It’s always exciting to see new adaptations of beloved classics, particularly when they offer something new to familiar material. As you might imagine, then, I was delighted to review the latest film adaptation of that most quintessential of Victorian Gothic vampire tales, Bram Stoker’s Dracula for Macquarie University’s The Lighthouse magazine.
The new film, Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter, is actually based on a single chapter of the novel (or technically just part of a single chapter), which means it has a lot of scope to fill in the gaps with characters, stories and horrors both familiar and fresh.
As a Gothic scholar and long-time lover of vampires, spooks and the supernatural, my enjoyment of such films balances between the beauty of the stock-horror thrill (we’re given what we know and love) and a more nuanced attention to the history, the traditions, and the subtleties in the nineteenth-century literary source.
Did Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter get this balance right? Find out what I thought by reading my review here (it’s free!): https://lighthouse.mq.edu.au/article/august-2023/new-dracula-movie-sinks-its-teeth-into-vampire-legend-review
Have you seen the film? What did you think?
