeter " opens on a very familiar sight to those who've read (or are even vaguely familiar with) Bram Stoker's original novel: a foundering ship run aground on an English beach in the middle of a fierce rainstorm, without a single living soul left on board. As concerned onlookers descend upon the wreck, the very atmosphere fills with dread and fear once more and more rescuers realize that something very wrong has happened here. The discovery of the captain's log only confirms these suspicions, documenting an innocuous enough voyage that started out like any other ... before ending in abject tragedy and death. As someone reads through each journal entry, we flashback to the last voyage of the Demeter to pinpoint exactly where the journey went awry.

This framing device might seem like yet another eye-rolling use of that trope where stories begin at their most exciting moment for the sake of a punchy and attention-grabbing start (an approach so overused these days that it has its own TV Tropes entry ), but one can hardly fault author Bram Stoker for being ahead of the curve by over a century, nor blame director André Øvredal for hewing close to the single chapter he and writers Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz adapted from "Dracula" into a feature-length narrative. But while the broad strokes remain the same, the filmmakers were left with plenty of blank space to fill in the gaps with their own unique take on what exactly went down between ports on the high seas aboard the doomed Demeter.

Here's everything that "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" changed — and maintained — from the book.

Shifting perspectives

How's this for a novel approach to adapting a classic story? Rather than take, say, a breezy children's story like "The Hobbit" and stretch it past its breaking point into an epic trilogy of movies, "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" follows a very different mindset altogether. By expanding on a surprisingly short chapter of "Dracula," which intentionally keeps a key moment in Dracula's reign of terror at a chilling distance from readers, Øvredal was able to take full advantage of the creative freedom afforded to him to tell an entire story between those lines of text.

That meant taking certain liberties to flesh out the crew of the Demeter, which only amounted to five deckhands, a first and second mate, a cook, and the captain himself in the book. While at least two of the named crew have been translated faithfully to the screen — the early Dracula victim Petrofsky (Nikolai Nikolaeff) and the deeply superstitious Olgaren (Stefan Kapicic) — the film goes out of its way to expand on Captain Eliot (Liam Cunningham) along with the ship's first mate Wojchek (David Dastmalchian) and religious cook Joseph (Jon Jon Briones), introduce the captain's innocent grandson Toby (Woody Norman), and give us a new main lead in Corey Hawkins' ever-capable doctor Clemens and the added wrinkle of a stowaway in Aisling Franciosi's Anna.

Clemens and Anna aren't ever mentioned in the original novel, marking the biggest change the creative team on "Demeter" chose to make. Clemens provides audiences with a much-needed sympathetic figure to bring us into the story just as he joins the crew of the Demeter. Anna, meanwhile, serves an expositional purpose while folding in other layers of Dracula mythology — namely the vampire's "brides," one of whom traditionally is named Anna in some takes on the story.

A voyage from hell

The title of "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" may not include any specific mention of Dracula himself, but audiences know who the main attraction really is. Several legendary actors have taken their turns and put their own spin on depictions of the sinister Count, finally leading up to monster actor extraordinaire Javier Botet's portrayal . While his take on the centuries-old vampire as an animalistic nightmare fueled entirely by instincts of hunger might feel like a massive departure from the suave, seductive portrayal popularized by Bela Lugosi, this is actually the most significant way in which "Demeter" remains faithful to the novel .

"Dracula" recounts the Demeter's demise through the captain's secondhand scribblings, transcribing his crew's occasional encounters with their unwelcome guest partway through their sea voyage. After the crew increasingly become convinced of a mysterious "something" watching their every move, and despite initially keeping his frightening experience on the main deck to himself, Olgaren eventually comes to the captain and admits catching a glimpse of a "tall, thin man, who was not like any of the crew" who inexplicably vanished without a trace. This encounter plays out in "Demeter" almost exactly as Stoker originally wrote, though with the addition of Clemens on deck at the time, as well. The other named crew member, Petrofsky, maintains the book's distinction of being the first to die by Dracula's hands fangs. Attacked while on watch and leaving nothing but blood and his knife behind, the survivors have no choice but to carry on with their duties despite their mounting dread. As in the novel, a ship-wide search for Dracula turns up nothing while morale continues to plummet.

All the while, Dracula lurks in every shadow as an unseen presence — just as he does in this chapter of "Dracula."

London calling

While both "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" and the relevant chapter from "Dracula" both end with the wrecked ship and Dracula on English soil, this is where the film takes its biggest leaps to deliver a fittingly cinematic climax. In the novel, the helpless crew are slaughtered one by one until the captain is the last one alive. Increasingly convinced that the murders may have been committed by his first mate, who throws himself overboard in a fit of madness after searching the cargo hold for their tormentor (and probably finding him), the captain lashes himself to the ship's wheel in a heroic attempt to keep the ship on course at all costs. In the novel, it's implied that Dracula does this to Captain Eliot out of mockery, but in both versions, we get his tragically noble line that he hopes he's been "true to my trust" in carrying out his duties.

This is where the captain's log in the book abruptly ends. The film's radically different conclusion involves the remaining Demeter crew springing a trap on Dracula with Anna as bait after intentionally poking a hole in the ship's hull so it never reaches its destination and imperils even more innocents — all of which, of course, goes horribly wrong. Even Anna's last-minute improvisation to crash the ship's mast into Dracula and save Clemens is all for naught when the ship succumbs to the waves, the two are set adrift clinging to pieces of wreckage, and Dracula himself escapes unharmed and makes it to the mainland, setting up a perfect sequel with Clemens hunting Dracula through the streets of London.

In the end, the film feels like the epitome of what an adaptation should be: reverent, faithful, but ultimately and heart-stoppingly original.

How ‘The Last Voyage of the Demeter’ Resurrects a Pivotal Chapter in Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’

The following contains major spoilers for The Last Voyage of the Demeter .

If the horror genre has a grandfather, it’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula . First published in 1897, the epistolary novel follows a group of English socialites who cross paths with a centuries-old vampire traversing the continent in search of fresh victims. From Francis Ford Coppola and Werner Herzog to Stephen King and Mel Brooks, it seems nearly every horror creator has reimagined the legendary text. After more than two centuries and countless variations, you’d think there’d be nothing left on these literary bones.

Enter The Last Voyage of the Demeter : André Øvredal’s take on Stoker’s seventh chapter. A short, but pivotal episode in the vampire’s saga, this adaptation fleshes out the log of a doomed vessel and unearths an entirely new tale from the ashes of an old story.

Dracula begins in Transylvania. London solicitor Jonathan Harker travels to the remote castle of Count Dracula to assist with a real estate transaction and slowly realizes that he has become a prisoner. With the transaction complete, the Count transports himself to England and begins feeding on Lucy Westenra, the best friend of Harker’s fiancé Mina. This ignites the second and third acts of the novel as Lucy’s death spawns a group of fearless vampire hunters who chase the bloodsucking beast back to Transylvania. Nestled between these iconic sequences is a horrific journey across the sea. Though Stoker leaves most of this harrowing trek to the reader’s imagination, the final voyage of the ill-fated ship is just as frightening as anything that occurs before or after.

Stoker tells us very little about the Demeter’s ordeal. A newspaper clipping from “The Dailygraph” describes a ship blown in by a storm with no one left alive onboard. The decomposing body of the ship’s unnamed captain is found lashed to the wheel with a crucifix wrapped in his hands, but other than a large dog who runs to shore, the Demeter is deserted. Reading the captain’s bizarre log presents a horrific explanation. When members of the company begin disappearing one by one, the captain starts to suspect that something monstrous lurks onboard. After watching the last remaining crew member jump into the sea, the captain affixes himself to the helm and resolves to go down with the ship. Still early in the novel, Stoker does not reveal much of his monster here, saving Dracula’s overt terror for later chapters. However, The Last Voyage of the Demeter benefits from a century of cinematic vampires pervading public consciousness. As a supplement to a world-famous story, Øvredal has no need to hide this legendary villain in the shadows.

‘The Last Voyage of the Demeter’ Review – Epic Horror Adventure Goes for the Jugular

Øvredal’s story also begins with the ominous storm. As lightning flashes through the sky, lighthouse workers and local authorities try to aid the drifting ship smashing into the rocky shore. We only see the vessel from a distance, but a peek at the log of Captain Eliot ( Liam Cunningham ) describes the crew’s desperate attempt to defeat a dreadful monster. We then jump back one month in time to the 6 July departure from a Russian port. All seems well at first. Aside from a few introductory squabbles, the crew gets on well and the captain’s grandson Toby ( Woody Norman ) tends to the livestock while learning the seafaring trade. But something sinister stalks the decks of the Demeter at night. Mr. Clemens ( Corey Hawkins ) finds a stowaway buried in a crate full of earth. Nearly dead, Anna ( Aisling Franciosi ) eventually recovers and tells of a monster from her village name Dracula. With this diverse cast, Screenwriters Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz have gathered seeds from Stoker’s sparse chapter and fleshed out the Demeter’s story while providing parallels to some of the classic novel’s most famous characters.

Bookended with dispatches from The Dailygraph , most of Stoker’s seventh chapter consists of the captain’s log. Øvredal brings several of these passages to life including a harrowing scene that provides our first glimpse of the monster. On 17 July, the captain writes that a deckhand called Olgaren has reported seeing a mysterious man hiding onboard the ship. “He said that in his watch he had been sheltering behind the deckhouse, as there was a rain-storm, when he saw a tall, thin man, who was not like any of the crew, come up the companionway, and go along the deck forward, and disappear. He followed cautiously, but when he got to the bows, found no one, the hatchways were all closed.” Øvredal brings this passage to life with the addition of Clemens who joins Olgaren ( Stefan Kapicic ) on the ship’s deck. Stoker does not mention this character again, but Øvredal’s film gives us the brutal details of his nightmarish demise.

