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The Ending Of The Last Voyage Of The Demeter Explained

André Øvredal — the director of "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" and "Trollhunter" — returns with a new vision for Dracula in "The Last Voyage of the Demeter."  Based on the chapter titled "The Captain's Log" in Bram Stoker's "Dracula," the film follows the crew of the Demeter ship as they transport cargo to England in 1897. While the early parts of their voyage are smooth sailing, the crew begins to realize that with each passing night, their numbers grow smaller. It turns out that a bloodthirsty creature has been brought aboard and is hunting them down, so the crew must band together and come up with a plan to kill the beast before they reach the mainland. 

After some more comical and charming recent depictions of Dracula , "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" reminds viewers why he's one of the scariest movie monsters. Øvredal brings a chilling Dracula to the big screen in what becomes a harrowing story of survival. Every time night falls, audiences are left in fear of what horrors will come and wondering who will bite the dust the next. Throughout all the scares and sudden turns, there are also some strong and surprisingly emotional story threads with these characters that lead to a gripping and jaw-dropping finale. Let's delve into the ending of "The Last Voyage of the Demeter."

What you need to remember about the plot

Before unpacking the film's tense finale, there are some important elements that influence the fates of the characters and their final bout with Dracula (Javier Botet). When the monster emerges each night, he targets one crew member, draining their blood so that he can regain his power and strength. As he picks off the crew one by one, Dracula goes from being a frail corpse crawling out of the shadows to a fearsome beast with devastating power. Not only can Dracula turn the crew members into his mindless minions just by biting them, but once he has consumed enough blood, he can grow wings and can fly. 

By the time the crew comes to terms with the reality that they're being hunted by a monster, there's only a handful of them left and they've been mentally and physically worn down. They've witnessed most of their companions be slaughtered or turned against them by Dracula, and Captain Elliot (Liam Cunningham) has even lost his grandson Toby (Woody Norman) to the beast. However, crew member Clemens (Corey Hawkins) is able to rally those who remain to form a new plan that'll kill Dracula and keep him from reaching the mainland. But their plan to leave Dracula stuck on the sinking Demeter doesn't go as planned and leads to unimaginable bloodshed.

What happened at the end of the movie

Although Clemens' plan to use Anna (Aisling Franciosi) — a woman who was stored with Dracula as his personal feeding source — as bait to lure the creature out makes sense when he explains it, Dracula also quickly catches on to what they're up to. Dracula not only kills most of the remaining crew — leaving only Clemens and Anna alive – but he causes so much chaos and destruction on the ship that it is now barreling towards the mainland. Eventually, Dracula has Clemens in his claws and is on the verge of killing him until Anna steps in and frees him. This also causes one of the masts to fall apart and pin Dracula into the middle of the ship. Unfortunately, the monster is able to break free before the ship crashes into the mainland and flies away while Clemens and Anna float on debris just off-shore. 

While Clemens is hopeful that the two of them can make it to safety, Anna's eyes turning pale signifies that she's succumbed to Dracula's bite and will burst into flames when the sun rises. Even though Clemens performed a blood transfusion on her, it only delayed the inevitable. Clemens is crushed by this realization, but Anna has accepted her fate and thanks Clemens for helping her fight back against Dracula. Without fear, she sits atop some debris and floats away from Clemens, burning to death slowly when the sun hits her skin. 

What happens between Clemens and Dracula

Although the newspaper headlines seen in the final moments state that there were no survivors aboard the Demeter, we come to learn that there are actually two: Clemens and Dracula. Clemens has made it to shore and is now the only surviving crew member of the ship. While in England, Clemens searches for Dracula — who he believes is still out there somewhere — and he is given some direction on where the creature could be. Clemens has now made it his life's goal to hunt and kill Dracula so that the world can be rid of this monster. But he is unaware that he's closer than he thinks to his vampiric enemy. 

Clemens hears the knocking code used on the ship and feels that it's coming from Dracula himself as a form of taunting. Suddenly, Dracula is shown hiding his horrid face under some clothes and holding the cane that Clemens found in his coffin on the ship. Dracula passes by Clemens causing him to leave his chair and follow him onto the streets. Now, neither Dracula nor Clemens is afraid to make their presence known to each other and their newfound rivalry begins.

What does the end of the movie mean

When the crew talks about what they plan to spend the money earned from the trip on, Clemens delivers a vastly different answer. Instead of wanting to spend it on a new place to live or pleasurable spoils, he says he doesn't care for the money much and hopes to gain a better understanding of the world from his travels. Although he's scoffed at by most of the crew, there's a deeper, more personal reason behind this that plays into Clemens' pursuit of Dracula at the end. When further explaining his experience in life as a Black man, Clemens talks about how he's been looked over simply because of the color of his skin. Despite his getting a great education and being a highly-skilled doctor, he was often turned away or outright rejected for being Black, causing him to become disillusioned by people and the world. 

This explains why Clemens is so obsessed with exploring and trying to gain a better understanding of the world. This mindset also influences his intrigue with Dracula — a being that goes against his more logical thinking and scientific views. Now that Clemens knows that this monstrous entity exists in the world, he wishes to understand its motives and origins so that he can defeat it — which possibly influences his desires to be accepted and acknowledged for his actions rather than rejected for who he is. 

Another explanation

The ending of "The Last Voyage of Demeter" also establishes a pretty grim reality for the world, and Dracula's appearance is a bad omen for humanity. Not only is Dracula free and living amongst the humans, but so far no one knows how to kill him. Even though Clemens survived his fight against Dracula on the Demeter, he isn't aware of how to defeat the vampire since Anna didn't have the answer and none of the weapons they used did anything. Further, if something as monstrous as Dracula exists, who knows what other horrors and evil creatures could exist in this world too? Evil is walking around freely and this could have damning consequences. 

However, there are people like Clemens who are willing to put everything on the line to stop evil entities like Dracula. Clemens is portrayed as the Van Helsing surrogate in this story, and he pledges his life to find and kill Dracula no matter what it takes. Even when Clemens is near death fighting Dracula, he shows that he isn't afraid of him, and his further pursuit of him is meant to act as a reminder of how evil can and should be fought against. While there are powerful entities out there that represent the same kind of evil that Dracula does, there's always a way to fight back, and this is something we see at the end of the film.

What has André Øvredal said about the film and future sequels

André Øvredal is one of the most notable rising forces in the horror genre over the last few years with films like "Trollhunter," "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark," and "The Autopsy of Jane Doe." Now with "The Last Voyage of the Demeter," he's delivered his own horrifying take on Dracula that shows a lot of potential to be something more. Speaking to Bloody Disgusting , Øvredal praised Javier Botet's performance as Dracula and said he was "curious to see how the audiences are feeling about the portrayal of Dracula, which I'm very proud of."

While Øvredal is happy with how the film has come together, the question remains whether he would have the time to continue working in this world if the opportunity comes to a sequel. It was announced that he's no longer set to direct the upcoming adaptation of Stephen King's "The Long Walk" and the only project he's currently listed to direct is a sequel to "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark." A lot hinges on the success of "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" but Øvredal clearly isn't opposed to the idea of a sequel, so we'll just have to watch this space to see if further vampire projects come about.

What the end could mean for the franchise

Perhaps the biggest question posed by the end of the film is whether we could see more of this world. Given how this film concludes, there's certainly room for a sequel or even a prequel to be made. With Clemens now on a life-long mission to kill Dracula, a sequel could see these two at each other's throats again. Clemens could be seen trying to help another community that's being terrorized by Dracula or searching for answers on how to kill this demonic entity. We could also possibly get a prequel that fleshes out Dracula's backstory and mythos more and could even be led by Anna since her village was controlled by Dracula for a long time. Given that the film is set in the world of Bram Stoker's "Dracula," other installments could be created to adapt other parts of the novel and further flesh out this world.

What could keep the film's franchise potential from happening

While the film has clear goals for its future, there are things that could keep it from reaching them. The first obstacle the film needs to overcome is its opening weekend at the box office. It releases at a time when both "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" still have a hold over the box office, and there's plenty of competition from the summer blockbusters. The current projections for "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" range from about $6 to $11 million — which wouldn't put it in striking distance of either film based on what they're projected to earn. The film will desperately need some good word of mouth and strong legs to have a good box office run. 

The next factor in "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" being a success is if moviegoers like it. Critics, so far, haven't been too fond of the film, but the audience is often the driving force behind a film's success. The last hurdle for "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" is the competition from other vampire films — including another from Universal themselves. "Eternals" director Chloé Zhao has a "Dracula" film on the way for Universal and Pablo Larraín's vampire film "El Conde" is coming to Netflix in September. So, there's a lot of competition that could steal the film's thunder and keep it from its future ambitions.

What does the ending mean for Universal's desires to reboot their classic monsters

It's no secret that Universal has been doing everything it can to bring its classic monsters back into the limelight for years. After the Dark Universe joined the other failed cinematic universes , Universal faced an uphill struggle. However, through films like "The Invisible Man" and "Renfield," they've seen that there are ways to bring their monsters back without the need for a connected cinematic universe. "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" isn't outwardly expressed as Universal's attempt to bring one of their classic monsters back to life, but it could easily be seen as a way for Dracula's cinematic legacy to continue.

Since "Renfield" fell flat at the box office , the door is wide open for another "Dracula" story to become Universal's next big horror franchise focused on the character. With the closing moments of "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" seeing Clemens begin his pursuit of Dracula, the story could easily continue, either in a sequel or possible future crossovers should Universal reignite their monster universe.

Why the ending gives viewers a different kind of Dracula

While recent depictions of Dracula have highlighted some of his more charming characteristics, or put a comedic spin on his presence, "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" takes the character back to his horror roots. Instead of being seen as this unsuspecting charmer with a hypnotizing power, Dracula is shown here to be more of an escaped demon from hell. His teeth are disfigured and sharpened to quickly draw blood from his victims and he has a pale, emaciated look that will instantly give you chills. By the time Dracula reaches his final form at the end of the film — with his wings and bat-like ears — he looks even more demonic. 

However, what's most interesting about this portrayal of Dracula is that he doesn't change his look when trying to hide among humans. When he is shown in the final moments of the film, he's just wearing clothes that slightly obscure his face to help him blend in. This is interesting since it was established earlier that he controlled Anna's village for years despite clearly standing out. This suggests that instead of using charm and suave looks to control those around him, this Dracula relies more on fear, intimidation, and force to control others — something that is incredibly different from other Draculas we've seen before.

