Now that official scary movie season is here, and now that I’ve had a chance to watch The Last Voyage of the Demeter, well, I guess I can share my thoughts. First of all, it immediately went into Holy Sequel. There’s a lot of religion in this vampire film. If you’re not familiar with Dracula, as written by Bram Stoker, or its many adaptations, the Demeter is the ship which carries the vampire from the Balkan peninsula to England. Dracula has purchased Carfax Abbey and since he’s traveling alone he has to ship himself there. He has crates of his native earth loaded on the Demeter, along with his coffin. Along the way he snacks on the crew until the fateful Demeter arrives at Whitby as a ghost ship, no crew anywhere. Anyone who knows Bram Stoker’s story knows that nobody survives aboard the ship.
That conceit makes this an interesting angle from which to tell the story. Critics were unkind, but the reason, it seems to me, is that you pretty much know how it will play out from the title. Personally, I’m more generous than the majority of critics. This is a perfectly serviceable horror film, well made, and with a message. Not only does the Black man not die first, he’s also the sole survivor. The fact that Drac picks off the crew one-by-one will come as no surprise. You need to guess who’ll go last and the successful escape of Clemens is, in some ways, unexpected. I did wonder, apart from the inclusion of the Bible right out there in the open, at the name Clemens and the dog Huckleberry. Was there a Mark Twain subplot going on here as well? I found Anna’s presence a bit strained but having a strong woman aboard was a nice touch. She almost survives too.
André Øvredal directed a couple of other horror films I enjoyed: The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Having seen three good horror films from him made me add Passengers to my list of movies to watch. There are a number of directors that are making horror that I’m starting to follow. Jordan Peele, Robert Eggers, Damian McCarthy, Osgood Perkins, Zach Cregger, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, Ti West, and Ari Aster, among others, are taking horror in some interesting directions. If I didn’t have to work for a living, and if I could afford all the horror movies I wanted, I have a feeling that the future would be pretty bright.