Øvredal captures other elements of this distressing chronicle as the ship drifts through a heavy and demoralizing mist. On 2 August the captain writes, “… only God can guide us in the fog, which seems to move with us; and God seems to have deserted us.” The log’s penultimate entry recounts the ship’s mate throwing himself into the fog and sea, hoping to escape the hellish creature onboard. Øvredal combines these two entries with the death of Joseph ( Jon Jon Briones ), the ship’s religious cook. Convinced the Lord will save him, the frightened man takes one of the lifeboats and, armed only with a lamp and his bible, rows into the mist. A mysterious being circles the rowboat from above and we’re left to assume the worst. The boat eventually drifts back with only a pool of blood where the cook once sat.

One notable addition to the ship’s crew is a deckhand who joins the crew at the Varna port. Also trained in medicine, Clemens is an educated man hoping to find a job as a physician while attempting to make sense of a world that would punish him for the color of his skin. When he finds Anna sick in the cargo hold, Clemens performs a series of blood transfusions to rid her body of a mysterious toxin, directly mirroring Stoker’s hero, Professor Van Helsing. Called in to treat the ailing Lucy Westenra, Van Helsing enhances the novel’s overarching theme by embracing both superstition and science. He prescribes similar transfusions for Lucy, but draws on his knowledge of folklore for alternative remedies to Dracula’s curse. Clemens initially rejects the superstitions of the Demeter’s crew, but eventually believes Anna’s tales of a monster that feeds on the blood of the living. As the sole crew member to make it to shore, Clemens vows to hunt down the powerful vampire. Like Van Helsing, a brief encounter with Dracula sets the young doctor on a quest to rid the world of this parasitic beast.

Another addition to this doomed voyage is the charming and sympathetic Toby. Grandson to Captain Eliot, the entire crew treats him like their own son. Despite this protection, Toby experiences one of the story’s most upsetting deaths. Told to wait in his grandfather’s cabin, the vampiric Olgaren tries to break through the door and attack him. As the crew comes to his rescue, a larger threat appears from inside the barricaded cabin. Dracula looms over the frightened child and drinks his blood as the crew stares on in horror. He falls into a coma-like sleep due to the vampire’s bite and fails to respond to blood transfusions.

This story may be wholly new, but it bears a striking resemblance to the unfortunate double death of Lucy Westenra. Having been visited by Dracula in the night, Stoker’s damsel in distress also succumbs to the vampire’s bite. Shortly after her entombment, rumors of a “bloofer lady” targeting children begin to circulate. Van Helsing directs her fiancé and friends to cut off her head and drive a stake through her heart, effectively killing the poor woman a second time. Toby also suffers this second death. As the crew prepares to bury him at sea, his grieving grandfather thinks he sees movement under the child-sized shroud. When Eliot removes the sheet, Toby’s eyes do indeed open only to reveal the demonic gaze of a vampire. He reaches for his grandfather’s neck as the sunlight causes him to burst into flames.

As a stowaway on the Demeter and the film’s only female character, Anna also provides an analog to the ill-fated Lucy. Though the two women have very little in common, they both become food for Count Dracula. Lucy receives nightly visits from the lurking vampire and eventually dies of a mysterious blood-related illness. Anna, fully aware of the Count’s horrific practice, has been brought aboard the Demeter as sustenance for the long voyage. Both women also spend a significant portion of the story in a coma-like state, though their stories differ wildly. Wealthy and beautiful, Lucy has men lining up to give her their blood. Her three suitors, along with Van Helsing and Harker, cross the continent to kill the vampire and avenge her horrific death. A poor villager essentially sold to the Count, Anna has no one to look after her. The superstitious crew believe that a woman onboard the Demeter will surely bring bad luck and insist on throwing her into the sea. Unlike Lucy, Anna has only Clemens to fight for her life.

Both women become transformed by the vampire’s bite, though they take different routes to their inevitable end. Lucy’s undead life is snuffed out by her grieving fiancé, while Anna recognizes the symptoms of vampirism beginning to take over her body. Knowing she will soon become a monster, she creates a sort of funeral pyre out of the ship’s wreckage and bursts into flames as the sun rises over the sea.

The Dailygraph clipping that introduces the chapter makes note of a large dog jumping from the ship and disappearing into the night. Citizens of Whitby, hoping to find a silver lining in this tragedy, search for the dog but their efforts only reveal more death. Instead of the shipwrecked dog, they stumble upon a half-bred mastiff with its throat ripped open. Øvredal nods to this element of the story with the upsetting death of the Demeter’s dog, a loyal companion placed in Toby’s care. However, closer inspection reveals a more terrifying truth. Stoker’s version of the captain’s log makes no mention of a dog onboard. With a detailed list of the ship’s crew and cargo, the he would surely have mentioned any pet present as an extension of the company. The creature that rushes to shore is likely Dracula in animal form, a dog-like creature similar to the wolf that bursts into Lucy’s bedchamber.

Øvredal’s Dracula also makes it to land, but in a much more hideous form. Inspired by Max Schreck’s Count Orlok, this version of Dracula has skin the color of the night sky, glowing red eyes, an angular face, and menacing fangs. With bat-like wings, Dracula escapes the sinking Demeter and flies to shore. Having jumped overboard before sabotaging the ship, Clemens swims to land as well, avoiding the vessel’s discovery at Whitby. Having recovered from the hellish voyage, he later recognizes the distinctive knocking of a gold-tipped cane in a crowded pub and looks up to see the smirking Count now dressed to the nines. Like Van Helsing, he vows revenge and we leave the Demeter’s lone survivor preparing to chase Dracula to the ends of the earth.

‘Halloween: Illustrated’ Review: Original Novelization of John Carpenter’s Classic Gets an Upgrade

Film novelizations have existed for over 100 years, dating back to the silent era, but they peaked in popularity in the ’70s and ’80s, following the advent of the modern blockbuster but prior to the rise of home video. Despite many beloved properties receiving novelizations upon release, a perceived lack of interest have left a majority of them out of print for decades, with desirable titles attracting three figures on the secondary market.

Once such highly sought-after novelization is that of Halloween by Richard Curtis (under the pen name Curtis Richards ), based on the screenplay by John Carpenter and Debra Hill. Originally published in 1979 by Bantam Books, the mass market paperback was reissued in the early ’80s but has been out of print for over 40 years.

But even in book form, you can’t kill the boogeyman. While a simple reprint would have satisfied the fanbase, boutique publisher Printed in Blood has gone above and beyond by turning the Halloween novelization into a coffee table book. Curtis’ unabridged original text is accompanied by nearly 100 new pieces of artwork by Orlando Arocena to create Halloween: Illustrated .

One of the reasons that The Shape is so scary is because he is, as Dr. Loomis eloquently puts it, “purely and simply evil.” Like the film sequels that would follow, the novelization attempts to give reason to the malevolence. More ambiguous than his sister or a cult, Curtis’ prologue ties Michael’s preternatural abilities to an ancient Celtic curse.

Jumping to 1963, the first few chapters delve into Michael’s childhood. Curtis hints at a familial history of evil by introducing a dogmatic grandmother, a concerned mother, and a 6-year-old boy plagued by violent nightmares and voices. The author also provides glimpses at Michael’s trial and his time at Smith’s Grove Sanitarium, which not only strengthens Loomis’ motivation for keeping him institutionalized but also provides a more concrete theory on how Michael learned to drive.

Aside from a handful of minor discrepancies, including Laurie stabbing Michael in his manhood, the rest of the book essentially follows the film’s depiction of that fateful Halloween night in 1978 beat for beat. Some of the writing is dated — like a smutty fixation on every female character’s breasts and a casual use of the R-word — but it otherwise possesses a timelessness similar to its film counterpart. The written version benefits from expanded detail and enriched characters.

The addition of Arocena’s stunning illustrations, some of which are integrated into the text, creates a unique reading experience. The artwork has a painterly quality to it but is made digitally using vectors. He faithfully reproduces many of Halloween ‘s most memorable moments, down to actor likeness, but his more expressionistic pieces are particularly striking.

The 224-page hardcover tome also includes an introduction by Curtis — who details the challenges of translating a script into a novel and explains the reasoning behind his decisions to occasionally subvert the source material — and a brief afterword from Arocena.

Novelizations allow readers to revisit worlds they love from a different perspective. It’s impossible to divorce Halloween from the film’s iconography — Carpenter’s atmospheric direction and score, Dean Cundey’s anamorphic cinematography, Michael’s expressionless mask, Jamie Lee Curtis’ star-making performance — but Halloween: Illustrated paints a vivid picture in the mind’s eye through Curtis’ writing and Arocena’s artwork.

Halloween: Illustrated is available now .

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The last voyage of the demeter: cast, story details, trailer & everything we know about the 2023 dracula movie.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter adapts one of the eeriest chapters from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Here's everything we know about the creepy horror movie.

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a unique adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, focusing solely on the ill-fated journey of the ship and offering a new approach to the vampire story.
The 2023 Dracula movie features a strong cast, including Liam Cunningham, David Dastmalchian, Aisling Franciosi, Woody Norman, Corey Hawkins, and Javier Botet as a terrifying and monstrous Dracula.
The movie, set to be released on August 11, 2023, promises to be a chilling experience with its Gothic tone, terrifying portrayal of Dracula, and expansion of the small chapter from the novel into a larger and haunting tale.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is an eerie 2023 adaptation of part of Bram Stoker's Dracula , and its cast, nautically-themed story, and — above all — its nightmare-fuel interpretation of Dracula himself has drawn intense speculation as the August release date approaches. Based solely on a single chapter from the legendary novel, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a Dracula adaptation like no other, telling only the story of the ill-fated journey of the titular ship. Universal Studios' legacy of classic monsters continues with this 2023 Dracula movie, and yet it manages to find a new approach to the seminal vampire story by focusing on one part instead of the whole.

The production of The Last Voyage of the Demeter has been anything but smooth. Director Neil Marshall was to direct the Dracula film , as announced back in 2012, but his involvement eventually fell through. Various casting announcements came and went with nothing coming to fruition until the project finally picked up steam in 2019 with director André Øvredal taking the helm. Amid a slew of other book-accurate portrayals of Dracula , The Last Voyage of the Demeter stands out with its Gothic tone and a strong cast that truly does justice to the story that has been told and retold for over a century on film.