What new mythos comes from the ending

Along with a new physical depiction of Dracula, the ending of "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" also establishes some interesting new mythos surrounding the character and his new pursuer, Clemens. With this Dracula using fear and intimidation to maintain his power, we get a more beastly monster who views his victims as disposable sources of food rather than people. He's much more dangerous to people than ever before and the minions he creates with the virus from his bite are much more violent and destructive than ever before. When Olgaren (Stefan Kapičić) gets possessed, he's shown to be very zombie-like and will go to any length — including self-harm — to do Dracula's bidding. Let's not forget the fact that anyone with Dracula's blood in them will be consumed by flames by the time morning comes around — further evidence that becoming Dracula's minion is deadlier than ever before. 

In Clemens, we get a new type of Van Helsing — one who will go to the ends of the earth to kill Dracula. Rather than have a background as a hunter or someone who's been tormented by Dracula for many years, his feud with Dracula is fresh and his background as a doctor gives him new ways of fighting the monster's control. These elements give the film a sense of familiarity but a newness as well, and the ending puts its own spin on the classic mythos in a way that feels exciting and interesting.

The Last Voyage Of The Demeter: Ending, Explained

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In these uncertain times, no ending can be considered final. Stories thought to be over get sequels thirty years later, and even the most contained narrative will be seen as a franchise opportunity. The Last Voyage of the Demeter tells a claustrophobic tale of horror on the high seas. Some critics saw its ending as a backdoor tease for a potential cinematic universe. Do those accusations have merit?

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is an adaptation of a single chapter from Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula . The book's narrative is told through letters and scraps of in-universe literature. The seventh chapter is a clever horror short story buried in the battle against the vampire. The Captain's Log has little impact on the rest of the novel, but it's a perfect standalone experience.

RELATED: The Last Voyage Of The Demeter Review

What is The Last Voyage Of The Demeter about?

On a stormy night off the coast of England, the brutal waves drag a disheveled schooner to the shore. When officials come to investigate the vessel, they find a mess of corpses and viscera. There are no survivors. The first man to step aboard is traumatized but leaves holding the captain's log. The film's story is told through its text. Captain Elliot of the Demeter arrives in Romania, where he needs to hire strong sailors for a treacherous quest. He and his men are offered an exorbitant sum to ferry fifty unmarked crates from Romania to London, with a bonus to be paid for beating the clock. Elliot and his first mate Wojchek meet Clemens, a doctor they initially underestimate. The strange men who unload the Demeter's charges scare off one of Wojchek's other hires, and Clemens saves the captain's grandson Toby from a falling crate, so Clemens is invited aboard.

Clemens joins the crew of the Demeter as they shove off. The voyage seems uneventful initially, but strange occurrences swiftly terrify the men. Clemens discovers a woman in the cargo deck. She seems to be ill, but Clemens' routine blood transfusions gradually bring her back to life. The other crew members see the stowaway, Anna, as a bad omen. The ship's livestock and Toby's beloved hound turn up dead. Each animal sports a tremendous bite wound on its neck. The next night, a crew member disappears. Another sailor dies the following evening. The realization hits the crew at different times and in different ways. Clemens remains skeptical. When Anna finally wakes up, she explains that a nightmarish monster called Dracula is aboard the Demeter.

As the crew realizes they're being picked off, they choose different strategies. Most are unwilling to risk the bonus to return to port. Clemens remains unsure of the evil aboard. Anna tries to warn her new friends. She's covered in similar bite marks. She explains that Dracula has kept her home village under his heel for generations. Olgaren, a member of the crew, identifies the threat immediately. Dracula has already killed several of his friends. When he tries to evade the vampire, he is left alive and tied up in the ship's rigging. After Olgaren awakens from his injuries, his eyes roll back into his skull, and he becomes a mindless zombie. The sailors drag him outside and tie him to the mast. When the sun rises, he burns to death. Most of the Demeter's crew is dead. The survivors can no longer ignore the threat.

How does The Last Voyage Of The Demeter end?

After Olgaren is dragged away, Dracula attacks young Toby . The crew tries to save him, but they're too late. Elliot collapses after Toby's injury, blindly convincing himself that his grandson must survive. Wojchek and Clemens decide that the boy must be put out of his misery. As they prepare to push him into the sea, Elliot swears he notices Toby move. The captain moves the shroud, exposing Toby's body to sunlight. He bursts into flames, burning Elliot's face as he drops into the sea. The loss is devastating, leaving only Elliot, Wojchek, Clemens, and Anna alive. The ship's chef, Joseph, escapes in a lifeboat, only to be killed by Dracula. As the boat returns unoccupied, the remaining crew members formulate a plan.

Clemens proposes drawing Dracula into the open before sinking the vessel and escaping in the lifeboat. Wojchek and Elliot are infuriated, arguing that the Demeter is their home. The captain and first mate volunteer to go down with the ship. The Demeter is a day away from England. Anna realizes that the vampire has been rationing the crew members, and with only one night left, they're all on the menu. Dracula emerges, and a fight breaks out. Wojchek dies as Dracula reveals his massive wings. Elliot ties himself to the wheel, fixing their course with his body. Clemens is dragged up the mast by Dracula. Anna sends half of the towering structure into Dracula's body, pinning him to the Demeter. The cargo hold is filling with water as they leap into the ocean.

Anna and Clemens escape Dracula, but the Demeter still reaches London. Concerned lighthouse keepers guide the vessel in. Dracula leaves the ship and disappears into the city. Anna and Clemens float on wreckage toward the shore. Anna reveals that she's infected and chooses to die on her terms. Clemens reaches London with a new purpose. He uses the documents in the cargo to find Dracula and swears to devote his life to finding the monster in disguise.

If there is to be a sequel to The Last Voyage of the Demeter , it will follow Clemens as he pursues Dracula. This aspect of the story isn't in the book. It would be entirely new material. It isn't out of the question, but adding to the miserable conclusion of the chapter changes the tone. The Last Voyage of the Demeter is exactly the contained horror story fans expected, but the last five minutes are a surprise.

MORE: What's Bringing Dracula Back To The Big Screen?

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Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Last Voyage of the Demeter

• The Last Voyage of the Demeter ends with the entire crew killed, except for Clemens. Clemens witnesses Anna's death and vows to pursue Dracula for revenge.
• Carfax Abbey is revealed to be Dracula's estate in London, where he rests during the daytime before hunting at night.
• Dracula and Anna are buried in Transylvanian soil, which is essential for restoring Dracula's strength during the day. The dragon symbol on the crates symbolizes Dracula's connection to Vlad the Impaler.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter ends with the entire crew of the Demeter — save for Clemens — killed. The supernatural horror film ends where it began: At the port of Whitby, with the ship having crashed into the harbor and the captain’s log having been found. Clemens, meanwhile, drifts at sea, having just witnessed the death of Anna, who reveals she was turned by Dracula. Though Clemens’ blood transfusions staved off the infection for a while, Anna didn’t want to live the life of a vampire.

Knowing she now had a choice in the matter, whereas she didn’t when she was offered to Dracula by her people, Anna chose to be burned by the sun than live the life of the undead. After her death, Clemens (Corey Hawkins) makes it ashore. Instead of going on with his life, the doctor vows to pursue Dracula and kill him for the death he’s caused. Clemens starts with the mystery of Carfax Abbey. Now that he knows Dracula can be burned by the sun, Clemens intends to kill him while he rests. But Clemens belatedly realizes his neck injury makes it so Dracula can sense him and vice versa.

Who Is Behind The Mysterious Carfax Abbey?

Throughout the film, the mystery surrounding Carfax Abbey deepens. It is what signed off on the transport of Count Dracula and his cargo, but there doesn’t seem to be any other information about it. Clemens looks it up when he arrives in England, and it seems to be a location where Dracula is holed up. What The Last Voyage of the Demeter doesn’t explain is that Carfax Abbey is actually an estate Dracula bought in London, and it’s where he lays to rest in the daytime before stalking the city for victims at night.

Considering Dracula had meticulously prepared for his trip, it’s likely that he’d bought Carfax Abbey long before the Demeter was set to sail. Dracula is intelligent, and didn’t want anyone to ask questions. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula , the estate is simply referred to by the first part of its name. Carfax Abbey is also a fictitious place, though it is based on the real-life Whitby Abbey in England. Whitby is also the name of the port at which the Demeter arrives.

Captain Elliot’s Last Words Explained

Captain Elliot is forever changed following the death of his grandson Toby, but he agrees that the Demeter must go down in the hopes of killing Dracula once and for all. Just before his death, Captain Elliot tells Clemens, “Let them know I was true to my trust.” While it seemed as though Elliot was speaking in general, perhaps about his honor as a captain, it’s more than likely he wanted others to know that he was right all along about Clemens. Throughout the voyage, Captain Elliot was one of the only people to believe in Clemens, trusting him with the life of Toby and Anna.

Clemens had long been dismissed because he was a Black man, discredited and not given opportunities despite his credentials. Captain Elliot believed Clemens was not only a good man, but good at his job. Elliot’s last words signified he was right to trust Clemens. What’s more, Elliot believed Wojchek would have made a good captain, and the fact that the latter agreed to go down with the ship and ultimately trusted Clemens with the plan — despite Wojchek’s earlier antagonism towards Clemens — solidified Captain Elliot’s decisions to rely on both characters. Elliot’s last words held weight for Clemens, even if he turned toward revenge.

The Real Reason Dracula & Anna Are Buried In Soil

The entirety of Count Dracula’s cargo was made up of crates of soil. Dracula and Anna were buried in them, so deeply that no one realized at first that there was anyone inside. Initially, the soil seemed like an odd choice. It covered up Dracula well enough, but he was bringing it along to London because the soil itself was from Transylvania — Dracula’s homeland. The Transylvanian soil is needed for Dracula to restore his strength during the day while he sleeps.

This is especially pertinent because Dracula was leaving Transylvania behind for London, and the soil was a requirement as he made his home in a new place. Without being surrounded or buried in Transylvanian soil, Dracula would not be as powerful as he aimed to be. Of course, the Demeter’s crew didn’t know the soil was so important, only that it was an odd thing to be buried in. Perhaps if Anna had an inkling regarding why he needed to be buried in it, the crew could have come up with a plan to rid Dracula of his beloved soil, sapping him of his energy.

The Meaning Of Dracula’s Dragon Symbol

Dracula’s coffin — and the other crates making up the Demeter’s cargo — was decorated with the dragon symbol. The reason behind the symbol isn’t explained in The Last Voyage of the Demeter , but the dragon is synonymous with Dracula himself, whose name means “son of the dragon.” Bram Stoker is said to have been influenced by Vlad III Dracul, also known as Vlad the Impaler.

