HMS Dracula

Film: The Last Voyage of the Demeter
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.

When I heard that The Last Voyage of the Demeter was in the works, I was excited; it’s one of the major parts of the Dracula story that hasn’t gotten a great deal of treatment in the various movies based on Stoker’s original work. Nosferatu probably covers the time on the Demeter more than any of them, and it still feels like short shrift. It really is a great set up for a horror film. Dracula travels from Romania to England on a ship, which turns up in port completely abandoned and derelict. So what happened on the voyage?

The problem, of course, is the moment you start thinking about it, the answer becomes clear: the ship ends up derelict, which pretty much means that everybody on board serves as provisions for Dracula during the crossing. What that means is the film that we’re going to see is going to essentially be that—it’s a vampire-based slasher film, where we count down the crew and work under the assumption that the person who is the closest thing we have to a sympathetic main character will be the equivalent of our final girl.