The latest The Last Voyage of the Demeter news comes just ahead of the movie's release. The final teaser for The Last Voyage of the Demeter has been released, showing off the movie's version of Dracula in all his undead glory — and this Dracula which is much more monstrous than the seductive gentleman image seen in many previous adaptations. While The Last Voyage of the Demeter's marketing has been doing an effective job of hiding the beast and letting the terror of the unknown do its work, it is not surprising that the final push before release is more willing to put its most iconic aspect front and center.

Along with the movie's impressive trailer, it was announced that The Last Voyage of the Demeter will be released on August 11, 2023. Though that date misses the typical Halloween season of September and October, it does reduce the amount of horror competition that Universal's 2023 Dracula movie will have to contend with. August is the tail-end of the summer movie season, but it could still give The Last Voyage of the Demeter a blockbuster feel.

The key to any successful horror film is a strong cast, and the actors announced for The Last Voyage of the Demeter cast promise a star-studded affair. The cast of the film is headed up by veteran character actor Liam Cunningham ( Game of Thrones) as the captain of the doomed ship. Additionally, David Dastmalchian ( The Suicide Squad) joins the cast as Wojchek, the Demeter 's first officer while Aisling Franciosi ( The Nightingale ) appears as Anna. Newcomer Woody Norman ( C'mon C'mon ) also co-stars with Corey Hawkins ( The Walking Dead ) as Clemens, the ship's doctor. Rounding out the cast, Javier Botet ( REC ) plays Count Dracula.

The best Dracula movies all manage to do something new with the iconic vampire, and The Last Voyage of the Demeter tweaked their Count Dracula by ratcheting up the terror. Unlike most adaptations that portray the Count as a suave and distinguished man, Javier Botet's Dracula is anything but gentlemanly. As seen in the trailer, Dracula has reverted to an almost bat-like form as he preys on the unwary crew of the Demeter. Count Dracula has always been a monster, but The Last Voyage of the Demeter has turned the Count into a living nightmare, more akin to Nosferatu, that will stick with the audience long after they have left the theater.

Declared by David Dastmalchian to be the scariest Dracula movie yet , The Last Voyage of the Demeter story expands what is only a small sliver of the novel into a much larger tale. Though little is actually known about the story of the movie, it can be assumed it will flesh out the absolutely eerie chapter and finally show what actually happened to the doomed crew of the Demeter. The deck of the Russian ship plays host to a story of paranoia and terror as the crew of the ship find themselves victim to the hellish desires of the ancient Count Dracula as he sails towards his new home in England.

Judging by the size of the cast, the nightmare of The Last Voyage of the Demeter will take place not just aboard the ship but on land as well. Though the movie aims to focus on the singular chapter of Bram Stoker's Dracula , it will most likely include other familiar moments from the book to expand the story beyond the confines of the ship. Regardless, The Last Voyage of the Demeter promises to be a chilling experience whether it is confined on board the Demeter or continues to haunt those on land as well.

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Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula was unique because it is told through the use of diary entries, journals, news clippings, and police reports as opposed to a conventional prose narrative. As such, many of the book's creepiest moments are merely suggested through second-hand accounts instead of explained in detail by the author's brilliant pen. While that did allow for the reader's mind to take its own journey into fear, it also left a lot unsaid about Dracula's deadly tour of England, which is where the idea for The Last Voyage of the Demeter was born.

The movie adapts the chapter "The Captain's Log," which offers a first-hand account of the tragic events aboard the Demeter as recorded by the captain himself. Coming somewhat early in the novel, the chapter shows just how dangerous the Count can be when unleashed, which makes his eventual arrival in the bustling country of England all the more terrifying. Even so, the book is notoriously scant on actual details, and The Last Voyage of the Demeter has reimagined those blank spaces as absolutely horrifying and gruesome occurrences.

The trailer for The Last Voyage of the Demeter introduces the characters and the basic premise of the movie while also showing off its unique gothic visual style. It also promises a variety of scares beyond the usual monster movie jumps and chills. Turning the cramped confines of the Demeter into Dracula's own personal hunting grounds, the movie's trailer shows the creeping paranoia and surreal claustrophobia that elevates it beyond just a simple horror film. Most importantly, the trailer for The Last Voyage of the Demeter features the sea as an inescapable landscape scarier than the dusty old castles of other Dracula adaptations.

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter Is a Delightfully Nasty Piece of Work

A movie like The Last Voyage of the Demeter must drive some members of the spoiler police nuts. It’s based, as an opening credit tells us, on a brief episode in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula — a captain’s log from the doomed Russian schooner that carries the legendary vampire and his crates of Transylvanian earth from Romania to London. The film itself begins with the discovery of the corpse-filled ship on a dark and stormy night, before flashing back to the first days of its journey with an unsuspecting crew of hardened sailors. So we know the story, we know what’s in those mysterious boxes emblazoned with the image of a dragon, and we know just about everybody on the boat is going to meet an unsavory end.

But this is where a real filmmaker gets to show their chops. With the ending basically a foregone conclusion, they can’t hide behind the drip-drip-drip of narrative disclosure. The characters may not know what exactly they’re dealing with, but we do; pretend that we don’t and you’ll lose us. That means the suspense has to come from, yes, cleverly engineered scenes of pursuit and carnage but also from atmosphere and character, those noble virtues so many genre films nowadays skimp on.

The movie has certainly got atmosphere. Like a proper haunted ship, the Demeter moves through treacherous lashings of rain and seemingly endless gray mist, its lanterns feebly lighting the way. One wonders if Norwegian director André Øvredal ( Trollhunter , Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark ) has spent some time staring at J.M.W. Turner and George Philip Reinagle and Caspar David Friedrich paintings; the film’s mood of doomed romanticism suggests he has.

The despair outside reflects the desperation inside. The crew of sailors, led by veteran Captain Elliot (Liam Cunningham) and the haunted-eyed first mate, Wojchek (David Dastmalchian, who makes everything he’s in better), are themselves a mercenary lot, suspicious and cynical and impulsive. They’re eager to sail fast because there’s a bonus in it for them if the ship arrives early. Joining them on the voyage is a young, Cambridge-educated doctor, Clemens (Corey Hawkins), who is initially rejected because he’s too well dressed and his hands are not rough enough. But then he saves the captain’s young grandson Toby (Woody Norman) from getting crushed by a falling crate, and he’s invited onboard.

The film does set up a potentially intriguing philosophical debate between the curious, scientific-minded Clemens and the rough men around him. “I want to understand the world,” he tells them. “Perhaps it needs to be experienced,” comes the reply. The deck is stacked against him, of course; there is, after all, a vampire on the ship. As a bizarre, bald, fanged figure starts to appear to the crew in brief, half-imagined glimpses, the pigs and goats and chickens onboard are mysteriously torn open, and the rats disappear. (“A boat without rats? Such a thing is against nature!”) The crew discovers a half-dead Romanian stowaway (Aisling Franciosi) with suspicious marks on her neck, and soon enough she’s warning them about what’s going to happen. Watching Clemens try and insist that there must be material explanations for all these occurrences could have easily become annoying, but Hawkins brings to the character a touching sense of anxiety: We understand that he needs to believe in reason and science because that’s all he’s got in this world. You feel for the guy.

But enough about the characters. What truly distinguishes Last Voyage of the Demeter , beyond its thick atmosphere of dread, is its gleeful cruelty, the delicious mean streak with which it sets up its suspense set pieces and its kills. All too often, studio horror films — especially ones based on classic monsters — can feel a little too tame, too bland, partly as a result of efforts to broaden their appeal. Not this one. Last Voyage of the Demeter certainly isn’t afraid to go for the gore, and it isn’t afraid to do away with characters we assumed would be off-limits, often in the nastiest possible ways. The film is filled with delightfully savage surprises. And suddenly, in this most predetermined of movies, anything seems possible.

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The Real-Life Lore Behind Dracula in History

Sometimes history is stranger than fiction, particularly when it comes to Dracula.

Even more than a century after publication, the character of Count Dracula remains one of the most enduring ever created. Much like Dracula himself, the character is seemingly immortal. Lifted from the pages of Bram Stoker’s classic novel, Dracula and his descendants have graced the screen in countless film and TV adaptations, most recent of which is The Last Voyage of the Demeter , in theaters now !

While the character of Dracula has become an important part of literary history, the story itself has deep historical roots. Stoker drew on a mixture of mythology and actual historical events to craft his tale. In fact, there’s some evidence that Stoker was convinced the events of his story were literally true.

RELATED: Is The Last Voyage of the Demeter Based on a True Story?

Stoker’s original preface, published in the Icelandic version, reads in part: “I am quite convinced that there is no doubt whatever that the events here described really took place, however unbelievable and incomprehensible they might appear at first sight. And I am further convinced that they must always remain to some extent incomprehensible.”

Whether Stoker meant that literally or was playing a little fast and loose with authorial license is a question we may never have the answer to. In the meantime, we can pull back the curtain a little bit to find the monstrous truth behind Stoker’s immortal horror story.

Vampires Before Count Dracula

Tales of vampiric creatures have existed for centuries in Central Europe and in various forms around the world. In areas which are now part of modern day Romania, locals told stories of the strigoi, restless spirits risen from the grave. According to the lore, they could transform into animals, become invisible, and take their power from the blood of their victims.

Dracula in The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

In addition to being the name of a horrifying undead creature, strigoi also shares an etymological relationship with the Romanian word striga, which means “to scream.” Over time, strigoi have referred to witches and other supernatural creatures, but the name is mostly closely associated with what we would all think of as vampires .

The earliest known report of a strigoi comes from the seventeenth century , when Jure Grando Alilovic apparently tormented his hometown 16 years after he was meant to have died. Alilovic was captured by local priests and townspeople, and beheaded.

The Inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Authors are often asked where they get their ideas. Most of the time they’re cagey, either because they don’t want to say or they don’t know themselves, but in the case of Bram Stoker we have some insight.

In 1890, Stoker visited the Subscription Library in Whitby, England in search of a particular book. The book in question isn’t likely to top any bestseller lists, not with a title like The Accounts of Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia anyway, but it was important to Stoker. Moreover, the book was rare, its presence in the library unadvertised, and could only be viewed under supervision. Stoker apparently asked for the book, opened it to a specific section, took down a few notes, and returned it .