Vlad III was the son of Vlad II, who was a member of the Order of the Dragon beginning in 1431, and whose emblem was a symbol of the dragon. In modern Romanian, the name Dracul refers to the devil. In the film, Anna often calls Dracula the devil because of his actions, the hold he has on people, and the death he brings wherever he goes. Thus, Dracula and the devil become one and the same, born from the dragon and transformed over time, an ancient entity whose symbol brings terror.

What The Last Voyage Of The Demeter Changes From The Book

“The Captain’s Log” chapter in Stoker’s Dracula lays the groundwork for The Last Voyage of the Demeter , but the film’s screenwriters alter or add a few things to expand upon the existing story. In the book, the Demeter sets sail in the summer of 1893, whereas the voyage in the film takes place in 1897. The sea captain is found lashed to the wheel of the ship in the book, but he is freed by Clemens before he dies in the movie. The names of the crew, and the details of exactly what happened daily on the ship, are additions to the film, as are Clemens and Toby.

How The Last Voyage Of The Demeter’s Ending Sets Up A Sequel

The Last Voyage of the Demeter ends with the entirety of the ship’s crew dead, but Clemens manages to survive. Dracula has made his way to London and is fully aware of Clemens’ presence. It’s Clemens’ vow to find and kill Dracula that essentially sets up a sequel to the horror film. The moment in the pub is charged with revenge, surprise, and a challenge from Dracula, as though daring Clemens to kill him.

While the Demeter’s story is over, the film’s final scene seems to be hinting towards more to come. Clemens’ hunt for Dracula has only just begun when the film ends, and a sequel could follow Clemens in this next chapter. That said, a sequel to The Last Voyage of the Demeter has not yet been confirmed, and it’s unclear whether there will be one. Even if a sequel never materializes, one can imagine that Clemens will struggle in killing Dracula, a formidable foe, but there is always hope he might succeed.

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'The Last Voyage of the Demeter' Ending Explained: Knock-Knock, It's Me Dracula

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The Big Picture

• The Last Voyage of the Demeter falls short of its promise, ending with a goofy hint at a potential sequel that is one of its few surprises.
• The film's predictable plot and lack of subtlety doom its theme and narrative, despite the efforts of the lead actors.
• The film sets up a potential sequel as the main character, Clemens, realizes he must hunt Dracula in London, but the ending feels silly and leaves much to be desired.

Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for The Last Voyage of the Demeter

André Øvredal’ s The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a movie with plenty of promise that unfortunately ends up falling far short of its influences before ending with one of the goofiest hints at a potential sequel that you’ll see this year. If you’ve found yourself here reading this after watching it, then you likely know all this and are just trying to piece together what the hell they were getting at with that odd cliffhanger of a conclusion. Don't worry, we were too, but we'll expand upon that ending in a moment. If you want to watch it without any knowledge of how the film concludes, bookmark this page and then rejoin us after. Other than that, let’s set sail into the full scope of this story.

The Last Voyage of The Demeter (2023)

A crew sailing from Varna (Bulgaria) by the Black Sea to England find that they are carrying very dangerous cargo.

What Is 'The Last Voyage of the Demeter' About?

To provide some background, there was a really potentially fun surprise of an experience to be had with this little horror flick. Even before the film was released into the world, it, unfortunately, was given away that this was going to be a story about Dracula . Though it would have likely benefited from a more coy marketing strategy that maintained the surprise of what lay in store and let word of mouth spread, the trailers immediately gave away the game. This was ultimately to its detriment, as the full feature itself soon becomes a rather predictable romp that falls into repetition where the greatest twist is in its setting of a boat. The crew of said vessel, led by Clemens ( Corey Hawkins ) and Anna ( Aisling Franciosi ), whose actors do their best to carry the film despite having very little to work with, must ultimately do battle with Dracula (Javier Botet) to prevent him from arriving in London where he can continue to feed. Death is everywhere as the being picks them off one by one, growing stronger and stronger until the climactic confrontation. Though Clemens and Anna go about hatching a plan, it was one that we soon realize was always doomed to fail . This comes down to reasons of both theme and narrative, each of which is hammered home with such a lack of subtlety that it ends up dooming both .

'The Last Voyage of the Demeter' Review: Dracula's Horror Cruise Lacks Bite

The iconic vampire goes on a lovely little cruise that comes with all food included, though could have used more substance to the overall meal.

Dracula Is the Only Thing That Takes Flight in 'The Last Voyage of the Demeter'

Throughout the film, it is repeatedly established that faith is part of what drives many of the crew and leads them to overlook the horrors lurking in the darkness. This means it takes an agonizing amount of time for them to rally together, by which point they are so close to shore that their plan to sink the boat with Dracula on it is comically insufficient to stop the being. That was true even before the characters discover that he can fly now . As we learned from an early scene that they were not privy to, Dracula now has wings and can swoop down on them. Thus, the supposedly brilliant plan to shoot him from atop the crow’s nest is immediately a flop when the winged vampire swoops in for a quick snack and takes them down. That then leaves Clemens and Anna on their own again. They manage to pin Dracula to the ship after a couple of close calls and then drift away on broken pieces from the vessel.

It's there where Anna meets her end in a scene tha t feels rather similar to Midnight Mass though without any of the genuine horror and emotional potency . Essentially, Anna is what Dracula had been feeding on while locked away before he breaks out. When Clemens gave her blood transfusions in the hopes that it would bring her back to health, he was also putting off her transforming into a vampire herself. That is what happens now as she turns to him with her eyes beginning to turn white just as the sun is starting to rise behind them. Even in the final moments we get with her, Franciosi continues to bring a lot of depth to a character that is largely underwritten . Of all the people that die over the course of the film, she is the one who embraces her fate and turns towards the sun. She is then consumed by fire, having ultimately failed to stop Dracula while still giving it a hell of a better attempt than any of the characters would have done without her. With Clemens now on his own and this actually rather fitting final death behind him, we pick up with the goofy tease for a potential sequel that, honestly, is one of the few surprises that this film had to offer .

How Does 'The Last Voyage of the Demeter' Set Up a Sequel?

Now in the city, Clemens is at a bar where he asks for directions to a place where he knows Dracula spends the daytime in hiding. However, as it is night, he fears it would be too dangerous to go after him right now. Wouldn’t you know it, Dracula is also there at the bar ? He knocks on the ground with his cane, literally echoing a recurring element from the film where characters would bang on the ship to communicate , and rattles Clemens to his core. When he subsequently gathers himself, he chases after his target, but he is unable to catch him. This rather silly ending seems to imply that there is a desire for a sequel in which we explore what it would be like to try to hunt for Dracula in London. There is little else to it other than that, proving to be one of the oddest and disappointing conclusions to a film this year . Only time will tell how seriously we are meant to take this tease.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is currently available to rent or own on Amazon Prime

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The Ending of The Last Voyage of the Demeter Explained

Where does the latest Dracula tale leave the legendary bloodsucker?

The Last Voyage of the Demeter  joins the ranks of dozens of   Dracula   adaptations this week, but unlike previous attempts to translate Bram Stoker's tale to the big screen, this film is taking on just a small part of the epic story. As you've probably heard by now, the film adapts "The Captain's Log" section of Stoker's novel, which describes the cursed voyage of the title ship as it heads to London to drop off Dracula at his new home. That means it's an intriguing expansion of a pre-existing story, but how does that work in terms of ending the story? Let's take a closer look, and unpack how  The Last Voyage of the Demeter  works in relation to the larger  Dracula  narrative.

What Happens at the End of The Last Voyage of the Demeter ?

The film's place as a piece of a larger story is interesting, particularly when it comes to the ending, because we know a couple of things have to happen in order for  Demeter  to fit into the  Dracula  saga. We know that the ship has to arrive in England with Dracula ( played by Javier Botet in this version) somehow still alive, and we know that the ship has to at least  appear  to have no survivors left onboard. These are the elements of Stoker's story that remain the most important, at least if you're planning to keep the  Dracula  plot intact on some level. 

And indeed,  Demeter  does work to maintain those big pieces of  Dracula 's story. We spend most of the film getting to know the crew, from the Captain ( Liam Cunningham ) to the ship's doctor Clemens (Corey Hawkins) to a stowaway named Anna (Aisling Franciosi) with a connection to Dracula's Transylvanian home. Along the way, Dracula himself picks off members of the crew one by one, leaving a few survivors to make a last stand that eventually costs the lives of everyone on board  except  Clemens and Anna, who float away from the ship as it takes on water, hoping that a trapped Dracula will go down with the vessel.

RELATED: Why  The Last Voyage of the Demeter  Will Make Dracula Scary Again

As the two survivors drift in open water, Anna reveals that she's slowly turning into a vampire , an inevitable byproduct of Dracula's persistent feeding on her after she was turned over to him as a blood slave back home. Clemens could stave off the effects with blood transfusions, but Anna doesn't want that. She'd rather be free of Dracula's curse, and thus faces the sunrise and bursts into flames, leaving Clemens alone. Meanwhile, Demeter manages to survive the water it's taken on and make landfall on the rocks of the English coast. Dracula, after spending a little while pinned against the ship's central mast, gets free before sunrise, leaving him with the chance to settle in London after all. 

In England, sometime after the ship's sinking, the story of the  Demeter  begins to gain a certain cultural currency as the creepy tale of a "ghost ship" that washed up with no survivors, and the lighthouse keepers who managed to salvage the ship in the first place have no doubt added to the legend through the discovery of the Captain's Log, which warns that a great evil was onboard. What no one seems to know, however, is that Clemens is not only still alive, but lurking in London with the location of Dracula's new home, Carfax Abbey, firmly in his mind. 

Clemens has spent the whole film talking about how he wants to understand the world. He wants things to make sense, as a man of science who believes in structures and systems and a natural order to things. Dracula goes against everything he knows about that natural order, and because of that he can't abide the creature surviving. So, with Carfax Abbey's location in hand, he sets out to wipe out Dracula, discovering in the film's final minutes that Dracula is not just already in London, but very aware that Clemens is looking for him.

RELATED:  The Last Voyage of the Demeter is Basically Alien, Just Set in the 1800s on a Ship

So, is there enough here for a sequel? Since the sequel would basically just be the back half of  Dracula , it's safe to say of course there is. What we don't really know is exactly how the narrative will twist from here. Clemens could link up with characters like Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, and the rest of the vampire hunting gang from the novel, or he could end up succumbing to his own obsession with the vampire somewhere along the way. He is, as the ending reminds us, marked in some way by Dracula, though he's not necessarily going down the full vampiric route just yet. Does that mean his obsession will consume him the same way Dracula's thirst for blood has consumed him? 

