BramStoker Tagged Articles at Cinematical

One of the coolest chapters in Bram Stoker's Dracula (the book, not the Coppola movie) is the one in which the titular bloodsucker is on a boat ride from Bulgaria to England, and he uses the crew as a rather messy all-you-can-eat buffet. It's a sequence that certainly seems spooky enough to warrant its very own film, so I say it's good news that Marcus Nispel is on board to direct The Last Voyage of Demeter.

Variety describes the story with a bit more clarity than I can muster at 6am on a Sunday morning, so here goes: It's "based on a chapter in Bram Stoker's "Dracula" describing the arrival of the vampire count in England on a cargo ship that has crashed into the rocks at Whitby with no crew and the dead captain lashed to the steering wheel. Stoker tells the story via the captain's log of the voyage, which begins in Bulgaria and becomes increasingly disjointed as members of the crew disappear."

Given Nispel's affection for tackling old-school horror (like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th), it'll be interesting to see what he does with Dracula. It's not like Demeter could be any more outrageously ridiculous than the Frankenstein adaptation the director did for the USA Network a few years back.

Call me crazy, but Bram Stoker's Dracula (the book, not the movie) ends pretty definitively. Dracula gets a bowie knife in the heart, and crumbles into dust in the red sun of the Transylvanian dawn. The wiggle room has been taken care of in a score of movies, books, and television shows -- and we have plenty of new vampire stories, so must we really dig up Dracula again? Well, according to ShockTillYouDrop, yes.

They say a sequel is coming -- and this time it's getting a literary and big screen outing. For the first time, the Stoker estate has authorized an official Dracula sequel titled Dracula: The Undead. Written by Dacre Stoker, Bram's great-grandnephew, and Dracula historian Ian Holt, the story uses characters and plot threads that were edited out of Stoker's original novel in 1897. It hits store shelves in October 2009, just in time for Halloween. And don't think it's the only sequel you'll be getting -- publishing house Penguin-Canada (who describes the book as having done a"fantastic job melding the old with the new"), has already signed up for two more.

But you won't get to read it before film production starts -- Holt and Alexander Galant have already completed and sold the script, and production is slated to begin in June 2009. Jan DeBont is one of the producers and I'm sure he's debating whether or not to direct as well.

I might be interested in this if estate authorized sequels were ever good -- I can't think of one that was, but there's always a chance this could be it. Besides, I think the definitive Dracula sequel has already been made -- Dracula 2000, starring a baby-faced Gerard Butler. I just know you've all forgotten about it, like Butler and Christopher Plummer probably want you to, but why wait until 2009 for sexy vampire times? Just rent this one.

Her last horror outing, of 10 biblical plagues and The Reaping, wasn't the most loved piece of scary cinema to hit the screens, but the 2-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank is trying again. I'm not sure what has brought about her recent attraction to fantastical horror, but Variety reports that Swank will star in an upcoming adaptation of John Marks' recent novel, Fangland -- a project that she will produce with Das Films and Blumhouse Productions. Mark Wheaton, scribe of The Messengers, handed in the project's first draft just before the strike -- and he's the same guy whose Unfinished Country script just got Samuel L. Jackson to take the lead.

John Marks is a former producer of 60 Minutes, and Fangland merges Bram Stoker's legend of Dracula with his experience on the news show. Yes, that means Hilary is heading back to the vamps, but with a little more drama than her role on Buffy. Evangeline Harker (Swank) is a producer for a television news show who takes an assignment to go into Romania and investigate a criminal legend, Ion Torgu, to get him on camera. This will put Swank face to face with more stories about crazy plagues, first, because one can't get enough of terrible disease. Soon, Torgu accosts her, impersonating Dracula. Like Stoker's tale, Harker finds herself held for months, before she pops up in a Transylvanian monastery as this Torgu Dracula gets introduced to New York City. Since only the first draft has been completed, this production will, most likely, be in the works for a while yet. I wonder... will Swank get accosted by the same, lustful vixen vamps? If you've read it, or would just like to comment on Swank taking on Dracula, please chime in!

Back in December, we totally failed to pick up the news that someone had written a screenplay for a sequel to Dracula. Whatever, right? Hollywood has sequel-itis, and a whole lot of the results suck. It turns out, though, that the film, entitled Un Dead, is the first Dracula movie to win the approval of author Bram Stoker's family since Tod Browning's 1931 masterpiece. Not only that, but it was written by a gentleman named Ian Holt who, according to the always-reliable internets, is a Dracula scholar, and actually traveled around Europe, scouting locations while he wrote. Plus, it's NOT a sequel to Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, but rather to Stoker's original story. I don't know about you, but I'm suddenly feeling quite intrigued.

Variety is just reporting the story today (which is fine because, well, so are we), which probably means that all the dotted lines are finally signed, and that the project might actually be getting off the ground. Action king Jan de Bont (he's busy right now directing Meg -- fear his power) will produce the film, which picks up 25 years after the end of Dracula and brings all the surviving characters together, along with an Inspector Cotford, who appeared in Stoker's original draft of Dracula, but was cut prior to the story's publication.