Last Voyage Of The Demeter was inspired by one of the best vampire stories ever

This is going to be a bizarre claim, but the seventh chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula—specifically the section colloquially referred to as “The Captain’s Log”—might be one of the best found-footage horror stories ever … it just happens to be presented in epistolary form in the middle of a 120-year-old novel. It’s a self-contained tale of terror, one that might even work better if you’re reading it out of context and don’t know that the previous six chapters have been concerned with a man (or whatever) named Count Dracula.

It also has an otherwise simple plot and no particularly complex characters, making it perfect for a Hollywood adaptation. You get to put Dracula in a movie, the actual Bram Stoker bloodsucker (since he’s in the public domain), and you don’t have to deal with all the letter-writing and real estate-dealing that takes up the book! Who could resist?

Universal Pictures evidently could not, since director André Øvredal’s The Last Voyage Of The Demeter (the studio’s second Dracula movie this year) is opening in theaters this week, and it appears to be little more than a feature-length adaptation of that one chapter from Dracula—which, regardless of anything about the actual film itself, is still a damn good idea for a movie. And, if you want to look like a smarty-pants by reading the book first, this one chapter of Dracula is going to take much less time than, say, reading all of American Prometheus before seeing Oppenheimer (which is less of a smarty-pants move and more of a part-time job).

A dead captain, an empty ship

For those who haven’t read it or need a refresher, the seventh chapter of Dracula is sort of a turning point for the story after early sections set at Dracula’s castle. The point-of-view settles on Mina Murray, the fiancée of Jonathan Harker, who spends the beginning of the novel at the castle partying with vampire ladies, but even she is somewhat irrelevant to the main plot beyond the fact that she happens to live in the seaside English town of Whitby.

The story-within-the-story begins with a great hook: A terrible storm has suddenly hit Whitby, miraculously dragging a seemingly abandoned ship, the Demeter, to shore. When the townsfolk get a closer look, though, they realize that the captain is still at the helm, dead, with his hands tied to the wheel and a crucifix tied to his wrist. The ship is otherwise empty, except for its cargo—boxes and boxes of dirt—and the captain’s log, a transcription of which makes up most of the rest of the chapter.

From there, it becomes like an old-fashioned version of the multi-day saga of something like Paranormal Activity, right down to the people refusing to listen when someone tells them about something supernatural happening. The captain picks up his cargo, a bunch of boxes of dirt (according to Dracula’s vampire rules, a vampire must sleep in the soil of their homeland, which complicates the Count’s planned move to London), and proceeds to detail the various suspicious setbacks the ship suffers over the course of a month or so—including the gradual disappearance of every crew member.

There’s no ultimate confrontation with Dracula, at least not in the text as it’s presented, just the captain ultimately deciding that his duty is more important than his life and the implication that shit got real bad in the time between everyone dying and the Demeter washing up on the shore. It’s a story where Dracula wins and all the good guys can do is look on in horror, and it’s presented as a story so frightening that you don’t even get to hear it firsthand.

The unseen evil

It is also, perhaps incongruously, one section of the book that seems perfectly suited to being cut. There’s so much other stuff in the book that actually has Dracula walking around and seducing people so he can drink their blood that the one section where the reader explicitly doesn’t see it happen could easily be excised.

But that’s precisely what would make it so good out of context, since it’s much scarier if you somehow go in without knowing there’s a vampire—which is perhaps something that the people behind Last Voyage Of The Demeter should’ve committed to. The first trailer dragged it out nicely, but by the end, you’re not only seeing Dracula in a monstrous bat-like form but hearing The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” (possibly the most on-the-nose “vampire song” in the history of songs that mention vampires), all of which spoils the fun of not putting “Dracula” in the name of the movie.

And that kind of thing is ultimately what inevitably tanks the real potential of turning the story of the Demeter into a movie: It’s at its best when you don’t know what’s going on, but it’s difficult to crack open the book without knowing it’s called Dracula and it’s even more difficult to release a movie with Dracula in it that doesn’t spoil the fact that Dracula is in it with the marketing.