We don't have the answers to these questions, and we don't know if a sequel might come along to answer them for us. What we do know, though, is that  The Last Voyage of the Demeter  sends us away with two key thoughts: Evil is very hard to vanquish, but so are the people determined to eradicate it at any cost.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter  is in theaters now. Get tickets at Fandango .

• The Last Voyage Of The Demeter
• Universal Pictures

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter’s ending, explained

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula , a single chapter, The Captain’s Log , is devoted to chronicling the story of the Demeter, the doomed ship that was duped into bringing Dracula to England. Screenwriters Bragi Schut Jr. and Zak Olkewicz expanded on that chapter and turned it into a standalone feature film, The Last Voyage of the Demeter , which was directed by André Øvredal.

How does The Last Voyage of the Demeter end?

What comes next for dracula.

In this film, Dracula (Javier Botet) is about as far from a romantic figure as you can get, and there will be no kissing for this Lord of the Vampires. At no point in the movie does Dracula even remotely resemble a normal human being. Instead, he is evil incarnate who feeds on the crew and their livestock without any regard for them. Dracula might have remained undiscovered if Anna (Aisling Franciosi) had not been found by Clemens (Corey Hawkins), the new doctor on the Demeter. Because Dracula had been using Anna as his unwilling source of blood, he quickly finds new sources of nourishment.

Hawkins previously starred in The Walking Dead , while Franciosi had a small but pivotal role on Game of Thrones as Ned Stark’s late sister and Jon Snow’s mother, Lyanna Stark. Another Game of Thrones veteran, Liam Cunningham, plays Captain Elliot, while The Suicide Squad ‘s David Dastmalchian portrays Elliot’s first mate, Wojchek. The rest of the cast includes Woody Norman as Toby, Jon Jon Briones as Joseph, Stefan Kapičić as Olgaren, Nikolai Nikolaeff as Petrofsky, Martin Furulund as Larsen, Chris Walley as Abrams, and Nicolo Pasetti as Deputy Hirsch.

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Now, we’ll tell you about the ending of The Last Voyage of the Demeter and what it means for the events that take place after the movie.

Warning: the rest of this post contains spoilers for The Last Voyage of the Demeter .

The ending of this movie was never in doubt. After all, it is called The Last Voyage of the Demeter , and the opening moments of the film show the wreck of the ship and the alarmed reactions of the authorities before flashing back to four weeks earlier. Judging from the way the crew treated the Demeter, it was a fine ship before Dracula came along. But his presence ensured that the Demeter’s voyage to England was a one-way trip.

By the time the remaining crew of the Demeter realizes that Dracula must be stopped at all costs, there are far too few of them left. Clemens and Anna come up with the idea of using Anna as bait and trapping Dracula on the Demeter before they sink the vessel to the bottom of the sea. What they didn’t know is that Dracula has wings, and their plan may have been doomed from the start. Captain Elliot and Wojchek, give their lives in the effort, but Dracula is only briefly trapped before the Demeter runs aground in England.

Both Clemens and Anna manage to survive by jumping off of the ship and holding on to a piece of wreckage as it approaches the shore. Unfortunately, Anna reveals that while Clemens’ blood transfusions saved her life, they only prolonged her transformation into a vampire. Rather than allow herself to become like Dracula, Anna shares a farewell with Clemens and allows the morning sunlight to burn her to death.

With Dracula unleashed in England, the events of Stoker’s novel begin to unfold again …with one key difference. Clemens has also made it to shore, and he has made it his mission to destroy Dracula. Because of his earlier investigation into Dracula’s resting place, Clemens knows where Dracula intends to sleep during his stay in England. And at dawn, Clemens intends to put an end to Dracula’s evil once and for all.

If only it were that simple. In the film’s closing moments, Clemens is alarmed to see that Dracula is not only aware of his survival, the vampire toys with him in a crowded bar before escaping into the night. Regardless, Clemens is not deterred from his quest for revenge. And while Clemens does not encounter any of Dracula’s enemies from the novel, like Jonathan Harker or Abraham Van Helsing, it’s entirely possible that Clemens’ presence could change the events of Stoker’s story if a sequel materializes.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is now playing in theaters.

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter ending explained: does anyone survive?

• Oops! Something went wrong. Please try again later. More content below

NOTE: this post contains spoilers for The Last Voyage of the Demeter ending.

The story of Dracula is more than 125 years old, as Bram Stoker's original novel was published in 1897. However, The Last Voyage of the Demeter tells a previously skimmed-over section of the story, Dracula's journey from Transylvania to London aboard the titular ship. So how does (or does it at all) The Last Voyage of the Demeter ending change the Dracula legend?

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is based on the chapter "The Captain's Log" from Stoker's novel. It follows the crew, including Captain Eliot (Liam Cunningham) and a doctor, Clemens (Corey Hawkins), as they make the long journey from the Black Sea to London. Soon members of the crew start to disappear and fear begins to set in. With insight from a stowaway named Anna (Aisling Franciosi), the crew learns they are dealing with a monstrous creature known as Dracula (Javier Botet).

As they continue to be picked off night after night and just days away from London, the crew realizes they must figure out how to stop the creature from getting ashore and continuing his horrible killing spree.

What do they do and does anyone survive? Read on for our breakdown of The Last Voyage of the Demeter ending. (If you have not yet seen the movie, here's how to watch The Last Voyage of the Demeter .)

Does anyone survive in The Last Voyage of the Demeter?

Throughout the journey, Dracula picks off the crew of the Demeter one by one. First Petrofsky (Nikolai Nikolaeff), then Larsen (Martin Furulund), completely draining them and killing them. He also attacks Olgaren (Stefan Kapicic), but Dracula doesn't kill him. Instead, his bite infects Olgaren and causes him to act mad and be restrained.

This is when the crew truly becomes concerned with what is happening, as Clemens notices Olgaren has bite marks on him as Anna did. The next night they try to be more prepared for Dracula's emergence on the deck, but instead, he possesses Olgaren and uses him to chase Toby (Woody Norman) below the deck.

Toby hides in the captain's quarters, while Olgaren attempts to break in. However, Dracula himself is able to get into the quarters and bites Toby. While the rest of the crew arrives and stops Dracula from killing Toby, he is now infected.

The next morning, Olgaren is tied to the mast of the ship when the sun rises, causing him to burst into flames and die. When Toby does not respond to the blood transfusions that helped Anna recover, they prepare to give him a sea burial. But Captain Eliot refuses to believe Toby is dead, convinced he saw him move under the sheet. He removes the sheet and Toby does pop up, but possessed like Olgaren was. He bites the Captain and then bursts into flames from the sun. The crew quickly throws Toby overboard.

The next night, the ship's cook Joseph (Jon Jon Briones) attempts to flee on a lifeboat, but Dracula, now with his wings regenerated after feeding on the crew, flies out to him and kills him.

With only Clemens, Anna, Captain Eliot, Wojchek (David Dastmalchian) and Abrams (Chris Walley) still alive, they decide to sink the ship with Dracula on it and try to make their escape with one of the lifeboats. Using Anna as bait (she says Dracula's bite allows him to feel her, and she him), Wojchek and Abrams are in the crow's nest ready to open fire, while Clemens hides near Anna. However, a storm hits and Dracula uses it as cover to snuff out the plan, quickly killing Abrams and Wojchek.

Anna and Clemens scramble, while Captain Eliot straps himself to the helm and tries to take the ship out to sea and away from the English coast, but Dracula kills him as well.

This just leaves Anna and Clemens, who fight Dracula, trying to wound him, but nothing seems to work. Anna then gets the idea to cut the support for one of the masts, bringing it down and trapping Dracula. With the monster pinned and the Demeter blindly being thrown in the storm, Anna and Clemens abandon ship.

The Demeter crashes along the coastline, just as we see in the movie's opening moments, but Dracula was able to free himself and make his escape.

At sea, Clemens and Anna float on some of the ship's wreckage. The sun is about to rise and Anna reveals to Clemens she is still infected by Dracula. Not having had a blood transfusion in a while, her eyes are beginning to look like Olgaren and Toby's did. Clemens says he can still save her, but Anna tells him that it's OK, it is her choice to die and end being under Dracula's terror. She pushes herself away toward the rising sun, bursting into flames as it hits her.

That only leaves Clemens as the sole survivor of the Demeter.

Is there going to be a The Last Voyage of the Demeter sequel?

The movie ends with Clemens is in London, asking around for information about where Dracula's cargo from the Demeter has been taken. While in a pub, Clemens says in voiceover that he will hunt Dracula down at all costs.

It is then that he hears a knock, knock, knock, just like what was used as a signal on the Demeter. He looks around but does not see where it is coming from. We see, however, that the knocking is coming from Dracula with his cane, sitting just a short distance away, taunting Clemens.

Dracula gets up to leave, continuing to knock. Clemens follows the noise outside, but does not see Dracula. Yet he continues to hear the knocking.

This scene appears to set up a potential sequel for the movie, where Clemens would continue his pursuit of the vampire. However, as of publication, a sequel has not been greenlit.

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter

Out on the wine-dark sea.

• Aug 11, 2023
• Dir. by André Øvredal

Note: This review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.

The Victorian-set horror film has been somewhat out of fashion for a few decades, having achieved its last surge of true studio-backed popularity in the 1990s. That period arguably ended with the Hughes Brothers’ phantasmagorical but flawed Jack the Ripper adaptation, From Hell (2001), and the subgenre hasn’t really recovered since. Oh, there have been occasional notable efforts like Joe Johnston’s underrated remake of The Wolfman (2010) and Guillermo del Toro’s opulent gothic romance Crimson Peak (2015), but cinematic chills set in the gaslight glow of the 19th century remain few and far between.

The most immediately notable aspect of André Øvredal’s new feature, The Last Voyage of the Demeter , then, is that it is a full-throated Victorian horror picture in the Year of Our Lord 2023, one produced by DreamWorks and given a proper theatrical release by Universal, no less. For genre devotees who are jonesing for the distinctive pleasures of a lushly produced, 1800s-set supernatural thriller, Øvredal’s film will doubtlessly feel like a properly bloody steak dinner after a long, demoralizing fast. It’s not a completely satisfying meal, owing primarily to some clunky writing and editing. Various versions of the story allegedly spent years in Development Hell, and although Øvredal’s enthusiasm for the material is obvious, it’s also clear that the producers lacked a clear understanding of how to shape or market the film. (Witness the laughable, anachronistic use of a certain Smashing Pumpkins song in the feature’s trailer.)

