Various artists have attempted to bring this tale to the screen over the past 20 years, and though director André Øvredal has thus triumphed where they failed, the end result suggests that it was a project best left unrealized. Whereas Stoker's interlude is compact and chilling, 'The Last Voyage of the Demeter' is bloated and banal. It's very long movie for something based on a single chapter

And Dracula haunts the vessel like the most spectral of demons - or, at least, he did in the novel, and in the shipboard sequence of 'Nosferatu' (1922), where Max Schreck famously played the vampire as a skeletal nightmare zombie aristocrat with sticklike teeth and febrile eyes staring out of his bald rat's head. There are 50 shipping crates aboard, all shaped like coffins and filled with dirt. The film was adapted from the 'Captain’s Log' section of Bram Stoker's 'Dracula,' which chronicles what happens after Dracula stows himself aboard the Demeter to travel to London. But this is not just any ship, or any monster. Much of it is incredibly, knowingly square, with each crew member defined by one or two traits.

The film moves slowly and deliberately, and it's been shot like some studio sea-voyage period drama from 1966. 'The Last Voyage of the Demeter' is set in 1897, and for most of it we're aboard a large wooden ship with multiple sails - the Demeter, a handsome relic, since this is already the era when metal ships were coming in - that’s sailing from Bulgaria to London. It wants to be an old-fashioned monster movie, the kind they used to produce back when horror films were actual movies, made with the stodgy well-carpentered rhythm that any movie was made with. 'The Last Voyage of the Demeter' has a terrible title, but in theory the film sounds intriguing.

It releases in theaters on August 11, 2023. 'The Last Voyage of the Demeter' stars Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham and David Dastmalchian. And now, we get a more bat-looking version who stalks a boat, which is quite different to a well-dressed rich man in a dusty old castle.īut is this new adaptation, covering only a chapter from Bram Stoker's original novel, any good? Here's what critics have to say. He's been around in pop culture since 1897, and has seen countless appearances on the big screen, from Bela Lugosi to Gary Oldman. Dracula is a fictional character that is now in the public domain, so anyone can use him for their vampiric fan service.

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