RELATED: The Last Voyage of the Demeter is Basically Alien, Just Set in the 1800s on a Ship

After the library, Stoker stopped over at the Whitby Museum where he looked at some maps and built a narrative path starting in London and ending on a spooky mountain top in Transylvania. You may have heard of it.

Finally, Stoker went to Whitby Harbor. There, he spoke with several members of the Royal Coast Guard. He was fishing for details about the sailing vessel Dmitri. It ran aground a few years prior with only a few of the crew having survived their journey. The ship was carrying crates of dirt and the crew reported seeing a large black dog leap from the ship and run away when they reached the shore.

(from left) Nosferatu (Javier Botet) and Clemens (Corey Hawkins) in The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

If you read the last paragraph, you’ve basically seen the trailer for The Last Voyage of the Demeter . Stoker’s trip through Whitby, with its various targeted pit stops, provided critical details which went on to inform parts of his story. And, thanks to that boring-sounding book from the library, Stoker had found his story’s name.

While The Accounts of Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia doesn’t mention Vlad III (commonly known as Vlad the Impaler ) by name, it does mention the surname Dracula. That’s where Stoker found his name and where the connection to Vlad III begins.

Vlad the Impaler, the Real-Life Count Dracula

The man who would become known as Dracula was born the second son of Vlad II, ruler of Wallachia, part of modern-day Romania. He was born in 1431, possibly in Transylvania, though he never owned property there and certainly didn’t live in the castle which now stands there.

The same year of his birth, his father was inducted into the knightly Order of the Dragon. As part of the induction, Vlad II was given the new surname Dracul. In 1442, Vlad II was called to a meeting with the Ottoman Sultan Murad II, and he decided to take his two young sons, Vlad III and Radu, with him.

Unfortunately, the whole thing was a trap designed to subdue Vlad II. All three of them were arrested, but Vlad II was released on the condition that his two sons were taken as royal hostages.

They were treated well under Ottoman captivity, educated and taught valuable skills. The conditions were such that Radu apparently became enamored of the Ottomans, integrating well into their society.

Javier Botet as Nosferatu in The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

Vlad III, on the other hand, resented his captivity. It’s likely his continued vendetta against the Ottomans throughout his life was motivated at least in part, by this time in his life.

When his father and older brother were killed at the hands of usurper Vladislav II, Vlad returned home on a campaign to reclaim his father’s seat as ruler of Wallachia. The effort had fits and starts, with Vlad ruling temporarily before being ousted, but eventually he emerged victorious. Vlad bested Vladislav II in hand-to-hand combat, avenging his father and reclaiming the throne.

RELATED: The Last Voyage of the Demeter Images and Featurette Reveal "Scariest Depiction of Dracula Ever"

Vlad’s rule was immediately decisive. He stopped paying tribute to the Ottoman sultan and put his own house in order in spectacularly bloody fashion. Vlad gathered his noblemen, accused them of disunity threatening the kingdom, and executed as many as 500 , though it could be as few as 50.

That was just the beginning. Vlad III was known as a just but vicious ruler, perfectly willing to use torture and mutilation to punish and frighten his enemies. It is said that he impaled tens of thousands of people on spikes over the course of his reign. He even, allegedly, dipped his bread in the blood of his victims, though that’s likely a popular invention.

Like his father before him, Vlad III was also inducted into the Order of the Dragon and given a new surname. He chose the name “son of Dracul,” in honor of his father. He emerged as Vlad Drăculea or, in the modern parlance, Dracula.

Find out what those sailors told Stoker in The Last Voyage of the Demeter , in theaters now !

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Javier Botet in The Last Voyage of the Demeter

The Last Voyage of the Demeter review – Dracula horror is lost at sea

A chapter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, set upon a ship, is expanded to a gory 2-hour film, an idea that works better in theory than in practice

A s Universal continues to find creative ways to rework its iconic monster movies in the shadow of the iconically disastrous Dark Universe (a set of interconnected horrors cancelled after Tom Cruise’s Mummy wrapped up with a loss), there’s an alluring elevator pitch at the heart of their latest offering. Rather than retelling Bram Stoker’s Dracula in full once again, why not take one chapter, The Captain’s Log, detailing his journey on boat from Romania to England, and dig into what happened to the crew members he feasted on?

But coming just months after Renfield , this year’s other novel spin on Dracula, focused on the cursed count’s even more cursed aide, it’s another idea that works better as a logline than a full movie, stretched to breaking point in The Last Voyage of Demeter, a 2-hour film with frighteningly very little to feast on. It’s mostly fascinating for its existence, a gothic period horror made on an unusually grand scale, harking back to the days of Hammer, an outlier in a genre landscape that usually bets on smaller budgets aimed at a younger audience. It might explain why it’s taken two decades for the film to make it to the screen, a voyage through development hell that took in stars such as Noomi Rapace, Viggo Mortensen, Jude Law and Ben Kingsley and directors such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Marcus Nispel, The Descent’s Neil Marshall and Flightplan’s Robert Schwentke. The script, originally written by Escape Room’s Bragi Schut Jr, has also seen multiple revisions with Bullet Train’s Zak Olkewicz receiving a co-credit and at least five other writers noted as helping with off-screen additional material.

Production finally began over two years ago, with Troll Hunter’s André Øvredal at the helm, and the finished result is hard to extricate from this tortured process – the film very much the end product of far too many cooks toiling away for far too long. What often happens with a movie that takes so long to go from pitch to premiere is that those involved tend to forget the whys and whats, the mission of making something overriding the motivation. Twenty years on, it’s hard to understand why we’re on this journey and who is supposed to care.

The Straight Outta Compton alum and two-time Tony nominee Corey Hawkins (who also managed to be the best part of Joel Coen’s starry take on Macbeth in 2021) tries hard as anchor, playing a doctor who finds his way onto the ill-fated Demeter, alongside a mostly unwelcoming crew led by Liam Cunningham as captain. There’s a shipment of large boxes, contents of which are unknown, but as the ship takes to the water, there begins a sneaking suspicion that something monstrous might be onboard.

One of the film’s great many errors is fatally misunderstanding the unique appeal of Dracula as an all-timer villain. The very best adaptations have had the breadth to use him as both man and monster, the suave to the savage, but here, he’s reduced to just some creature, a production line B-movie baddie and a poorly designed one at that, looking like a gargoyle just came to life. The effort that’s clearly been funneled into the film’s extravagant production design has been weirdly withheld from that of Dracula himself, a cheap and immediately unscary beast, set to trouble only the dreams of those who could have done a better job in bringing him to life.

Despite the setting, the film also lacks the oppressive claustrophobia it desperately needs, the nightmarish fear of being trapped with a monster in an inescapable place, heading towards doom. Schut Jr has spoken of Alien as inspiration but unlike that film, an inspiration to so many, he’s never able to either make the workplace tensions crackle or truly immerse us in the awful clamminess of such a predicament. With suspense then at zero, Øvredal goes full steam ahead with some admirably uncensored gore and some less easy-to-admire jump scares more likely to cause eye-rolling than seat-ejecting. Hawkins is fine enough, with a British accent that’s mostly passable but his character is written without a shred of conviction, confusingly discordant moments of exposition making him a mystery to us, while Aisling Franciosi, slowly becoming the new Elisabeth Moss of actors whose roles are defined almost entirely by trauma, is effective in a limited capacity as a surprise crew-mate, boxed up for later snacking. There’s no real surprise to where we’re heading, given the source material, and so a great deal of the film is a rather meandering wait for the inevitable.

It’s ultimately a doomed voyage: for the crew, for the audience and for Universal’s monster movie strategy at large.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is out in Australian cinemas now, in US cinemas on 11 August and in the UK later this year

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'The Last Voyage of the Demeter': Release Date, Cast, Trailers, and Everything We Know So Far

Based on a single chapter from Bram Stoker's Dracula...

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When and where is the last voyage of the demeter releasing, watch the trailers for the last voyage of the demeter, who's making the last voyage of the demeter, where and when was the last voyage of the demeter filmed, who’s in the cast of the last voyage of the demeter, so what's the last voyage of the demeter about.

After many script rewrites and production changes, the film's release date was moved from January 27, 2023, to August 11, 2023 . As of now, The Last Voyage of the Demeter will only be available to watch in theaters, as no streaming date has been announced yet. The film has been given an R-rating and has a runtime of 119 minutes.

The first trailer for The Last Voyage of the Demeter was released on Universal Picture's YouTube channel on April 13, 2023. Set to a moody remix of The Smashing Pumpkins' "Bullet with Butterfly Wings," the trailer unleashes plenty of vampire carnage.

This was followed by a teaser trailer released on July 18, 2023. The fifteen-second video doesn't show much, but it does plenty to raise the scare level, with mysterious deaths and a terrifying look at the movie's Dracula. See it here:

On July 31, a Look Inside featurette for The Last Voyage of the Demeter was released via Rotten Tomatoes, promising an Alien -esque story. See it here:

Bragi F. Schut ( Escape Room ) wrote a story and screenplay based on Chapter 7 of Dracula all the way back in 2002, but the film languished in development limbo for nearly two decades. Along the way, numerous interested directors came and went from the project, including Robert Schwentke ( RED ), Marcus Nispel ( Friday The 13th ), David Slade ( 30 Days of Night ), and Neil Marshall ( Hellboy ). Ditto for onscreen talent; at one point, Viggo Mortensen ( Lord of the Rings ) was cast to play the captain but dropped out after the production hit numerous snags. Ben Kingsley ( Ghandi ) and Noomi Rapace ( Girl With The Dragon Tattoo ) were also attached at one point . Finally, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark director André Øvredal took the helm in 2019 , working off a screenplay written by Bragi and Zak Olkewicz .

The film is produced by Brad Fischer , Mike Medavoy , and Arnold Messer , and executive produced by Matthew Hirsch . The production companies involved include Amblin Entertainment, Amblin Partners, Latina Pictures, New Republic Pictures, Phoenix Pictures, Universal Pictures, and Viola Film, with distribution by Universal Pictures. Roman Osin and Tom Stern serve as the cinematographers and Thomas Newman composed the film's score.