One can at least understand why Hollywood has been so keen to make this film for so long, and why Øvredal and his collaborators embraced the project with marked gothic-horror fanboy glee. The premise is fairly irresistible, for, as cannier genre fans have already guessed, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a Dracula story. Specifically, it’s a “sidequel”: Taking inspiration from a single chapter in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, it recounts the story of how the ageless, bloodthirsty Count Dracula journeyed from his Carpathian fastness to the streets of London via the sailing ship Demeter .

In Stoker’s book, the “Captains Log” chapter constitutes a compelling horror mini-narrative in its own right, the tale of a doomed vessel recounted from the perspective of her captain in a pseudo-epistolary style. Øvredal’s film zeroes in on the taut, creepshow potential of this story-within-a-story, observing that it effectively strips Dracula of 120 years of pop-cultural baggage and turns him loose on a group of ordinary working-class folk who have no notion that they are just the nameless, off-screen victims in a Dracula movie. Furthermore, when you trap a crew on a ship with a ravenous monster in the middle of nowhere, you basically have Alien (1979), and Alien is never a bad template for a horror movie.

Opening with on-screen text that awkwardly and superfluously explains that, hey, this is a Dracula movie, Øvredal’s feature begins at the end, with the Demeter having run aground on the coast of North Yorkshire. The local constables find no living crew members aboard, but they do uncover a captain’s logbook that records an unbelievable tale. Several weeks earlier, the Demeter sets out from a Bulgarian port on the Black Sea under the command of Captain Eliot (Liam Cunningham) and his first mate, Wojchek (David Dastmalchian). Also aboard are cabin boy Toby (Woody Norman) – who happens to be Eliot’s grandson – the ship’s cook Joseph (Jon Jon Briones), and a salty foursome of colorful but largely interchangeable sailors (Chris Walley, Stefan Kapicic, Martin Fururland, and Nikolai Nikolaeff). Rounding out the small crew is the latest addition and the de facto protagonist, Clemens (Corey Hawkins), a Cambridge-educated physician fallen on hard times, who is eager to return to London even if it means flexing sea legs that he hasn’t used since his maritime childhood.

The bulk of the Demeter ’s cargo consists of 50 enormous wooden crates owned by an anonymous client, each container affixed with a curious dragon seal. It’s an admittedly mysterious charter but also a lucrative one, as it includes a hefty bonus for a speedy journey and early arrival in Britain. The prospect of a big payday initially has the crew in high spirits, but before you can say strigoi , sinister happenings begin to occur aboard the ship, including strange sounds emanating from the hold and slithering shadows glimpsed during the evening watches. The crew’s growing unease is amplified by the discovery of an unconscious Romani woman, Anna (Aisling Franciosi), who apparently stowed away in one of the crates. Clemens takes responsibility for her care, fixating on her peculiar bloodborne affliction, but to the ship’s veteran sailors, the presence of a woman onboard is just another ill omen in an expanding litany of unsettling misfortune. Events swiftly and remorselessly escalate from there to gruesome nocturnal attacks on the onboard livestock and, eventually, on the crew themselves.

A skeptic might assert that knowing exactly how this story ends – Dracula kills everyone and makes landfall in England, roll credits – puts an inherent drag on the situational tension in The Last Voyage of the Demeter . However, Øvredal approaches the material with passion and conviction, treating it less as an accessory story than as a stand-alone, period creature feature. With the exception of a creepy but wholly unnecessary epilogue, the film doesn’t belabor its connection to the source novel or to the story and visuals that have been more popularly received through a century’s worth of theatrical and cinematic adaptations. Øvredal keeps the essence of the film commendably simple: a group of people are physically trapped in a confined environment with a powerful predator that is picking them off one by one. They don’t know they’re the collateral damage in the most famous English-language horror story of all time, so they don’t behave with any kind of meta-awareness of their situation.

Clemens fills the role of the token rationalist, Captain Eliot the seasoned but out-of-his-depth leader, and Anna a tripartite hybrid of exposition-spouting wise woman, trembling damsel-in-distress, and world-weary badass action-lady. The rest of the crew are an anxious, superstitious lot, accustomed to freak weather and strange phenomena, but wholly unprepared for an ancient, ageless evil on the scale of their unwelcome passenger. The Demeter itself makes for a fantastic setting, realized as a series of incredibly tactile sets crafted with splendid attention to period detail. When Clemens initially comes aboard, Toby gives him – and therefore the audience – a quick tour of the ship, elegantly providing a clear sense of the restricted geography that will define the next 90 minutes of bloody terror.

Quite bloody, as it happens. Øvredal embraces the film’s hard R rating with the gusto of a genre aficionado who recognizes that studios don’t exactly give $30 million theatrical horror films free reign these days. Consider this your content warning: The Last Voyage of the Demeter is very gory and at times shocking, stomping on a couple of mainstream horror-movie taboos with the beastly cruelty of a wolf ripping out a deer’s throat. The design of Dracula himself (Javier Botet) is far afield from the caped Transylvanian nobleman of popular conception, starting out as a kind of mewling Eraserhead mutant and evolving into a hairless, needle-fanged chiropteran nightmare that loosely nods towards Nosferatu ’s Count Orlock. The film eschews complex mythology or vampiric rules, keeping the monster lore straightforward: Dracula feeds on living blood, sleeps in the earth of his homeland, and fears the touch of the sun. That’s it.

Cinematographers Roman Osin and Tom Stern – the latter a longtime Clint Eastwood collaborator – contribute significantly to the film’s rich atmosphere, whether the scene in question takes place on the sun-parched upper deck, in gloomy lantern-lit interiors, or in clinging nocturnal sea fog. Credit also goes to the unnerving sound design overseen by Adam Kopland and the score by genre powerhouse Bear McCreary, which shifts smoothly from haunted-house eeriness to thunderous monster action.

Overall, it’s a gratifying nuts-and-bolts period horror movie. However, the film’s generous and exuberant execution unfortunately doesn’t save The Last Voyage of the Demeter from the shoals of some gawky writing and editing. Hawkins is normally a solid performer, but he seems a bit adrift in a role that lacks clear characterization. The film’s attempts to give Clemens a poetic worldview and an empathetic backstory – such as a scene that belatedly and rather bafflingly connects his experiences with racial prejudice to the crew’s current predicament – just come off as clumsy and scattershot, orphans from dozens of successive rewrites. Patrick Larsgaard’s editing has an aggravating habit of scuttling the clear, coherent sense of space that the film is plainly aiming to maintain. The latter half of the feature in particular is positively filthy with abrupt, confusing cuts that betray missing scenes and reek of the sort of ham-fisted studio tinkering that inevitably follows disappointing test screenings. These faults aren’t enough to fatally sink The Last Voyage of the Demeter , but they are enough to demote it from a future minor horror classic to a lavish but imperfect genre exercise.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter opens in theaters everywhere on Friday, Aug. 11.

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‘The Last Voyage of the Demeter’ Review: A Dracula Movie To Give You Nightmares

Dracula's sea voyage from romania to england is full black nights and unspeakable horrors in this hair-raising horror film from director andré øvredal..

On a dank, dreary and dismal night in 1897, a chartered Russian tanker called the Demeter left Romania for England with an under-staffed crew, its only cargo a series of coffins in the shape of wooden boxes. In the ominous black nights that followed, a chaos of death, destruction and unspeakable horrors ensued. When the Demeter finally arrived at its destination, the ship was empty. Nobody ever solved the mystery. Until now. 

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And so begins The Last Voyage of the Demeter , a longer dramatization of a brief chapter in Bram Stoker ’s classic vampire novel, Dracula. It took up only a few pages in the 1897 book and no more than a single scene in the 1931 film with Bela Lugosi, but now we can see what really happened on that fatal voyage from Transylvania to London. It’s pretty foreboding, loaded with atmosphere, dark as midnight and thick as a deadly fog. Also very well made and justifiably terrifying.

Distilled from details in the captain’s log discovered in an empty cabin, the narrative moves forward from one bloody encounter after the next as the remains of the most evil Carpathian count of all time rises from the soil of his native country and wreaks havoc—first attacking the livestock used for meat to feed the crew, then the dog that was their mascot. There are some grotesque eating scenes when the monster comes alive and, one by one, drains the jugulars of everyone onboard. Then, in the eye of a violent and brilliantly staged storm, the creature goes on a rampage of relentless horror and savagely feasts on several humans who replace the animals as the missing protein on the menu, including the captain’s beloved cabin boy. Dracula’s victims all go up in fiery flames and burn to ashes, including Anna, a stowaway who turns out to be one of the vampire’s intended brides. She escapes her coffin, narrowly evades her own annihilation, and helps the crew to defeat the enemy. One day away from the coast of England, the handful of crew members still alive decide to sink the ship and send the beast to a watery grave, but they don’t know Dracula.  

As the only living survivor when the ship finally reaches port, a man named Hawkins follows the vampire, garbed in a long black cloak like Jack the Ripper, through the murky cobblestone alleys of London, determined to spend the rest of his life tracking down the maniac and driving a stake through his heart. It’s all vigorously detailed and hair-raisingly enhanced with extraordinary computer-generated special effects. The cast is unknown (to me, anyway) but under the guidance of André Øvredal, the Norwegian director of the cult films Trollhunter and The Autopsy of Jane Doe, they all excel in complex and physically demanding roles, including Corey Hawkins as Clemens, Aisling Franciosi as Anna, and Liam Cunningham as the captain. Special effects are excellent and the clammy cinematography by Tom Stern is enough to give you nightmares. Filmed in Malta, a rare film location I’d like to see more of.

Observer Reviews are regular assessments of new and noteworthy cinema.

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter

A crew sailing from Varna (Bulgaria) by the Black Sea to England find that they are carrying very dangerous cargo. A crew sailing from Varna (Bulgaria) by the Black Sea to England find that they are carrying very dangerous cargo. A crew sailing from Varna (Bulgaria) by the Black Sea to England find that they are carrying very dangerous cargo.

• André Øvredal
• Bram Stoker
• Bragi F. Schut
• Zak Olkewicz
• Corey Hawkins
• Aisling Franciosi
• Liam Cunningham
• 445 User reviews
• 196 Critic reviews
• 52 Metascore
• 2 wins & 11 nominations

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• Trivia Dracula's look is based on Count Orlok from the unauthorized adaptation Nosferatu (1922) . This was also the model for the look of the vampire Barlow in the original Salem's Lot (1979) .
• Goofs (~1h 35m) Wojchek locks himself inside the cargo hold by inserting a wooden board through the handles, but they're sliding doors, so they would still open.

