The horror comedy Renfield isn’t the only Dracula movie Universal Pictures will be releasing this year. Completely unrelated to Renfield (so don’t expect Nicolas Cage to show up in it) is their August 11th theatrical release The Last Voyage of the Demeter, which is based on a single chapter, the Captain’s Log, from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Directed by André Øvredal, The Last Voyage of the Demeter stars (according to The Hollywood Reporter) “Corey Hawkins as a doctor aboard the Demeter, Aisling Franciosi as an unwitting stowaway, Liam Cunningham as the ship’s captain, and David Dastmalchian as the Demeter’s first mate. The ensemble cast includes Jon Jon Briones, Stefan Kapicic, Nikolai Nikolaeff, and Javier Botet.” And during a recent interview with Collider, cast member Dastmalchian promised the movie is going to “scare the crap out of people”.
Dastmalchian said, “Horror is (André Øvredal’s) backbone and he is a true monster kid. He has this deep love and affinity for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as do I. His knowledge of the book and his passion for the characters is so beautiful, and he’s got this really intense and unique vision and a way of telling stories that is so outside of the box. So anyone who’s familiar with his works like Trollhunter, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, you go, ‘Well, this guy never takes a little swing. He takes a big swing.’ He took a huge swing with this film. I think it’s gonna scare the crap out of people, but it’s also gonna be one of those movie experiences that transports you to this other place.“
He added that he was excited to work on The Last Voyage of the Demeter because it gave him the chance to play “a character I’ve never gotten to play and it’s in a story that is one of my favorite chapters of one of my favorite books of all time.“
Escaping development hell twenty years after the script was first written (Bragi F. Schut, Stefan Ruzowitzky, and Zak Olkewicz all receive writing credits on the finished film), The Last Voyage of the Demeter tells the story of the Russian schooner, Demeter, which was chartered to carry private cargo – twenty-four unmarked wooden crates – from Carpathia to London. The film will detail the strange events that befell the doomed crew as they attempt to survive the ocean voyage, stalked each night by a terrifying presence onboard the ship. When it finally arrived near Whitby Harbour, it was a derelict. There was no trace of the crew.
Our own Chris Bumbray had the chance to see some footage from The Last Voyage of the Demeter at CinemaCon last year, and he said the movie looks epic, gory, and classy.
Are you interested in watching The Last Voyage of the Demeter? Let us know by leaving a comment below. I’m really looking forward to seeing the movie.