Related: Comparing Universal's Dueling 1931 'Dracula' Films – Which Is More Unsettling?

Principal photography began in June 2021 in Berlin. The film was also shot in Malta and production on the movie wrapped in the fall of the same year with Amblin announcing the end of filming with a Twitter post dated September 30, 2021.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter stars Corey Hawkins ( The Tragedy of Macbeth ) as Clemens, a doctor who comes aboard the ship. Hawkins is also set to star in the upcoming remake of The Color Purple later this year. Aisling Franciosi , who appeared in Game of Thrones and the upcoming film The Nightingale , plays Anna, a young stowaway who helps battle the merciless count. Liam Cunningham ( Clash of the Titans ) will play the ship's captain, who might go down even if his boat doesn't. David Dastmalchian ( The Suicide Squad ) plays the ship's first mate, Wojchek.

And of course, the man of the midnight hour, Count Dracula is played by Javier Botet . When he was five years old, Botet was diagnosed with a rare genetic condition called Marfan syndrome, which affects the body’s connective tissues, giving him unusually flexible and long limbs. In a rather inspirational way, Botet has used his rare physical traits to make a career playing surreal and often nightmare-inducing characters like the Slender Man in the movie of the same name, the Crooked Man in Conjuring 2 , and the terrifying title character from the 2013 horror film Mama . Considering his unique talents, fans can probably expect Botet's portrayal of Dracula to be less "jaded and debonair aristocrat" and more "horrifying wall-crawling monster"--with a serious case of the munchies. Other members of the ensemble cast include Jon Jon Briones , Stefan Kapicic , Nikolai Nikolaeff , Woody Norman , Martin Furulund , Nicolo Pasetti , and Chris Walley .

In Chapter 7 of Stoker's novel, the captain's diary entries recount the ship's journey from Carpathia, where they pick up some strange private cargo: 24 strange, heavy wooden crates that are to be delivered to London. At first, the journey seems normal, but things very quickly take a sinister turn. Everyone is anxious but can't figure out why they continue to face one extremely unfortunate event after another. First, a strange man is spotted on board, then crew members start disappearing. A terrible storm hits the ship and the first mate goes crazy, throwing himself overboard. The captain finally realizes that some sort of evil supernatural creature is stalking his crew, picking them off one by one. In the spine-tingling final entry, he's holding a rosary in his hands and lashing himself to the mast, determined to defy the monster and the storms to the very end. He leaves his log in a bottle in the hopes that someone who finds it may be able to decipher the terrible truth behind the events that have befallen him and his ship. By the time the nearly ruined schooner pulls into its next port, there's no one on board except one clearly insane man.

Expanding a little on the events of the chapter, the film follows various characters, including a doctor, the captain, and first mate of the ship, and a stowaway who clearly picked the wrong boat to sneak onto. No one thinks to check the wooden crates in cargo where Dracula rests during the day, and by the time the sun sets, it's too late: Dracula is hungry. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Øvredal described the film as " Alien -on-a-ship in 1897." That rather nicely sums up the story, don't you think?

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Dracula: He’s so hot right now. (Just like in 1897!)

Hot on the heels of this week’s Renfield , a comedic take on the Dark Lord’s relationship with his less-famous familiar, the trailer for the upcoming film The Last Voyage of the Demeter is here to remind you of one very basic thing about Vlad the Impaler, which is that he’s real goddamn scary.

Based “ The Captain’s Log ,” an early passage from Bram Stoker’s epistolary novel, the film will follow the crew of the merchant ship Demeter as it slowly discovers that its cargo of goods includes the vampire himself.

Familiar faces pepper the Demeter’s crew, like Corey Hawkins ( In the Heights ) playing a doctor on board, Liam Cunningham ( Game of Thrones ’ Ser Davos Seaworth) as the Demeter’s captain, and David Dastmalchian ( The Suicide Squad ) as the ship’s first mate.

It turns out the Demeter’s perilous journey also mirrors that of the film, which was mired in development hell for 20 years after writer Bragi Schut sold the initial screenplay .

The Demeter will finally complete its long trip from Transylvania to London on Aug. 11, when The Last Voyage of the Demeter finally arrives in theaters.

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‘The Last Voyage of the Demeter’ Review: A Dracula Movie That’s Intriguingly Old-Fashioned, Until Its Conventional Megaplex Demon Shows Up

André Øvredal adapts a section of Bram Stoker's "Dracula" into what feels like a sea-voyage studio drama from 1966. But his Gollum-with-teeth vampire is right out of the visual-effects factory.

By Owen Gleiberman

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The strange thing about “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” is that the old-fashioned atmosphere goes right out the window whenever Dracula shows up. In this one, he’s a fast-moving goblin-like creature, with a devil’s head atop a spindly body, which makes him resemble a medieval stone gargoyle crossed with Gollum crossed with some razor-toothed animalistic demon out of a Jason Blum horror movie. He’s played by an actor (the creature specialist Javier Botet), but mostly he seems a product of the visual-effects department. There are shock cuts and savage montages as he rips into the throat of a crew member.

But “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” is strictly prose, and rather plodding prose at that. I appreciated the film’s willingness to take its time, but as Dracula knocks off one crew member after the next, we seem to be watching some rotely garish and not all that scary 19th-century version of “Alien,” or maybe “Mutiny on the Bounty” remade as a slasher film.

Most of the performances are corny enough to feel at home in a pirate movie. There’s the noble Old World captain (Liam Cunningham), the nasty Russian (Nikolai Nikoleff), the callow ladykiller (Chris Walley), the paranoid captain’s mate (David Dastmalchian), the addled chef (Jon Jon Briones), and the captain’s innocent young son (Woody Norman). But Corey Hawkins, who has the lead role of Clemens, a physician trained at Cambridge who’s been shut out of medicine because of his race, has a saturnine glare and a lithe quickness of mind the movie could have used more of. Clemens believes in science and nature; he’s in thrall to learning about the world. The presence of a vampire kind of messes with his view, and the drama, what there is of it, emerges from how the film makes this demonic intrusion feels unprecedented.

Clemens discovers a stowaway, Anna (Aisling Franciosi), who is catatonic with infection, and he uses infusions of his own blood to nurse her back to life. But she never completely recovers, and the other crew members keep showing up as clawed mincemeat. They might survive for a while, but then, instead of turning into vampires, each bitten person has a moment of spontaneous combustion, with embers rising out of their bodies to consume them. That’s the most poetic thing in the movie. The rest of the time, “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” is too explicit, too dawdling yet rapid-fire, too much like other horror films.

Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, Aug. 9, 2023. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 118 MIN.

Production: A Universal Pictures release of a DreamWorks Pictures, Reliance Entertainment, StoryWorks Production Ltd./Studio Babelsberg, Phoenix Pictures/Wise Owl Media production. Producers: Bradley J. Fischer, Mike Medavoy, Arnold W. Messer. Executive producers: Matthew Hirsch, Chris Bender, Anne Rodman, Jeb Brody.
Crew: Director: André Øvredal. Screenplay: Bragi Schut Jr., Zak Olkewicz. Camera: Tom Stern. Editor: Patrick Larsgaard. Music: Bear McCreary.
With: Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Javier Botet, Liam Cunningham, David Dastmalchian, Jon Jon Briones, Stefan Kapicic, Nikolai Nikolaeff, Martin Furulund, Chris Walley, Woody Norman.

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The last voyage of the demeter cast on their characters and battling dracula, director andré øvredal and stars corey hawkins, liam cunningham, and david dastmalchian chat about their fresh new take on a familiar story..

TAGGED AS: Horror , interviews , movies

Director André Øvredal and cast members Corey Hawkins , Liam Cunningham , and David Dastmalchian join RT’s Jacqueline Coley to discuss their upcoming film The Last Voyage of the Demeter . The cast members detail the importance of telling their characters’ stories, Øvredal talks about his vision for the film, and they all spill what it was like working with Dracula.

Unlike previous depictions of the iconic vampire, The Last Voyage of the Demeter adapts just a single chapter from Bram Stoker’s original novel, one that charts the fate of the crew aboard a ship carrying Dracula’s body across the ocean from Carpathia to London. It’s a fresh take on a familiar story, helmed by a director who’s no stranger to horror; André Øvredal previously brought us films like Trollhunter , The Autopsy of Jane Doe , and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark , all of which are Certified Fresh.

Jacqueline Coley for Rotten Tomatoes: André Øvredal has described this movie as “ Alien on a boat.” Was that sort of the appeal of it, the horror in general, or was it what you saw in the character?

Corey Hawkins: Oh, it was a little bit of both, to be honest, and a lot of André’s vision. First of all, when I read the script — and I know it’s been around for a long time — I saw this incredible character in Clemons, an opportunity that I thought was important for us to just go after. You know, you don’t have to hit the nail over the head with it, but he’s a black man, a black, Cambridge-educated doctor at the turn of the century. And I think that was important, because these men existed. And so part of it was also the research and conversations with André and our producers who also wanted to make space for that. And I thought that was great and important, especially in the horror genre, because we’re not always centered in that way. And it was great to watch this man who I think is an outsider, who I think represents the other, and Dracula represents the other; also the woman, the one woman on board played by Aisling [Franciosi] , Anna, she represents the other. And so there’s this dynamic there that I thought was just incredible.

And then also, I’m a horror nerd. I’m a horror geek. I never pictured myself actually doing it, and this being my first sort of… leading in this way, because I’ve been a part of some really cool big franchises, but to be a part of bringing Dracula back is awesome. My first time some being introduced to a vampire was Blacula in the 1970s, William Marshall and the Blaxploitation era. I mean, I didn’t see it in the 1970s; I saw it, you know, when, I was alive. [ laughs ] You know, the VHS, rocked it ’til the tape popped. But it’s one of those things that for me was just incredibly special, and it’s just great opportunity.