Clemens : I... do not... fear you!

Dracula : You will!

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• Soundtracks Hangin' Johnny Traditional Arranged by Thomas Newman Performed on Hardanger fiddle by Kathleen Keane

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• Oct 8, 2023
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• August 11, 2023 (United States)
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• United Kingdom
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• Dreamworks Pictures
• Reliance Entertainment
• Storyworks Productions
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• $45,000,000 (estimated)
• $13,637,180
• Aug 13, 2023
• $21,786,275

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• Runtime 1 hour 58 minutes
• Dolby Atmos

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the last voyage of the demeter.

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As those of you with a decent grasp of horror trivia already know, the Demeter was the ship whose ultimately doomed journey to deliver some especially dangerous cargo from Transylvania to London was chronicled in the seventh chapter of the Bram Stoker classic Dracula . Although this section, running 16 pages in my copy, contains some of the most evocative imagery in that sometimes clumsily written book, the whole episode is not that important to the narrative. It simply illustrates how the title character got from point A to B, and on the rare occasions when filmmakers have chosen to bring this story to the screen, the journey is either reduced to a brief montage or newspaper headline or ignored entirely. Now comes “The Last Voyage of the Demeter,” a feature-length expansion of those 16 pages that fully examines the strange occurrences aboard one of the most doomed sea journeys in literary history.

Upon hearing this movie's premise for the first time, I wasn’t entirely convinced it could work. This would be a film where practically every audience member would not only know exactly what the supernatural force at the center of the story is before the Universal logo hits the screen. But they would also—barring some unexpected deviation from the well-known narrative—know exactly how the on-screen events would play out. To me, it looked like just another attempt by Universal to introduce the character that played such a key role in the studio’s history to contemporary audiences following the misfired likes of “Dracula: Untold” and the recent and dreadful “ Renfield .” That may have been the case, but the results are a big step up from those previous stumbles, an often striking take on the tale that makes up for what it lacks in surprise with a lot of style and some undeniably effective scare moments.

Set in 1897, the film opens as the Demeter is about to set sail from Transylvania to London, carrying Captain Eliot ( Liam Cunningham ), loyal first mate Wojchek ( David Dastmalchian ), his grandson Toby ( Woody Norman ), and a small crew that grows even smaller when some of the locals recruited for the journey get skittish when they see that the cargo contains many large crates being sent by an unknown figure to Carfax Abbey in London. Among those recruited at the last second is Clemens ( Corey Hawkins ), who signs on as the ship’s doctor to get passage home to England. His expertise comes in handy when one of the boxes is accidentally opened, and an apparent stowaway ( Aisling Franciosi ) is discovered with a mysterious malady that requires numerous blood transfusions. 

Soon, strange things begin happening on the ship. All the livestock on board and Toby’s beloved dog are slaughtered throughout one grisly evening. Sailors begin seeing and hearing odd things at night while on watch, and even the ship’s rats appear to have vanished, leading up to the deathless line, “A boat without rats—such a thing is against nature.” The members of the crew soon begin disappearing, driving the already skittish ones who remain further into paranoia that is not helped when the stowaway, whose name proves to be Anna, finally wakes up and informs Clemens and the others that to steal a line from Mel Brooks , yes, they have Nosferatu. As Dracula ( Javier Botet ) continues snacking through the ship, the rapidly dwindling survivors try to figure out how to stop him before they reach London.

The film was directed by André Øvredal , whose previous credits include such intriguing horror-related efforts as “ Trollhunter ,” “ The Autopsy of Jane Doe ,” and the underrated “ Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark .” This time, he is trying to figure out how to tell a story in which everyone in the audience will be ahead of the characters on the screen at virtually every given point. He accomplishes that primarily by focusing heavily on visual style, creating a moody and haunted atmosphere throughout—even during the scenes set in the daytime—that is both eerily beautiful and just plain eerie. "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" is one of the better-looking horror films to come along in a while. The cat-and-mouse games between Dracula and the crew are staged in a manner that suggests a seafaring variation of “ Alien ,” with Øvredal milking scenes for maximum tension before culminating in some nasty business. 

Bear in mind, some of that business is indeed quite nasty—the visualization of Dracula shown here is a particularly grotesque and demonic variation, the scenes of slaughter are definitely gory enough to earn the “R” rating, and not only does the one character you are conditioned to expect to somehow avoid a gruesome demise end up suffering just that, but they also do so more than once. The performances, especially the ones from genre MVP Dastmalchian, Franciosi (so effective in “ The Nightingale ”), and Botet, are all strong and convincing, which helps to raise the emotional stakes to make up for the lack of surprise.

There are two points where the film stumbles a bit. Although the relatively slow and measured pacing employed by Øvredal to generate suspense is mostly effective and preferable to the quick-cut approach others might have taken, a few scenes here run on too long for their own good. Also, the film—Spoiler Alert!—indulges in one of the most irritating elements of contemporary horror cinema, a final scene that exists solely to set up future movies if this one does well at the box office. 

And yet, the rest of the movie works enough so that these flaws don’t hurt things too badly. “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” may not be a classic in the annals of Dracula cinema along the lines of the Terence Fisher's Hammer production “Horror of Dracula,” Werner Herzog ’s version of “ Nosferatu the Vampyre ,” or Francis Ford Coppola ’s “Bram’s Stoker’s Dracula.” But it is a smart, well-made, and sometimes downright creepy take on the tale that both horror buffs and regular moviegoers can appreciate in equal measure. 

In theaters now.

Peter Sobczynski

A moderately insightful critic, full-on Swiftie and all-around  bon vivant , Peter Sobczynski, in addition to his work at this site, is also a contributor to The Spool and can be heard weekly discussing new Blu-Ray releases on the Movie Madness podcast on the Now Playing network.

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

Rated R for bloody violence.

118 minutes

Corey Hawkins as Clemens

Aisling Franciosi as Anna

Liam Cunningham as Captain Eliot

David Dastmalchian as Wojchek

Chris Walley as Abrams

Stefan Kapičić as Olgaren

Martin Furulund as Larsen

Nikolai Nikolaeff as Petrofsky

Woody Norman as Toby

Jon Jon Briones as Cook

Javier Botet as Dracula / Nosferatu

• André Øvredal

Writer (based on the chapter "The Captain's Log" of Dracula by)

• Bram Stoker

Writer (screen story by)

• Bragi F. Schut
• Zak Olkewicz
• Christian Wagner
• Patrick Larsgaard
• Julian Clarke

Cinematographer

• Bear McCreary

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter Wastes Its Terrifying Monster

“ Alien on a boat” is not as exciting as it sounds.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle for The Last Voyage of the Demeter is that it shows its hand before it even starts. Based on the seventh (and most mysterious) chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula , director André Øvredal’s new movie sets itself up nicely. A wrecked ship washes up on the shores of England, empty except for mutilated bodies and a captain’s log warning of a terrible evil that accompanied them. So what happened on that boat? Many horror fans have wondered, but no movie has provided an answer — until now.

It’s an intriguing premise, but what follows is exactly what you expect, and little else.

Most are familiar with the basic plot beats of Dracula . The vampire count travels from his home country of Transylvania to England, where he terrorizes a couple of young, aristocratic women until their loved ones must enlist the knowledgeable Dr. Van Helsing to destroy the blood-sucking monster. Last Voyage of the Demeter details that voyage from Transylvania to England, which plays out in the book like a chilling, unexplained incident that was all too typical of the times — this was, after all, the era of Jack the Ripper and mysterious Victorian era maladies.

There’s something Lovecraftian and dread-inducing about this chapter in Bram Stoker’s novel. The brief glimpses we get of a crew being picked off by a ruthless entity feed into this fierce terror of the unknown too awful to comprehend. But a Lovecraftian fear of the unknown is hard to adapt into a good horror movie, so Øvredal and screenwriters Bragi Schut and Jr. Zak Olkewicz opted for “ Alien on a ship.”

Dracula is a different beast than what we are familiar with, in The Last Voyage of the Demeter.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter starts at the beginning of the end: with the doomed ship washing up on the shores of England amid a powerful rainstorm. The English naval officers who search the ship find a captain’s log that warns of some great evil on board they have now brought with them… Cut to four weeks earlier at a Transylvania port where Captain Elliot (Liam Cunningham) recruits three men for the Demeter’s voyage to London. Of the three that volunteer, only Doctor Clemens (Corey Hawkins) stays while the other two are frightened off by the dragon insignia on six wooden crates that are part of the ship’s cargo.

Unphased by this strange event, the crew sets sail with a brisk pace that could allow them to make landfall early, earning them a bonus promised by their charter. It’s the promise of this bonus that drives the crew to push on, even as ominous and increasingly violent events start to occur. First, they discover a dying woman (Aisling Franciosi) in the cargo hold after one of the crates breaks open. As Clemens nurses the woman to health, something appears to stalk the ship, slaughtering the livestock and the beloved dog of Captain Elliot’s grandson Toby (Woody Norman, bringing the same precocious charm he showed in C’mon C’mon ). Finally, this bloodthirsty entity starts to pick off the crew, turning a handful of them into brainless monsters that attack the rest.

Once the crew realizes their fate, Last Voyage of the Demeter begins to lose its momentum.

Øvredal, whose films Autopsy of Jane Doe and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark teased a promising horror auteur with a talent for moody thrills and striking imagery, ups the atmosphere in Last Voyage of the Demeter . The dread sets in with every creak in the old wooden ship, in every echoing knock in its walls, and in the mist perpetually settled across the water at night. But it’s clear that Øvredal relishes most in delivering the shocks of R-rated gore. Last Voyage of the Demeter has some admirably gory scenes, including one particularly horrifying one where a trapped victim’s eye darts wildly while Dracula feasts on his flesh.

This Dracula (Javier Botet, whose unique physicality stemming from a rare genetic condition is a truly inspired choice) is less sinister gentleman than feral beast, a creature that stalks his prey and rips their throats open with his teeth. Clearly inspired by the Nosferatu design, Dracula is a full-fledged monster in Last Voyage of the Demeter — a bony, ghostly white, inhuman beast whose pale-eyed stare invokes the stuff of nightmares. It’s clear that Øvredal thinks the same, getting all the mileage he can get out of the genuinely scary monster design within the first hour of the film.

There’s a Dracula behind you.

Once we’ve reached the halfway point, and the crew has realized their fate, Last Voyage of the Demeter begins to lose its momentum. The characters keep circling the same dilemmas and keep coming up with the same fruitless solutions. (There are at least two separate instances where the captain orders them to search the whole ship.) Øvredal keeps the tension up by throwing in a few shockingly dark choices and several buckets of blood and viscera, but it feels like this ghost ship is already filled with ghosts.

