Did you watch: " The last voyage of the Demeter" ?

Dracula and his vampire brothers are classic monsters of the 19th century, which in the 20th century very successfully migrated to the world of cinema. The horrors of these Gothic bloodsuckers have gone through all possible variations and permutations. Creating a new, fresh, and interesting story is almost an impossible mission.

In "The Last Voyage of the Demeter", screenwriters Bragi F. Schut Jr. and Zak Olkewicz return to Bram Stoker's 1897 horror classic. But instead of another screen adaptation of the entire novel, they decided on a much more interesting approach: adapting a single chapter. Specifically, it is the ship's diary of the ill-fated captain of the sailing ship Demeter in which Dracula traveled to England, killing the sailors one by one along the way.

Stoker's novel is a solid book with a lot going on. Due to this, the film adaptations were forced to shorten or completely remove some parts. The last voyage of the sailing ship Demeter is a relatively independent unit that can be cut without major consequences for the rest of the screenplay. Because of this, screen adaptations usually either skip that part or cut it . However, this same independence also makes this story within a story an excellent basis for a feature film.

The challenge is that we know how the novel Dracula ends - and it's not like he gets beaten up by some sailors on the way to London. "The Last Voyage of the Demeter"consciously and deliberately uses the genre's clichés to its advantage here. There are countless horror franchises in which a seemingly unstoppable monster slowly kills a small, isolated group of characters. This film may be based on Bram Stoker's novel, but it's hard not to see the influence of Ridley Scott's film "Alien".

In Varna at the end of the 19th century, the crew of the sailing ship Demeter received an unusual cargo - 50 crates of soil. As usual in these kinds of movies, strange old men and superstitious lunatics warn the crew that the cargo is haunted which they ignore because they were promised bonuses on their salary if they bring the crates to England on time. What should worry them more is that this is their captain Elliot's ( Liam Cunningham – Game of Thrones ) last voyage before retirement. When the characters in a movie - especially a horror movie - start telling you that they're looking forward to retirement, you know right away that they're not going to make it past the peak.

Soon after raising the anchor, problems begin. The sailors find a stowaway in one of the crates: an exhausted girl, Anna ( Aisling Franciosi – The Nightingale ), who is helped by the ship's doctor Clemens ( Corey Hawkins – BlacKkKlansman ) with a blood transfusion. This detail is actually taken from another scene in Stoker's novel and represents a historically accurate irregularity. Namely, if you are wondering how Clemens knows if he and Anna have the same blood type, the answer is that at the time of the novel's publication, doctors had not yet discovered their existence and importance.