The Last Voyage of the Demeter

The crew of the merchant ship Demeter sets sail from Carpathia to London with a cargo of fifty wooden crates, but once they lose sight of land, they discover that they are not alone on that ill-fated ship, as Dracula begins to feed upon the crew, one by one...

Based on a single chapter from Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, published in 1897, this film is a… re-imagining? a dramatization? …of the tale of the Demeter, the ship that was hired to unknowingly carry Dracula to England, a ship that eventually drifts into London with no trace of the crew, save the captain, who is found lashed to the helm, dead. The details of the Demeter’s ill-fate voyage were recounted in the novel via the Demeter’s captain’s log, and up until now, they have usually been portrayed in film as a brief montage, or maybe as a newspaper headline.

Due to this fact, and the general awareness of the novel Dracula that basically everyone has, you already know how this story ends. This is a problem that usually haunts prequels, and that is, that it is difficult—sometimes too difficult—to tell an engrossing story when the ending of that story is already well-known, and as a result, your heroes’ fates are never really in question, which renders all of their actions both completely safe during the story, and ultimately in the end, sadly impotent, especially when those well-known fates mean the heroes have no other option but to fail and/or die and/or accomplish nothing.

I’m looking at you, Rings of Power…

Sometimes, this inevitability works in your favor, like when folks complain that the film shouldn’t have shown Dracula so soon or so often, which is silly, because at this point, the milky mystery of what’s lurking in that ship’s hold was spilled long ago, so in the film’s favor, they at least don’t play at being coy about what’s going on here, and just dive right into the bloody, bloody meat of the matter.

I appreciated that.

Being straightforward about what’s hunting the ship’s crew, and not bothering to pretend that anyone in the audience is confused as to who Dracula is, and what they do, allows for more room for characterization, which really helps to add some emotion to the moments when the characters inevitably get torn into pieces by a grotesque bat-like humanoid creature lunging from the shadows. The Captain, and the Ship’s Boy, who is also his young grandson, the First Mate, the Cook, the four Hands, plus the new Doctor, and one really good boy dog, not to mention a young woman stowaway… are all in for a real bad time, with nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide, as first the livestock, and then the crew are devoured by the monster that Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer called “that poncy bugger glory hound” Dracula.

Heavy on mood, capitalizing on the eerie isolation of being far out at sea on an old creaking wooden ship, Last Voyage of the Demeter is a really fun and really gory cat-and-mouse, creature-feature horror movie. It’s a ballsy story too, one that doesn’t shy away from the demands the book has put on the characters’ fates. I also really loved the depiction of Dracula too. Not yet the suave Count with the cane and tophat, he is an inhuman beast, bent and twisted and terrifying, and best of all, it quickly becomes apparent that his monstrous exterior pales in comparison to his monstrous interior, as his enjoyment of the cruelty he inflicts on the crew is clear on his face, delighting in his games and its kills.

Good stuff.

Just to be clear, I don’t want to toot the film’s horn too much, but it really was all around better than I expected. It stumbles a bit, but it mostly works. I enjoyed it, so thumb’s up. This would be an excellent choice for your Halloween night movie.