The energy, at least, doesn’t wane within the key cast. While Hawkins is a likable but somewhat generic protagonist, and Franciosi is excellent at playing another traumatized rifle-wielding woman , it’s David Dastmalchian who delivers the standout performance as the incredulous first mate Wojchek. Donning facial hair and a thick Eastern European accent that makes him virtually unrecognizable, Dastmalchian is hard-edged, desperate, but ultimately sympathetic in a way that elevates him above the character archetypes that populate the rest of the cast. One actor who feels slightly misused, though, is Cunningham, whose somber gravitas gives the film weight. However, despite the occasional narrative punctuation of his captain’s logs and the loving relationship with his grandson, Demeter clearly missed an opportunity to make him the protagonist instead of Hawkins.

Last Voyage of the Demeter is, essentially, a brilliant short story stretched too far. Compared to other contemporary blockbusters’ bloated runtimes, Demeter barely brushes up against two hours, and yet it is left adrift in mood and atmosphere, without much momentum to keep it going. Despite the genuine thrills and throat-ripping gore, Last Voyage of the Demeter fails to drum up something more exciting than what was already on the page.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter opens in theaters August 11.

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a Creative Dracula Adaptation That Bites Off a Bit More Than It Can Chew

Olivia rutigliano grades andré øvredal's new film on a curve.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter hoists sail underneath an excellent conceit. The film is an adaptation of a single chapter from the 1897 novel Dracula, Chapter VII, which is an account of a ship’s voyage chartered from Varna, Bulgaria to Whitby, England. The novel Dracula is epistolary and this account is the Captain’s Log, which records strange things happening aboard the ship. Crew members start disappearing and the sea grows tempestuous. Sailors begin reporting seeing a strange man in the shadows of the vessel. “God seems to have deserted us,” the Captain writes. By the time the ship reaches its port, everyone is dead.

The sailors do not know that they are transporting Count Dracula from his Carpathian empire to his new English home, but to readers of the novel who have spent the novel’s four opening chapters in Castle Dracula while the Count negotiates the sale of an English estate, it’s evident that he has begun his journey from his ravished homeland to a bountiful new world. The doomed voyage of the Demeter is a logical bridge between these two parts of the novel, but it’s often reduced to a single scene, or even expository shots of a ship leaving Eastern Europe and/or arriving on the shores of England.

It is a very clever idea to zero in on this oft-underrepresented section for two reasons. One, the story suggested by the Demeter ‘s log is one of incredible drama and terror, an opportunity to explore what must have been, to that doomed crew, a terrifying and dramatic mystery. Two, the tale of the Demeter is, when you think about it, a standard horror movie: it’s about a group of people who find themselves in a remote location with a powerful evil entity or serial killer (or both) who picks them off one by one.

The film, written by Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz and directed by André Øvredal, is well-versed in its source material, which doesn’t usually technically matter to the quality of a movie but which in this case helps greatly, since this film’s focused relationship to the book is its main selling point; Dracula has been remade so many times that studying the basics feels important for a film that by its very nature promises to burrow into the forgotten details.

That being said, it also takes up a very difficult task: it’s well-known at this point that Dracula does ultimately arrive in England after ravaging the ship and feeding on its crew. It’s quite a challenge to build the necessary rhymes and rhythms of the horror genre when it’s an incontrovertible fact that the entire venture is doomed anyway. It’s hard to get the audience to care about characters who are mere footnotes in the original novel and who literally must die.

For these reasons, I’m grading The Last Voyage of the Demeter  on a curve. To make up for all these obstacles, the movie has the good sense to lean into what a horror movie with these restrictions CAN do to move an audience: steep itself in atmosphere and dabble in gore. The film is equal parts rich and nasty, baroque in its rendering both of day-to-day life on a cargo ship in the late 19th century and the carnage that takes place on its final trip.

The film takes its time before the scary stuff, allowing the audience to learn about the ship itself, architecturally as well as culturally. Then, when the waters get choppy, the fog rolls in, and the vampire gets loose, the film becomes a shadowy Victorian nightmare. Visually, including in the design of its vampire, the film takes much inspiration from F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent horror film Nosferatu, one of the few Dracula films that captures in great detail the terrors on the ship where the Count (or “Orlock,” as he is named for copyright purposes) has stowed away. One of the film’s most frightening sequences, in which the Count stalks the last of the crew, feels tonally in sync with The Last Voyage of the Demeter , even though they are separated by a century’s worth of filmmaking innovations.

But The Last Voyage of the Demeter ‘s Dracula is almost the least satisfying part. He’s not in it so much, and when he is, it’s as a Orlockian, Kurt Barlow -looking goblin. And don’t get me wrong… that’s scary. It’s plenty scary. He’s ugly as hell. But Dracula the guy is the inspiration for 126 years’ worth of entertainment, and he has more of an impact when he’s a suave foreigner than when he’s his skeletal batlike avatar, or at least when he shape-shifts between the two forms.

There are two Dracula films this year—this and Renfield — and both under-use the Count. It’s almost as if these films are scared to, and I get why. He’s one of the most interesting and complicated characters ever created — he’s evil and yet sociable, human and animal, a monster and a gentleman, ubiquitous and omnipotent and yet with many restrictions, invulnerable but with many opportunities for vulnerability. He might literally be the devil. He’s also a feudal landlord from Eastern Europe attempting to fit in busy metropolitan London. That’s a lot to factor in, or even to pick and choose from, when designing a Dracula for your movie. The Last Voyage of the Demeter ‘s  choice to make him more monster than man works well for the jump scares but also depersonalizes, uncomplicates him as a villain.

But this film is mostly about the crew dealing with an unknown, threatening presence among them—like in Alien (1979). Not to recklessly compare movies, but I’d say that this doesn’t work as well because the audience of The Last Voyage of the Demeter has so much more information about the monster than the audience of Alien. And also because the audience knows that Dracula himself is way more interesting than any of the regular guys pulling the lines and steering the ship, even though the actors do their damnedest.

Liam Cunningham plays the dignified Captain Elliott, who permits a young doctor named Clemens (Corey Hawkins) to join the crew before the ship departs Varna. Because Clemens is Black, the mostly Slavic and Irish crew treats him with a bit of racism, but no more than he’s experienced before, he explains. The first mate, Wojchek (David Dastmalchian) is a bit suspicious of him, but the Captain’s grandson Toby (Woody Norman) and Toby’s dog both take a liking to him. So does a veteran sailor named Olgar en ( Stefan Kapicic). But things grow complicated after they discover all the livestock have been slaughtered and find a young Slavic woman named Anna (Aisling Franciosi) inside one of the many crates of dirt that are being stowed aboard in the hull.

Amid these strange developments, the crew focuses their suspicions on the wrong newcomers, worrying about the two strangers above deck (Clemens and Anna) instead of realizing that there is a worse one below. The film doesn’t really turn itself into a witchhunt before it becomes a vampire hunt, which feels like a missed opportunity to complicate an otherwise very, very simple film.

Still, when Dracula does materialize, the film becomes a bracing game of hide-and-go-seek with the devil. And if that’s all it accomplishes, that isn’t worth nothing. The film might bite off more than it can chew, but it’s still a dark, deluxe vampire slasher. And, like, I’ll drink to that.

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter - Review

Drac’s on a boat and, he’s drinkin’ blood and….

From a handful of pages by Bram Stoker comes The Last Voyage of the Demeter, a moody hunt-and-kill chronicle of Count Dracula’s passage from Transylvania to England. Director André Øvredal expands upon a single chapter in Stoker’s pioneering novel to imagine how its titular vampire fed his hunger at sea. Journal entries about missing crewmen are translated into a rain-soaked nightmare of bad sailor’s luck, torn open necks, and waterlogged isolation that plays to Øvredal’s storytelling strengths. It’s a throwback to broody, Hammer-esque horrors with dread as thick as a fog over the moors, and while the journey isn’t quite fit for a nearly two-hour runtime, there’s still a bloody-good addition to Dracula lore found in the dimly lit decks and cargo hold of the Demeter.

Writers Bragi F. Schut, Stefan Ruzowitzky, and Zak Olkewicz introduce protagonists like Corey Hawkins’ Cambridge graduate Clemens or David Dastmalchian’s gruff and hard-nosed second mate Wojchek, helping us sympathize with characters who are otherwise faceless cannon fodder in the source material. From Liam Cunningham as Captain Eliot – a sympathetic leader making one last haul before retirement – to Aisling Franciosi as the mysterious stowaway Anna, Øvredal’s ensemble feels at home quivering under a doomy, gloomy moonlight, petrified by a gangly figure lurking in the shadows.

Famed creature actor Javier Botet (It, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Mama) brings “The Evil” (as Drac is referred to by his unwitting shipmates) to life in a form that recalls F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot miniseries. Demeter’s Dracula is a vile bloodsucker who begs audiences to cower in his presence. Bat-like features distance this vampire from the  dreamy Brad Pitt and Robert Pattinson types, driving home the animalistic nature of Botet’s performance.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is sea-sickeningly claustrophobic.

The waters churn around the Demeter in a sign of continued distress, tossing the wooden vessel around as a reminder that it’d be a perilous place to be with or without the murderous addition to its manifest. Øvredal channels the Universal Monsters classics of the 20th century whenever lightning bolts illuminate scenes of prolonged dread, drawing fear from the hopelessness of being set adrift with one of horror’s heaviest hitters. Cunningham’s narration is stoic and resigned as spooked seamen fall to fang-gnashing demises each night, but the structure becomes repetitive. The Last Voyage of the Demeter is sea-sickeningly claustrophobic, but sustaining the crew’s paranoia for roughly 110 minutes is an uphill battle. The script stays true to Stoker down to the tiniest speck of cursed Transylvanian soil, and the performances are steeped in survival urgency, yet there are instances where the slow-burn torment needs to be reignited.

Maybe that’s because The Last Voyage of the Demeter has a set destination with an outcome that can’t be rearranged. Øvredal tells a tale that Stoker confined to punchy entries in a captain’s log, which makes the inevitability of slain galley cooks and skittish lookouts less gripping in a second act that withholds Dracula’s full potential. The introduction of an underage livestock handler attempts to heighten the stakes, and Clemens’ experiences with Victorian-era racism speak to societal monsters, but otherwise, Schut and Olkewicz stick to the predator-prey standards. Familiarity is the film’s friend more often than not, yet it briefly turns foe when the cast tries to generate suspense in scenes with an obvious answer: There’s a vampire on board the Demeter.

