The Last Voyage of the Demeter sails into theaters this weekend, culminating literal decades of development for the blood-soaked Dracula horror movie. The film is an adaptation of the Captain’s Log chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, published in 1897. The screenplay was written by Bragi Schut Jr. and Zak Olkewicz, from a story that Schut Jr. first conceptualized more than two decades ago.
Recently, PopCulture.com had a chance to speak with Mike Medavoy and Bradley J. Fischer, who produced the film, and have been working hard to bring the Demeter to life for over 10 years. “We have a lot of passions for a lot of stuff that we do and, we continue to work on it and sometimes it takes a long time,” Medavoy told us, when asked if he would consider Last Voyage of the Demeter a passion project.
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Medavoy then shared, “I’ve said this before and that is that, look, I worked on a film that took forever, which was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that took a long time, like 25 years. Kirk Douglas had done it as a Broadway play. And, we also worked on Black Swan, which took 10 years.” He added, “I mean, I’ve worked on a lot of films that took a long time, but once I get it in my head that there’s a really good story and that there’s a terrific movie there, I just hang in there and so does Brad. That’s probably what makes us where we are, what we are and how long we’ve been doing it.”
Over the past 20+ years, a number of major directors have been attached to The Last Voyage of the Demeter. Most notably, Marcus Nispel, David Slade, Neil Marshall, and Guillermo del Toro, who Fischer explained had gotten the furthest. “We were in pre-prep with Guillermo before ,” he shared, then explaining that it was Del Toro who suggested the André Øvredal (Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) for the job. “He put André forward, and André and I had happened to be working together at that time on an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Long Walk at New Line, which stalled because of the pandemic. So it’s always this crazy set of circumstances and coincidences where these things come together. But we already had a wonderful working relationship.”
After introducing Øvredal to Medavoy and the rest of the behind-the-scenes team, they were ready to get the film rolling. “There’s this sort of great tradition of Victorian horror from these stories set in the late 19th century, Fischer said. “The sort of larger-than-life haunted house, whether it’s something like the haunting or a ship, which we always looked at as a haunted house, and we always looked at this film as a haunted house movie set on the high seas where you can’t get out for obvious reasons.”
He went on to say, “That question answered itself quite well, but there was also at the same time this counterbalance that André had brought to it. Where the sort of beauty of those gothic Victorian trappings was offset by the terror and intensity of this feral beast that needs blood to survive, but also is operating at a higher level of intelligence because it is Dracula and it has a sadistic streak running through it. It doesn’t just want to consume to stay alive. It actually wants to take away the things that each of these characters love the most, including ultimately hope itself, and force all of them to confront a fate worse than death. And that journey, that sort of heart of darkness, is the core of the story that we wanted to tell.”
Fischer then added, “From the ship itself, which goes from this beautiful, larger-than-life vessel to this husk at the end. I mean Stoker was so brilliant, the Demeter, and the goddess of fertility, and the soil. The soil in these boxes, it’s almost like this plague that’s being brought to England when the Romani wise man sort of looks off and crosses himself in the direction of the sea, this generational curse that they’re finally ridding themselves of. But he can’t help to feel for these poor unsuspecting souls on that ship and those poor unsuspecting souls on that continent. So there’s a lot there that André and we were excited to kind of unpack from all of this.” The Last Voyage of the Demeter debuts in theaters on Friday.
