The Hollywood Reporter tells us that Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky (who helmed The Counterfeiters, which took home an Oscar in the foreign language category), is interested making his English-language debut with period horror The Last Voyage of the Demeter for Phoenix Pictures. In the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker, the Demeter is the fill-fated ship that transports the Count across the sea to England, where it washes up on the shore, an empty vessel, with only a dead captain tied to the wheel. All we learn of what transpired on board comes from the captain’s log, which recounts the mysterious disappearance, one by one, of the entire crew. Written by Bragi Schut (who penned SEASON OF THE WITCH, with Nicolas Cage), The Last Voyage of the Demeter expands this brief episode into an ALIEN-like movie about a helpless crew menaced by an unstoppable monster.
According to H.R., two big hurdles have kept the project in development hell: the period setting and concerns about filming an entire film set on the ocean. Fortunately, Phoenix’s recent hit Shutter Island has proved that audiences are not averse to attending films set in the past.
An even bigger hurdle might be the very nature of the story, which ends badly for all on board (except Count Dracula). Let’s just hope Ruzowitzky and company do not go for a revisionist take, a la Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape, which tells us that the ancient vampire is just an innocent bystander while a mad crewman is the one actually killing his comrades.