The Last Voyage

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

Written by Tom Fortner

Vampires have always been pretty terrifying for me. The idea of being sucked dry, rather than attacked or mauled or ripped to shreds, seems to me to be ominous and disturbing. And guess what? It is! So let's jump into Universal’s most recent take on Dracula, The Last Voyage of the Demeter.

Modern Universal Horror

I think it’s a good idea to start with some backstory on the original Universal Classic Monsters. The monsters that you immediately think of like The Wolf Man, the Invisible Man, Frankenstein, the Mummy, etc. were all released without connection by 

Universal between the 30s and the 60s. It wasn’t until much later that they became pop culture icons and Universal rebranded them all under the Universal Classic Monsters franchise. 

Recently, Universal had plans to reboot the mobsters in a cinematic universe called the Dark Universe. Honestly, this is a really cool idea, but was largely shelved due to the massive flop of The Mummy starring Tom Cruise in 2017. But, as Caleb wrote earlier this week, The Invisible Man (2020) is really great and scary, so maybe we can cross our fingers for more films on the way.

The Last Voyage

Even though this film was produced by Universal, the director, Andre Ovredal, claims that it originally had no connection to the Dark Universe. However, we can still look at The Last Voyage of the Demeter and analyze the portrayal of Dracula it provides. And it’s a weird one.

Basically, Dracula is being shipped across the ocean from Transylvania to London, sometime around 1840. The crew finds a crate that has broken open, revealing a woman inside, who warns them about Dracula. That night, all of the animals are killed and the crew report seeing a mysterious figure on the deck. Chaos ensues.

Transplanting the setting to the ocean creates a really cool claustrophobic set up where the characters have nowhere to run from the eventual carnage. I think that it’s a fun idea for a monster movie, and even for a Dracula movie, but I feel like they put too much monster into the character of Dracula. His actual appearance is more like a goblin and his tactics of killing are more akin to an animal’s. I just feel like they went in the wrong direction with the Dracula character.

Gentleman Disguise

Now let’s get into what actually makes Dracula scary, at least to me. As long as the idea of Dracula has been around, his connection to sexuality has been pretty prominent. Even in the original Nosferatu from 1922, the scenes when he is sucking blood appear sensual. The film that leaps to mind that portrays this most explicitly is Paul Morrissey’s Blood For Dracula in which Dracula attempts to find virgin blood to no avail because the gardener beats Dracula to every woman inside the mansion. The original Dracula novel, especially, played upon society’s fears of the spread of disease and of the arrival of Eastern Europeans into Western Europe. Today, Dracula is synonymous with a toxic abuser, one who uses people for his own pleasure and gain.

I think this ability to create metaphors about the Dracula character is really integral to his monstrosity. In a way, he has the least monstrous appearance of all of the Universal monsters because he’s presented as a count, a gentleman. But then he shows his true colors as a monster through his actions.  This initial clean exterior sets up a contrast to the horrible, dirty act of drinking someone's blood. The truth is the most frightening thing. When you make him look monstrous, all you do is create another scary figure in the horror movie catalog. 

The clip below is the least gory clip I could find that gives an example of Dracula’s look.

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