For the past century, horror fans have had a shifting idea of the lore of Dracula and of vampires, and this year saw director Andre Øvredal adapting one chapter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula into the unsettling The Last Voyage of the Demeter. The film leaned into the more monstrous elements of the figure as opposed to the more seductive iteration of the character, and even initially included scenes in which Dracula appeared in his wolf-like form, though ultimately scrapped the sequences when they befuddled audiences. Additionally, the movie almost included nods to the vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing, which could have teased the future of the franchise.
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In the chapter focusing on the Demeter in the original Dracula, the appearance of a dog at the ship’s wreckage implies that the vampire has morphed into a canine-like form. With Øvredal’s film featuring a winged version of the monster, test screenings of the movie left audiences confused by the appearance of the more wolf-like version of Dracula.
“People were very confused about that as an additional form that Dracula took,” producer Brad Fischer revealed to SYFY WIRE. “So we had to make a decision to listen to the audience and make sure that that confusion didn’t get the better of everyone.”
It’s easy to see how audiences who weren’t entirely familiar with the original novel could be confused, as much of the wolf imagery is missing from modern iterations of Dracula, and even Last Voyage of the Demeter already showed one dog being aboard the ship. Additionally, Dracula is among the roster of Universal Monsters, which also includes The Wolf Man, potentially leading some audiences to think that this character was also aboard the vessel.
Makeup designer Göran Lundström teased the look of this version of the character from the scrapped sequence.
“[Director] Andre [Øvredal] didn’t want a hairy werewolf, he wanted a werewolf who’s lost his hair because he’s not well,” Lundström explained. “This would’ve been the second stage … [this] really weak-looking, gaunt kind of werewolf thing and very asymmetrical and deformed.”
In the film’s final scene, audiences witness a tease about Dracula’s future, with Fischer noting that one version of a scene in a bar would have included an appearance by Van Helsing.
“We went through a lot of different approaches to the story, but nothing that was wildly different than the movie that we ended up with,” Fischer revealed. “We actually had one ending for quite a while. The scene in the tavern was Clemens [Corey Hawkins] being approached by a strange, shadowy dude, who starts talking to him, seems to have some knowledge of the experiences that he went through, and introduces himself as Van Helsing. Then we kind of left it there.”
The Last Voyage of the Demeter is out now on home video.
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