Rotten Tomatoes: Liam, your character and your performance, it’s a little bit more because you also are narrator to this. So it’s a very intense voice acting performance. I think it’s so interesting that your character goes through those various points because he really is what brings us into the story and lets us know that trouble is afoot.

Liam Cunningham: Yes, it’s a good point you make, and your audience should know that the reason I’m narrating is because the entire movie is based on one chapter in the book, which is the Captain’s Log, and it’s very sparse in the book. It’s this log where he says, “One of our guys is missing, there’s something malevolent on this.” So we, it was in honor of the book that my narration takes place.

The character of Elliot, which we have to kind of build from the ground up, is interesting; he’s a decent man. These are merchant seamen. They’re blue collar guys who deliver packages and merchandise around the world, and they’re visited by this horrific beast who treats this ship like his refrigerator. And I think that’s what’s really interesting, these decent men. There’s not a wasted character on board on this ship. They’re all kind of good people, and I think that’s what’s important. You can have whatever monster you want, and as David has said before, and I’ve said, if you don’t have people you care about, you’re not gonna care about the film. And I think you care about these people.

Watch the video for the full interview with Øvredal, Hawkins, Cunningham, and Dastmalchian.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) is in theaters on August 11, 2023.

On an Apple device? Follow Rotten Tomatoes on Apple News.

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How David Dastmalchian faced down his real-life demons for The Boogeyman

Opening up about his past struggles with addiction, homelessness, and depression, the character actor maintains gratitude for his string of opportunities: Stephen King adaptation The Boogeyman, Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, and Dracula tale The Last Voyage of the Demeter.

Senior Writer

In Stephen King adaptation The Boogeyman , Air star Chris Messina plays a psychiatrist and widower with two children whose life is terrifyingly altered by a visitor. That unexpected arrival is Lester Billings, played by David Dastmalchian , who describes the man as "even more lost, more pained."

"With Lester comes a story that's not only going to change this family's life but is going to introduce a materialized horror the likes of which the people in this film — and I think audiences — have really never seen before," warns Dastmalchian, 47.

The Boogeyman (out June 2) is among several upcoming 2023 films to feature the Kansas-raised actor, who has a yet-to-be-announced role in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (out July 21) and portrays a Polish sailor in the Dracula tale The Last Voyage of the Demeter (out Aug. 18). But it's this horror endeavor that frightened him the most.

Dastmalchian grew up reading King and was already familiar with the author's film-inspiring short story "The Boogeyman" from its inclusion in the 1978 collection Night Shift . "I've got it dog-eared on my shelf," he tells EW over Zoom from his book- and comic-filled home office. "Every story I know backwards and forwards."

Even so, Dastmalchian initially turned down the offer to play Billings in The Boogeyman , which is directed by hot Brit horror talent Rob Savage (2020's Host ). "It was really hard for me to think about going into Lester's reality," the actor explains. "In fact, it scared the s--- out of me."

Speaking candidly, he says, "I'm someone who nearly took my life a number of times and that's a theme which this story plays with. So, I actually said, 'I don't think I can do this,' the first couple of times they came round. Then I thought a lot about what Stephen King means to me, and I thought about this director, Rob, and what his vision meant, because we met and talked. And then I said, 'Okay, let's see what happens.' And it was hard, man. It was really hard."

Savage, for one, is very grateful that Dastmalchian changed his mind. "He brought a vulnerability and a nervy unpredictability to the role of Lester Billings, a celebrated King character that could have veered into caricature in the wrong hands," says the filmmaker. "David is one of the most thoughtful, collaborative, and committed actors I've ever worked with. This might be an unrealistic career goal, but I want him to be in every movie I ever make."

It would seem as though other directors feel the same way. This year alone, Dastmalchian has voiced the character Veb in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and played suspected serial killer Albert DeSalvo in Hulu film The Boston Strangler , on top of his previously mentioned credits. The horror lover also plans on co-hosting this year's Fangoria Chainsaw Awards, the magazine's annual celebration of the genre, which premieres on Shudder May 21. Meanwhile, he continues to write his comic book, Count Crowley: Reluctant Midnight Monster Hunter , which he says "explores all the issues that really matter to me, including addiction and mental wellness, while set in the world of late-night horror hosts and monsters."

Dastmalchian, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children, counts himself lucky: "I can't believe my life," he adds.

That life has not always been rosy for the actor, who suffers from bouts of severe depression and began using drugs in high school to self-medicate. After graduating, Dastmalchian moved to Chicago and enrolled in DePaul University's theater program but succumbed to heroin addiction in the course of his studies and wound up homeless. He eventually entered a psychiatric facility, followed by rehab, and started working low-paid jobs while he took roles on the stage. Half a decade into his recovery, he got the chance to audition for Nolan's second Batman film, 2008's The Dark Knight , which was shooting in Chicago.

"In 2007, I was five years clean and sober," he says. "I was doing theater for free basically in Chicago and working as a telemarketer. I got the opportunity to audition for this film based upon one of my favorite characters of all time." Nolan was impressed enough by the unknown actor to cast him as an unhinged henchman of Heath Ledger 's Joker named Thomas Schiff.

"One of the greatest filmmakers of all time looked at me and said, 'Yeah, you. Come be a part of this,'" recalls Dastmalchian, still amazed. "My last day of filming The Dark Knight , I remember I walked past the alley where I used to sleep when I was homeless and struggling with my addiction. That experience, my very first time of being on the set of a movie, changed my life in every way you can possibly imagine."

Years later, Dastmalchian gets another call from Nolan, this time for the star-studded Oppenheimer , a biopic starring Cillian Murphy as physicist and so-called "father of the atomic bomb" J. Robert Oppenheimer. "I didn't even think he remembered me. I didn't even think he would know who I was," Dastmalchian remarks of Nolan. "It turns out I was wrong, and he gave me an opportunity to come and play in his incredible creative space, with some of the best actors of our time, all of whom treated me so kindly, and welcomed me, and made me feel like I belonged. Which was humbling because I don't ever feel like I belong, especially when you're amongst the ranks of artists like Robert Downey Jr. and Cillian Murphy and all of these amazing artists."

While it is unlikely that the famously detail-obsessed Nolan would have forgotten Dastmalchian, the director had plenty of chances to be reminded of his talents. In the years between The Dark Knight and Oppenheimer , the actor appeared in a slew of big screen projects, including the first two Ant-Man movies, playing Scott Lang's associate Kurt; three films directed by Denis Villeneuve (2013's Prisoners , 2017's Blade Runner 2049 , 2021's Dune ); and 2021's James Gunn -directed The Suicide Squad , playing the obscure supervillain Polka-Dot Man. It was while shooting the latter that Dastmalchian came across the cute-as-a-button cat who is crawling all over the actor as we talk.

"This is Bubblegum," he says. "We were in the streets of Panama, and this little beautiful cat just kept coming up to us, wanting love, and so now I've got her, and she's part of my family. I tell you what, these last couple of years were really tough with the pandemic, and I lost both of my parents, and we had a lot of difficult times, and it's amazing the magic that a cat can bring to your life. Bubblegum helped me through a lot of my grief-processing."

As has probably become clear by now, Dastmalchian is happy to talk about his mental health issues. The actor is keen to promote the idea that such transparency is a good thing.

"There's so much stigma around that stuff," he says today. "I'm just a character actor, I'm not some movie star, I don't have some massive platform with billions of fans. But whenever I get the opportunity, [I say that] the reality [is] we have to get rid of these f---ing stigmas, we have to talk to each other about this stuff. We're not allowed to be as vulnerable as we need to be, to be healthy, to live the lives that we're capable of living. I think we're getting somewhere, but there's so far to go."

Dastmalchian's description of himself as a "character actor" is accurate. While he played the male lead in 2014's Animals , a semi-autobiographical drama about heroin addicts which he also wrote, nearly all his onscreen appearances have been in supporting roles. Not that you'll hear the actor complaining about that.

"Every character's important, every role's important," he says. "I know it's an old cliché, but I did learn that in Chicago theater, when I was only getting to be, say, Montano in Othello . You know, you've got two scenes to try and actually help propel a story. As a character actor, as someone who's always looked up to the John Cazales and the Peter Lorres of cinema history, I want to be like a slingshot to the movies, you know what I mean? I want to be a guy that helps shoot things forward."

Dastmalchian is thrilled to have found life working in the horror genre and talks excitedly about his role in The Last Voyage of the Demeter , which is adapted from a chapter in Bram Stoker's original novel Dracula and takes place on a ship transporting the vampire-Count to Britain.

"As a horror hound, as a monster kid, Dracula was by far one of my favorite books growing up," he says. "The story of the Demeter, to me, it felt like Ridley Scott's Alien on board a merchant ship in the 1800s. It's great storytelling. It was a hard shoot, the hardest I've ever done. Took a lot out of me physically, because I had to learn how to be a sailor, I had to learn Polish, but thank god I got to be a part of it."

Dastmalchian is similarly enthusiastic about yet another horror film on which he recently worked, Late Night With the Devil . The currently undated movie is directed by Australian brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes, and gifts the actor another lead role as a late-night talk show host whose attempt to boost his ratings leads to horrifying consequences.

"His show is going to be cancelled because Johnny Carson is blowing him away, so he does in one night all this stuff, trying to save his show, and crosses some lines ethically," he says.

Late Night With the Devil recently won the Audience Award at the horror movie-showcasing Overlook Festival. The film also got a severed-thumbs up on Twitter from Stephen King who described the movie as, "absolutely brilliant. I couldn't take my eyes off it." The author would have equally good things to say about The Boogeyman .

"Stephen King sent a personal email to our director telling him how much he loved The Boogeyman , which is such a badge of honor for me," says Dastmalchian. "Then, he tweeted that he had gotten to see a secret cut of Late Night With the Devil and he wrote this glowing review of that. So, at the moment, I'm having a surreal horror hound transcendence. Stephen King seems to have liked two of the things that I helped make this year and that right there feels like the kind of thing that makes me go, 'Oh! Okay, I can retire.'"

"Although," he adds, "I'll never retire."

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly 's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Abigail is Secretly an Adaptation of Dracula's Daughter

Quick links, what was dracula's daughter, how abigail became a reimagining of a universal cult classic, how dracula's daughter lives on.

