Producers Want to Take The Last Voyage of the Demeter

Steve Barton |

Feb 3, 2010

If there’s one good thing that has come from the truly mystifying Twilight craze, it’s that vampires are now hotter than they’ve been in ages. One vamp in particular, the big daddy of them all, Dracula, is getting some serious attention what with several upcoming projects based on his exploits in the pipeline. Time to add one more, a more faithful telling of the Count’s tale — The Last Voyage of the Demeter!

FEARnet spoke with producers Mike Medavoy and Brad Fischer about the project, which focuses on Dracula’s harrowing boat ride, and here’s what the duo had to say …

“When I picked up the script” [which was penned by Bragi Schut (Season of the Witch)], “it just struck me as such a great idea. Because I’d always been a fan of the Stoker novel and the Dracula mythology and lore. And that chapter, which – if you go back and look at the Stoker novel – is basically told through the captain’s diary, from when he was on the boat. The boat was chartered to go from Varna to London, and there were these boxes of earth that were being put on it, and one of these boxes of earth was Nosferatu himself; and he was feeding off of the crew members as the boat made its journey. The captain’s log – the way that it’s structured in the book – it actually starts off with someone who was a journalist, who is among this group of people when the boat crashes into the rocks at Whitby. And he finds this water-soaked log book. Just by reading these entries, which grow – starting off with descriptions of an “unsettled feeling among the crew that there’s a presence on the boat, someone who can’t be accounted for” – into varying increasing degrees of paranoia. Crew members go missing; no one had actually dramatized what happened on the ship. And Bragi Schut, who wrote Season of the Witch – this was actually his first script that he wrote, before Season of the Witch – he came up with this idea to tell the story of what unfolded. It’s told from the point of view of a guy who’s just desperate to get to London. And he just gets on the wrong boat basically.”

Let’s hope this baby sees the light of day … or should we say the dead of night … soon!