“We’re a doomed crew,” Captain Eliot (Liam Cunningham) says some way into The Last Voyage of the Demeter, “on a doomed ship.”
Such fatalism is built into André Øvredal’s feature, from its very title, to its opening sequence near the film’s chronological end, when the Demeter has already run aground on the coast of Whitby, with no surviving crew found on board. And then, of course, there is the film’s obvious literary source, adapted by Bragi Schut Jr. and Zak Olkewicz from the section of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1987) known as ‘The Captain’s Log’. The Demeter is a mere vehicle for getting the vampire from Romania to Britain, and its crew are merely sacrificial fodder to their narrative functionality.
Yet the captain’s addressee, the doctor Clemens (Corey Hawkins) who joined the crew just before its departure, is a new character representing change – and not just to the received text, but to the world. For as the new century approaches, this talented, Cambridge-educated black man of science seeks a place where he can fit in the white, racist continent that keeps rejecting him – and to him, a murderous vampire is just one of countless obstacles to have impeded his progress. With Clemens comes the possibility, however limited in scope it might seem, of a course correction from Stoker’s prescribed paradigm. Perhaps, after all, not everyone is doomed, and some hope, even in the final hour of this voyage, remains.
All the characters here have of course been fleshed out no less creatively this this expansion of what was once only a brief bridging section in Stoker’s novel. Two more, like Clemens, are entirely new: the ailing, anaemic stowaway Anna (Aisling Franciosi), who knows better than anyone else the baleful threat facing the vessel; and the Captain’s grandson Toby (Woody Norman), whose young years bring a new kind of moral peril to the horror. It is to Toby that Clemens will say, “There are things in this world that we can’t control, but we do our best,” in words that encapsulate both the futility of this crew’s every effort against the bloodthirsty creature in their midst, and the particular brand of heroism that attaches to their continued struggle.
Dracula has long been portrayed as a seductive charmer, but The Last Voyage of the Demeter returns to the older tradition of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) – also including the Demeter episode – in which the vampire (here played by Javier Botet) is a batlike, barely human monster. He is also a slasher, taking out, as the Captain puts it, “each of us, one by one” – and much as Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) has often been called ‘a haunted house movie in space’, this is a haunted house movie at sea, with the nine hands on deck (plus Anna) too far from land for anyone to hear their screams. There is even, as in Scott’s sci-fi, talk of bonuses and (eventually) of destroying the very craft that is transporting them. Yet Øvredal has also crafted a kind of gothic Master and Commander (2003), pausing to show us the realities of commercial seafaring in the late nineteenth century even as he introduces more fantastical elements to curtail that way of life.
The days of the Demeter – a wooden sailboat in an age when metal and steam are fast taking over – already seem numbered, even before an undead aggressor is stowed away belowdecks. Yet The Last Voyage of the Demeter, for all its doomed trajectory, rewrites the script, and even promises a different kind of sequel entirely uncharted by Stoker.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter had its UK première at FrightFest 2024, 24 Aug