Abigail joins a slew of new Dracula adaptations put out by Universal.
A dramatic departure from its source material, Abigail is secretly an adaptation of a Universal Monsters classic.
Dracula's legacy lives on as one of the most adapted works in literary history.

Horror is secretly reborn as Abigail reveals itself as an adaptation of a Universal Monsters cult classic. Today, everyone knows and reveres titles like The Phantom of the Opera , The Mummy , and The Bride of Frankenstein as classics of horror cinema. However, far-reaching and sometimes debated, the Universal Monsters pantheon has an extensive family of ghouls that go beyond the familiar faces often associated with the brand. Over the past few decades, people have seen remakes of The Wolf Man , Dracula , and even The Invisible Man . Still, when Abigail crept into theaters, few recognized that the film was a modern adaptation of one of Universal’s most controversial titles.

Before the creature features, horror-comedies, and slasher movies that became the face of modern horror, the Universal Monsters paved the way for them all as some of the most groundbreaking films of the past century. Helping to popularize the horror genre and the classic stories that inspired them, from Count Dracula to Frankenstein, these creeps have been heroes, villains, and, above all else, icons as they lept off the screen into our everyday lives. Despite their timeless stories and unmistakable profiles, there have been several attempts to bring back the Universal Monsters for modern audiences. Ranging from the beloved 1999 remake of The Mummy to less successful endeavors like The Dark Universe, Universal continues to reimagine its classic films, with 2024’s Abigail being just one of many titles to be adapted for the silver screens of today.

Gloria Holden's first headlining role was as the eerie Countess Zaleska.

Universal's Epic Universe Could Reanimate the Dark Universe

1931’s Dracula was a massive hit and the defining role for classic horror actor Bela Lugosi. So, it wasn’t surprising that the adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel would warrant spinoffs, sequels, and even parodies. While audiences have likely heard of films like Renfield, Van Helsing , and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein , Dracula’s Daughter remains one of the lesser-known titles within the legendary vampire’s filmography. A dark, creepy, and erotic sequel to Bela Lugosi’s famous film Dracula’s Daughter, has a fascinating history along with an ambitious future as Abigail is unleashed upon the world. Looking back on how Dracula’s Daughter came to be, the film’s production provides context and insights into the movie’s unusual parallels with its modern counterpart.

Believed to be inspired by the Bram Stoker short story "Dracula’s Guest" and the Gothic novella Carmilla , the film’s rights were purchased from MGM and forced into production by 1935. A very loose adaptation of "Dracula’s Guest," Dracula’s Daughter hoped to wrap up lingering plot threads and provide a fitting sequel to the Bela Lugosi classic . Controversial from the start, early drafts of Dracula’s Daughter faced rejection by the Production Code Administration and the British Board of Film Censors for its questionable content. However, against all odds and the backdrop of a very different time from which the film was conceived, Dracula’s Daughter eventually saw release, which is somewhat surprising considering the film's perceived LGBTQ+ implications. With supposedly reluctant actress Gloria Holden cast as the titular Countess Zaleska, the film lived up to its tagline of "She gives you that WEIRD FEELING." Additionally, while Bela Lugosi wouldn't return for Dracula’s Daughter , Edward Van Sloan reprised his role as Van Helsing (bizarrely renamed to Von Helsing), and Universal once again recruited the talents of legendary makeup artist Jack Pierce, hoping to deliver the sequel Dracula deserved.

Radically different from its source material and what Universal originally envisioned, the film begins with Van Helsing under investigation after the bodies of Count Dracula and Renfield are discovered. Seeking assistance from his colleague, psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Garth, Van Helsing attempts to make sense of the mysterious events for a skeptical Scotland Yard who doesn’t seem to believe in vampires. However, the situation takes a bizarre turn with the arrival of the vampire Countess Marya Zaleska, who destroys Dracula's body as part of a quest to rid herself of the vampiric curse he bestowed upon her. When traditional methods fail, however, she turns to Dr. Garth and modern science for salvation. As her struggles with bloodlust and her "father's" legacy intensify, Zaleska seeks companionship in Dr. Garth, kidnapping his secretary and luring him to Transylvania with hopes of turning him into a vampire. The climax sees the tragic demise of Zaleska, triggered by a broken promise to her servant, Sandor, who meets his own undoing at the hands of Scotland Yard. While for many, it might seem like the final nail in the count’s coffin as his progeny is destroyed, his story wasn’t over, paving the way for other Dracula revivals under Universal.

Dracula's Daughter was followed up by the 1943 film, Son of Dracula .

What's Behind the Recent Resurrection of Frankenstein's Fame?

Since the divisive reception of 2017’s The Mummy and the complete overhaul of Universal’s plans for the Dark Universe series, it’s been a confusing time for their iconic monsters. What began as a shared cinematic universe splintered into a series of nebulous adaptations and remakes. Renfield and The Last Voyage of the Demeter presented two very different takes on Dracula . Meanwhile, remakes of The Mole People , The Invisible Man , and The Invisible Woman all seem to provide dramatic departures from their respective namesakes. When it comes to Abigail , it may not seem like a remake of Dracula’s Daughter , but they share a connection and a bizarre trend that reflects the rebirth of Universal’s beloved horror icons .

In 2023, it was announced that Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett of Scream series fame were attached to a new horror project from Universal and Radio Silence Productions. Allegedly developed under the working title of Dracula’s Daughter (via The Hollywood Reporter ), the film distanced itself from past titles like The Mummy and the idea of a shared cinematic universe to allow the work to stand on its own. However, it appeared this concept of a solo film was taken even further because, not unlike the 1936 film, which differed greatly from "Dracula’s Guest," Abigail evolved into a total reimagining of the concept of Dracula’s bloodthirsty progeny.

When released in theaters in 2024, audiences saw just how different Abigail was from its inspiration. Instead of Countess Zaleska’s quest for humanity, Abigail tells the story of a group of kidnappers who are enticed with a once-in-a-lifetime offer. Taking the daughter of an infamous underworld figure hostage, it’s the criminals who end up paying the ultimate price when, similar to Claudia from Interview with the Vampire , their target turns out to be a vampire with a young girl’s face and a thirst for carnage. Starring Alisha Weir after her breakout role in Netflix’s Matilda , while a strange take on Dracula’s Daughter , it proved popular on Rotten Tomatoes, with early reviews putting it at 85% and fresher than the food Abagail likes to play with. As it sees a wider release and audiences get a chance to sink their teeth into this modern reimagining, it could prove to be another iconic part of Countess Zaleska’s legacy.

Countess Zaleska was a playable character in the defunct MMOBA Universal Monsters Online .

The Dracula Reboot Needs to Borrow This Lesson From 2023's Overlooked Vampire Hit

Although rarely headlining any Universal Monsters projects or sharing the spotlight with The Bride of Frankenstein , Dracula’s Daughter’s influence extends beyond Abigail . Embraced a cult classic of LGBTQ+ and vampire cinema, Dracula’s Daughter inspired video games, movies, and, most notably, famed author Anne Rice , who references the movie in The Vampire Chronicles series. While Dracula tends to get top billing and recognition as one of the most adapted literary works in history, Dracula’s Daughter left its own mark on the horror genre; it’s as breathtaking and unforgettable as a vampire’s kiss.

They say a good horror story doesn’t die and, like Count Dracula himself, usually finds a way to live on. There’s a reason why the Universal Monsters are considered classics, and much of it has to do with how much influence they have on the horror genre. Art like Dracula’s Daughter may come in different forms or show up in the most unexpected places, but their inspiration looms from the shadows, continuing to haunt the silver screen and everything beyond. As different as Abigail may be from the classic Universal Monster movie that supposedly inspired it, if there’s anything Countless Zaleska taught audiences, it’s how difficult it is to escape the past or the hungry jaws of a vampire.

Abigail (2024)

After a group of criminals kidnap the ballerina daughter of a powerful underworld figure, they retreat to an isolated mansion, unaware that they're locked inside with no normal little girl.

Director Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett

Release Date April 19, 2024

Cast Angus Cloud, Alisha Weir, Kevin Durand, Dan Stevens, William Catlett, Melissa Barrera, Kathryn Newton, Giancarlo Esposito

Writers Stephen Shields, Guy Busick

Main Genre Horror

Genres Thriller, Horror

Producer Paul Neinstein, William Sherak, James Vanderbilt, Chad Villella, Tripp Vinson

Production Company Project X Entertainment, Radio Silence Productions, Wild Atlantic Pictures

Abigail is Secretly an Adaptation of Dracula's Daughter

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List of 10 best horror movies of 2023.

Creepy and horror movies is a genre that continues to bring the audiences back to the theatre. There is something very unique and powerful about horror movie, and that is what attracts so many people to them. Each year, there are countless good horror movies that get released in the theatres and on OTT platforms as well.

With horror movies, you never know what to expect. Sometimes these movies get rebooted and legacy franchises end up become even bigger hits or run to the ground. And sometimes, newer directors often release an absolute gem which promises the return of a sequel (or a prequel, in some cases).

Here’s our pick of the best horror movies or best scary movies.

10 Popular Horror Movies of 2023

1. knock at the cabin.

Directed by the incredibly talented M. Night Shyamalan, the Knock At The Cabin is a movie about a small family who travel to the woods to spend a holiday. But their holiday is cut short when a group of armed and dangerous men ask them to perform a sacrifice that they would never want to.

2. Godzilla Minus One

This is perhaps one of the best scary movies to have released in 2023. The story takes you into 1940s Japan, where the horrors of the second World War have just ended and the country is slowly getting its feet back. However, Godzilla is created and swims up to the coast of Tokyo. Amidst the chaos, Koichi, a soldier with a bad reputation decides this could finally be an opportunity for him to clear his name.

Read more: List of the top 10 Horror Korean Dramas to Watch in 2024

3. Husera: The Bone Woman

A psychological horror movie as well, Husera takes you into the life of an expectant mother who starts seeing horrific images. Upon consulting some Brujas, she is told that these visions will go away as soon as the child is born. However, that is not the case.

