The Last Voyage of the Demeter Producers Detail 20-Year Journey for Dracula Movie to Get Made

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is arriving in theaters after a whopping two decades in development. The entire story is based on one chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, telling the tale of how the iconic vampire journeyed across the sea and decimated a ship’s crew. The film has gone through several iterations over the years, with a number of different writers and directors attached at different points. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark filmmaker André Øvredal is the one who finally got the project over the finish line and onto the big screen.

Speaking with ComicBook.com’s Chris Killian, producers Mike Medavoy and Brad Fischer opened up about The Last Voyage of the Demeter‘s long and trying journey to completion.

“Well, we’ve had several versions of it with various directors at different times. But mainly, Brad has been carrying this thing over the years from one iteration to the other, and it’s been difficult. It hasn’t been easy,” Medavoy explained. “And then, of course, we had the plague showed up. But I’ve been involved with movies that took a long time. They turned out to be really good. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, that took forever. It’s like 25 years before it was made.

“There are a lot of them. We did Black Swan together. Sometimes they happen quickly, others not. But the objective, of course, is to make a good movie. I think in this case, we made a good movie and that we’re proud of, which is wonderful. We showed up.”

Fischer added that the actual logistics of the film itself also made it difficult to get production started over the years. A monster movie set in a different time period on a boat in the middle of the ocean isn’t exactly the easiest type of project to put together.

“It’s a period horror. It’s set on the ocean. It’s got a kid and animals and heavy practical prosthetics, which was really important,” said Fischer. “I remember we did one budget and there was no cast line for Dracula. I’m like, ‘You forgot somebody.’ They were like, ‘Oh, isn’t that just going to be a VFX thing?’ I’m like, ‘No, it’s not going to be a VFX thing.’ I worshiped at the altar of Dick Smith, Tom Savini and Rick Baker. We are going to have an actor in prosthetics and makeup. It just took a while to get it right and to find the right team, the right partners in Amblin and Universal, and André as the director.”

Fischer went on to say that there was also a long process in selecting the right filmmakers to bring The Last Voyage of the Demeter to life, with several different directors being attached to the project at various points.

“We had so many directors involved in this movie over the years,” he said. “This chapter of Stoker’s novel and the entries of The Captain’s Log and the mystery of what happens in between those entries just stokes the imagination. Everybody, from Robert Shanky to Stefan Ruzowitzky, to Marcus Nispel, to David Slate, to Neil Marshall, to Guillermo del Toro, who was attached right before André, had their own elements of this that they really were excited about and sparked their imaginations.

“And the opportunity to do Dracula in this form? You just saw Coppola’s version again recently and that bat wing, bat membrane thing, that’s probably the closest between that and Max Schreck in the 1922 Nosferatu, I think were probably our two closest stylistic references. But André, obviously, was wonderful and just dreaming up what this was all going to look like and executing it beautifully.”

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is now playing in theaters.