Harefooted Halloween: The Last Voyage of the Demeter

What I Liked: Good production design especially with how lived in the ship feels.  You can tell she’s been around a while and so everything has a worn patina.  The griminess of the cargo hold, the narrow intimate corridors and mess hall all look fantastic.  The period costume design, set dressing and dim lighting build a nice creepy atmosphere.

Every creak and groan of the ship is wonderful.  They really help to fill out the spooky surroundings.  Plus the sound design of the mysterious backwards wispy voices heard whenever Dracula’s nearby is great.  The sound plays a bigger role here than normal because we’re stuck in one location looking at the same stuff over and over so audio cues are key to enhancing and shaping the mood of the scenes.

Luckly the film never falls into a lull which again, due to the limited location is trickier to avoid than usual.  It’s difficult to introduce new characters or outside forces to move the story along so the situation has to evolve regularly to keep a good pace up which they do.

The design of Dracula looks pretty neat.  It’s more of the Nosferatu style except he’s much more of a creature with large ears, a full mouth of sharp teeth, a hairless body, pale eyes and he sports wings at one point.  They kinda mixed the vampire from Salem’s Lot with the man-bat form of Dracula from the 1992 movie.  It’s challenging to come up with a new design for this character because there have been so many adaptations and while this version isn’t anything that new it works well.

*Spoiler on this last item* They utterly destroy a little nine year old boy.  At first I thought it was really lame to include a kid on the ship but it’s almost like the filmmakers put him there just so they could fuck with him.  Drac ends up biting into his throat sucking his blood which turns him into a vampire.  That would’ve been enough but later on he dramatically bursts into flames when he gets exposed to the sun causing the crew to finally throw his still burning body into the ocean.  Now this same fate befalls a couple of other victims but due to the boy being so damn young it got an audible chuckle from me.  They also kill off the dog and I’m into these moments where the film sorta flips the finger to the audience.

What I Didn’t Like: Anything I didn’t take to is fairly minor.

Overall Impressions: I’ve been hearing about this film being in development for decades so it’s bizarre to actually see it for real (for a long while I was dying to see what Neil Marshall (The Descent, Dog Soldiers, Doomsday) was gonna do with it).  It’s a fine idea to take this portion of Bram Stoker’s tale and turn it into its own piece.  Even though we all know who’s on board and what will happen it’s a testament to the filmmakers that it’s still an engaging movie.  Director Andre Ovredal (Troll Hunter) has said it’s basically Alien and I imagine a lot of folks are gonna think that while watching.  I know I did.  The other picture this reminds me of is Jason Takes Manhattan as that film is notorious for barely taking place in NYC and mainly being about Jason stalking his victims aboard a ship en route to the Big Apple.

And it was cool to see a slasher on the silver screen again that’s not a sequel or part of an established franchise.  A one off like this, despite being from an incredibly famous larger narrative, is the type of high concept horror that I can get behind.  What’s amazing is the initial idea still feels inspired.  Like this one small part of the book that I’m sure most people don’t think too much about could be its own movie.  And it can and it’s intriguing.  And I hope some folks don’t skip out because they aren’t familiar with the full story of Dracula and think they’ll be lost.  The film keeps shit self-contained by establishing everything you need to know from the top.

This is a fine little movie.  It’s not amazing but all the performances, setups, effects and camerawork are solid.  It’s just very competently made.  The biggest thing it has going for it is the excellent eerie atmosphere.  And after so many years of wondering if the thing would ever get made and eventually writing it off I gotta say the end result is the best I could’ve hoped for.