4. The Last Voyage of the Demeter

Count Dracula is one of the most popular stories of all time. This movie takes the same concept and delivers yet another masterpiece from 2023. The crew of the ship Demeter takes to sea as they have to deliver 50 unmarked crates. However, the crew soon discovers that they are not alone while Dracula starts killing people.

5. El Conde

The Chilean dictator Agusto Pinochet gets a new lease of life in this movie, as a vampire who is tired of his boring life. He has finally decided that he wants to die, after causing disgrace to his family. If you are history buff, this horror movie from 2023 might exactly be what you need.

Read more: Top 20 Telugu Movies in Disney+ Hotstar in 2024

6. Infinity Pool

A couple are out on a vacation and are guided by a mysterious and charming woman to go out of the resort and into the jungles. However, the couple soon find themselves lost in a culture of hedonism, extreme violence and untold horror. Will they escape?

7. Enys Men

A lonely woman lives on the Cornish Coast and works as a wildlife volunteer. One of her daily observation walks, she suddenly finds a different kind of flower, that intrigues her. But the flower does something to her, which takes a dark turn, and she starts questioning herself, the meaning of life and horrific nightmares.

8. No One Will Save You

Brynn is a teenage girl who finally finds peace in the home where she grew up. As she lives her life comfortably within the 4 walls of the house, it is all about to change when intruders from a different planet show up to her house.

9. When Evil Lurks

The residents of a small town are suddenly alert of the fact that a devilish creature is about to be born in the town. Everyone tries to escape the town, but they might be already too late.

10. Skinamarink

This is a horror movie that shows you the tale of two children who are happily living with their father. However, one fine day, they wake up and see that their father has vanished, while all the doors and windows of their house has disappeared away.

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IMAGES

How to watch Dracula: The Last Voyage of the Demeter
The Last Voyage of the Demeter: trailer dell'horror ispirato a Dracula
'The Last Voyage of the Demeter' Trailer: Horror Film Puts Dracula on a
'The Last Voyage of the Demeter' Trailer: A Unique Adaptation of ‘Dracula’
Dracula Reimagining The Last Voyage of the Demeter Gets Trailer
The Last Voyage Of The Demeter

COMMENTS

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)
The Last Voyage of the Demeter: Directed by André Øvredal. With Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham, David Dastmalchian. A crew sailing from Varna (Bulgaria) by the Black Sea to England find that they are carrying very dangerous cargo.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter
The Last Voyage of the Demeter (also known as Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter in some international markets) is a 2023 American supernatural horror film directed by André Øvredal and written by Bragi F. Schut, Jr. and Zak Olkewicz. It is an adaptation of "The Captain's Log", a chapter from the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker.The film stars Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham ...
The Last Voyage of the Demeter
The legend of Dracula is born. Watch the trailer for The Last Voyage of the Demeter now. The Last Voyage of the DemeterIn Theaters August 11thhttp://demeterm...
The Last Voyage of the Demeter
Rated: C • Dec 4, 2023. Based on a single chilling chapter from Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula, The Last Voyage of the Demeter tells the terrifying story of the merchant ship Demeter, which ...
The Dracula Monologues Featured, Reviews Film Threat
Based on the works of Bram Stoker, writer/director Brian Eck presents the stories of three well-known characters from Stoker's world of Dracula in his short film, The Dracula Monologues. Steve Bishop is the Captain telling the story of the final voyage of the infamous ship, Demeter. Robert Honeywell is R.M. Renfield recounts his encounter with
'Abigail' Surpasses Universal's Last Two Vampire Films at ...
Abigail surpassed box office milestones, earning more globally than previous vampire films Renfield and The Last Voyage of the Demeter.; Universal's previous attempts to revitalize the Dracula ...
'Last Voyage of the Demeter' Director Explains Dracula's Evolution
The Last Voyage of the Demeter offers a fresh take on Dracula, showing him in a beastly form as he preys on the ship's crew in a gruesome fashion. Director André Øvredal aimed for a gradual ...
The little-known shipwreck that inspired Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'
August 18, 2023. • 6 min read. The arrival of the Demeter in Bram Stoker's Dracula serves as a fundamental part of the titular character's story: the ship brings death himself to England. Stoker ...
Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter
Dracula's unholy presence dooms the crew of the merchant ship Demeter as they set sail for London. ... BingeLists; DRACULA VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER. the legend of dracula is born. MA 15+ 2023; 1h 58m; 6.1; The crew of the merchant ship Demeter sets sail to London to deliver cargo. But they're not alone and soon, Dracula's presence turns the trip ...
Barbara Crampton Inducted Into Monster Kid Hall Of Fame For 22nd Rondo
This year's runners-up were Poor Things and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, with honorable mentions going to Renfield, Evil Dead Rise, and Last Voyage of the Demeter, starring Fango fam and Monster Kid David Dastmalchian.
Why Dracula Looks So Good in 'The Last Voyage of the Demeter'
The movie is based on one chapter of Bram Stoker 's Dracula. The Demeter is a merchant ship packed with private cargo — 50 unmarked wooden crates of dirt to be exact. Soon after the crew sets ...
How 'The Last Voyage of the Demeter' Adapts 'Dracula'
The Last Voyage of the Demeter, in theaters Aug. 11, takes this chilling interlude in the original story and turns it into a full-length fright flick."I wanted to make a genuine horror movie about ...
How The Last Voyage Of The Demeter Changes The Original Dracula ...
This article contains major spoilers for "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" (and also for the 126-year-old novel "Dracula.") "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" opens on a very familiar sight to those ...
How 'Demeter' Resurrects a Pivotal Chapter in Stoker's 'Dracula'
The following contains major spoilers for The Last Voyage of the Demeter. If the horror genre has a grandfather, it's Bram Stoker's Dracula. First published in 1897, the epistolary novel ...
The Last Voyage Of The Demeter Ending Explained & What Happens To Dracula
The Last Voyage of the Demeter ends with the entire crew killed, except for Clemens. Clemens witnesses Anna's death and vows to pursue Dracula for revenge. Carfax Abbey is revealed to be Dracula's estate in London, where he rests during the daytime before hunting at night. Dracula and Anna are buried in Transylvanian soil, which is essential ...
Dracula actor in The Last Voyage of the Demeter is horror's greatest
Hollywood's new Dracula is played by horror's greatest secret weapon. The Last Voyage of the Demeter actor Javier Botet talks about how he built his career playing some of horror's most popular ...
The Last Voyage of the Demeter: Cast, Story Details, Trailer
The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a unique adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, focusing solely on the ill-fated journey of the ship and offering a new approach to the vampire story.; The 2023 Dracula movie features a strong cast, including Liam Cunningham, David Dastmalchian, Aisling Franciosi, Woody Norman, Corey Hawkins, and Javier Botet as a terrifying and monstrous Dracula.
Movie Review: Last Voyage of the Demeter
Movie Review: In The Last Voyage of the Demeter, an idealistic young doctor (Corey Hawkins) joins the crew of a ship sailing to London. Unfortunately, the Russian schooner is transporting Dracula.
The Real-Life Lore Behind Dracula in History
Lifted from the pages of Bram Stoker's classic novel, Dracula and his descendants have graced the screen in countless film and TV adaptations, most recent of which is The Last Voyage of the Demeter, in theaters now! While the character of Dracula has become an important part of literary history, the story itself has deep historical roots ...
How Last Voyage of the Demeter Made a More Horrific Dracula
Director André Øvredal talks about bringing his take on a horror icon to life. Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of horror's most influential novels. Dracula himself has become a mascot for the ...
The Last Voyage of the Demeter review
The Last Voyage of the Demeter review - Dracula horror is lost at sea. A chapter from Bram Stoker's Dracula, set upon a ship, is expanded to a gory 2-hour film, an idea that works better in ...
'The Last Voyage of the Demeter': Release Date, Cast ...
Who's Making The Last Voyage of the Demeter? Bragi F. Schut (Escape Room) wrote a story and screenplay based on Chapter 7 of Dracula all the way back in 2002, but the film languished in ...
THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER Trailer (2023) Dracula
THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER Trailer (2023) Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Dracula Movie HD© 2023 - Universal Pictures
Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter
Watch the trailer, find screenings & book tickets for Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter on the official site. In cinemas 10 August 2023 brought to you by STUDIOCANAL. Directed by: André Øvredal. Cast: Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham, David Dastmalchian
The Last Voyage of the Demeter trailer: Uh oh, Dracula's on a boat
The first trailer for Last Voyage of the Demeter shows a nightmarish boat ride with Dracula, starring Liam Cunningham of Game of Thrones fame and The Suicide Squad's David Dastmalchian.
'The Last Voyage of the Demeter' Review: A Dracula Movie That's
André Øvredal adapts a section of Bram Stoker's "Dracula" into what feels like a sea-voyage studio drama from 1966. But his Gollum-with-teeth vampire is right out of the visual-effects factory ...
The Last Voyage of the Demeter
Director André Øvredal and cast members Corey Hawkins, Liam Cunningham, and David Dastmalchian join RT's Jacqueline Coley to discuss their upcoming film The Last Voyage of the Demeter.The cast members detail the importance of telling their characters' stories, Øvredal talks about his vision for the film, and they all spill what it was like working with Dracula.
The Boogeyman: How David Dastmalchian faced down his real-life demons
Dastmalchian is thrilled to have found life working in the horror genre and talks excitedly about his role in The Last Voyage of the Demeter, which is adapted from a chapter in Bram Stoker's ...
Abigail is Secretly an Adaptation of Dracula's Daughter
Dracula is an icon that Universal Studios helped define. ... Luc Besson is remaking Dracula and needs to forge a new path like 2023's The Last Voyage of Demeter to find real success with the ...
List of Best 10 Horror Movies in 2024
The Last Voyage of the Demeter. Count Dracula is one of the most popular stories of all time. This movie takes the same concept and delivers yet another masterpiece from 2023. The crew of the ship Demeter takes to sea as they have to deliver 50 unmarked crates. However, the crew soon discovers that they are not alone while Dracula starts ...

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How The Last Voyage of the Demeter ends

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