Computer animation steps in for practical craftsmanship that would look infinitely sharper.

There are other minor quibbles, like when computer animation steps in for practical craftsmanship that would look infinitely sharper, but nothing that’s a stake to Last Voyage of the Demeter’s heart. This movie adores being a horror time capsule that gives actors like Dastmalchian and Hawkins opportunities to pay homage to more theatrical genre films that relied on performance to supplement their visual trickery. Øvredal dusts off buried treasures of Old English verbiage and vampire mythology, and while excitement may lay in hiding for longer than hoped, the director unleashes his creature of the night in a way that would make Tod Browning proud.

The Verdict

The Last Voyage of the Demeter should delight horror fans raised on Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and offers an R-rated bite of vampiric brutality for genre fans with a stronger bloodlust. Øvredal does well to transport his cast to a time when scary stories were told around lanterns in the dead of night, and even if the moodiness evaporates due to a protracted runtime and the foregone conclusion of Dracula’s landfall, the director accentuates the basics of violent feeding sessions in hair-raising fashion.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter

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Watch The Last Voyage of the Demeter with a subscription on Paramount+, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

What to Know

The Last Voyage of the Demeter finds a fresh angle on Dracula's oft-told tale, although lackluster execution often undercuts the story's claustrophobic tension.

A solidly scary Dracula movie, The Last Voyage of the Demeter will reward patient viewers with some intense scenes and plenty of eerie atmosphere.

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Audience reviews, cast & crew.

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Hollywood's new Dracula is played by horror's greatest secret weapon

The Last Voyage of the Demeter actor Javier Botet talks about how he built his career playing some of horror's most popular monsters, from Mama to The Conjuring 2 to Alien: Covenant.

Senior Writer

Javier Botet has frightened literally millions of people by portraying monsters in movies like 2013's Mama , 2015's Crimson Peak , 2016's The Conjuring 2 , 2017's Alien: Covenant , 2018's Slender Man , and the same year's Insidious: The Last Key . But it was the Spanish actor's turn to be unnerved ahead of playing the iconic role of Dracula in the Malta-shot horror film The Last Voyage of the Demeter .

"In the beginning I was a bit scared," Botet, 46, tells EW in an interview, which took place before the start of the SAG-AFTRA strike. "I was sure it would be wet in the boat, a lot of hours in the night. So, I thought we were going to be cold, but in Malta, in the summer, the weather was perfect to make the movie."

Like nearly all of Botet's on-set experiences, the shoot was still something of an endurance test. The Last Voyage of the Demeter is adapted from the seventh chapter of Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula that finds the iconic vampire killing off a ship's crew, who are unwittingly transporting the aristocratic bloodsucker from Eastern Europe to England. "The movie is really Alien -on-a-ship in 1897," says director André Øvredal , who previously cast Botet as the Corpse character in 2019's Guillermo del Toro-produced Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark . "Dracula is the creature that they have to contend with."

To enhance the Alien -style vibe, Øvredal decided to depart from the human-like look and aristocratic costuming of previous big-screen Draculas for something more monstrous. "It was always about being a demon, because that's what they call him. They call him 'the Devil,' and that's a big statement," says the filmmaker, whose movie costars Corey Hawkins , Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham, and David Dastmalchian . "It was always my wont to create a creature movie here, to portray Dracula in a way we haven't really seen much. It's not really described much in the novel, how he looks when he's out on the boat. We just know that he has the ability to change into all kinds of shapes. So, we were free to create this demon as we pleased."

Audiences will witness a dramatic change in the Dracula creature over the course of the film as he gains strength by feasting on the blood of the Demeter's crew. "One side [is] the old fragile man, who's over 400 years old, who is now suffering from a lack of blood, and he's become almost like an addict," Øvredal says. "When he regains his powers, through killing the crew one by one, he then becomes the demon. For that version of Dracula, we were going for references in animals, and especially of course in bats, to portray muscle movements and how they used their wings."

The director's vision, turned into reality by prosthetic makeup designer Jörn Seifert, meant long hours in the makeup chair for Botet, but the actor believes the results were worth the effort. "It's been one of the best makeups, for sure, I've had," he says. "Jörn and his team made amazing designs. We had three, four different looks. In the beginning, it was more skinny, more white, more weak, and then it started getting bigger. After we release the movie, we will show a lot of photos of the procedure, and it will blow the mind of a lot of makeup lovers."

Botet is talking over Zoom from his home in Spain while one of his two cats wanders around in the background. "He's Selva," the actor points out. "Selva is 'jungle' in Spanish. And the other guy is Akira, like the comic." Amiable, garrulous, and clearly in love with the filmmaking process, Botet could not seem more different from the fear-inducing ghouls he specializes in playing onscreen. "He's just the sweetest guy, he truly is," says filmmaker James Wan , who cast the actor as supernatural fiend the Crooked Man in The Conjuring 2 . "All the great cinematic horror movie monsters are played by the sweetest, nicest actors, and Javier is very much in that camp."

You could say that the 6 feet 7 inches tall Botet was born to play the kind of elongated or otherwise outsized creatures that pepper the filmographies of Wan, Øvredal, and Del Toro, the latter of whom cast him as multiple ghosts in Crimson Peak . As a child, the actor was diagnosed with Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder which increases growth in limbs and extremities. Not too long ago, it would likely have shortened his life by decades.

"Marfan syndrome is a connective tissue disorder," he explains. "It makes you so flexible in the joints, very long. In childhood, you grow so fast if you have Marfan. The doctor told my father, 'Your child probably [will] never get 20 years.' I was so lucky because medicine has changed so much. Now, the expectancies of Marfan life, it's so big, it's like 75 or even more. But, yes, I need to take care, be responsible, and go to the doctor yearly."

Botet fell in love with movies after seeing the creature-filled The Empire Strikes Back and he spent his teenage years making short films with friends. Later, Botet joined a makeup workshop which led him to be cast as an emaciated ghoul in the Madrid-shot Beneath Still Waters (2005), directed by Brian Yuzna ( Bride of Re-Animator ). "I needed a monster. I wanted to have somebody who crawls out of the deep," Yuzna says. "I said, 'I want to get someone really thin, that we can then put full body makeup on, and have a cool-looking monster.' And they found Javier. I did audition multiple actors for the part, and Javier proved himself to be the best choice due to his incredible ability to act physically, almost like a dancer."

The filmmaker says his new cast member took to performing for the camera like a duck to water — or like an undead creature emerging from the murky depths anyway. "I don't think he had ever acted before, but he was terrific," the director says. "Quite frankly, he's the best thing in the movie."

Over the next few years, Botet racked up an impressive number of credits in locally shot movies, most notably appearing as a possessed and horribly changed girl in Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's 2007 acclaimed found-footage horror film [REC] and its two sequels.

Botet's biggest break came when he attended Austin's Fantastic Fest in 2009 to promote [Rec] 2 and encountered Argentinian filmmaker Andy Muschietti , who was screening his horror short Mama . Muschietti went on to cast Botet in the title role of a vengeful ghost in hit feature film version of the concept, which was produced by Del Toro and shot in Toronto.

"It was my first big international experience," the actor says of shooting Mama . "It was hard. It was so cold. I was shooting almost naked in the forest sometimes." Botet compares Muschietti to the legendary director and perfectionist Stanley Kubrick . "He makes always 30, sometimes 40 takes," he recalls. " Sometimes 10, but he never does it in two or three takes. [You think] okay, we're here, and if you think it's going to go better, let's do it 1,000 times, no matter. But Mama was a beautiful experience and the movie was number one in the USA box office."

Botet's terrifying performance in the film attracted the attention of other Hollywood filmmakers, including Wan. The Conjuring 2 director describes the Spaniard as "a real performer," saying, "He plays these roles that are so much larger than life, and he brings such a unique stamp and creativity to it."

It is a sentiment with which Øvredal enthusiastically agrees after working with Botet on The Last Voyage of the Demeter . "We wanted to focus on the beast in a way, but still it has to be Dracula. He was able to portray that," the director says. "He gives performance after performance, take after take, with different nuances in accordance to how he thinks the character should behave and also what he hopes that I would enjoy."

Botet himself is delighted to have gotten his chance at portraying Stoker's vampire and says he would happily reprise the role, no matter how much discomfort that involved. "In the last years, everybody asked me what monsters I want to do. I always say Dracula, Nosferatu," he says. "Yes, I would love to play Dracula again, in a sequel or even in another franchise or another studio. Dracula never dies, never stops. He's immortal!" To the horror crowd, so is Botet.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter hits theaters this Friday.

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Film / The Last Voyage of the Demeter

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a 2023 horror film directed by André Øvredal . It is based upon Bram Stoker 's classic Gothic Horror novel, Dracula , specifically the chapter "The Captain's Log". Starring in the film are Corey Hawkins , Aisling Franciosi , Liam Cunningham , and David Dastmalchian .

The story tells of the nightmarish final voyage of the Demeter as it sails from Romania to England... with an unexpected passenger aboard. The film released in theatres August 11, 2023. Interestingly, it is the second 2023 film by Universal to be based upon Dracula , the first being the horror comedy Renfield .

The manifest for this voyage is comprised of the following:

• Action Survivor : Both Anna and Clemens become this by the end. Anna in particular shows clear prior knowledge of how to use a gun (presumably due to being from a rural village with hostile wildlife), but it's not until she's back to her full strength that she has the will to fight.
• In the original novel, while it is implied Dracula massacred the crew of the Demeter , there is enough evidence to suggest he was innocent and one of the crew did it instead. The film removes any ambiguity by showing Dracula attacking the ship's livestock and crew.
• Despite adapting the events of less than a single chapter, the timeline is so loosely adhered to as to be unrecognizable, with everything from the book that could have been a scene being notably absent. To give but one example, the captain is specifically noted to have been dead for two days when the authorities in Whitby discover him, while the film's climax takes place only one day before they reach London.
• The captain is the subject of many deviations, from the addition of his grandson to the complete negation of his Dying Moment of Awesome . He's also much more keyed into the plot in this version; In the original novel, the captain was the last person to learn about Dracula and didn't see him until his last entry in the log, while here his crew are much more eager to loop him into things.
• Dracula is here reimagined as a near-feral Orlok-esque winged vampire, appearing to entirely lack the shapeshifting abilities of the book (although he does sprout previously-absent wings after feeding), with even his final appearance dressed to the nines but unmistakably inhuman.
• The book makes no mention of any additional vampires created from the crew. The film has Olgaren and Toby return as vampiric zombies after Dracula's feeding was interrupted, a fate shared by Anna in the end . Said zombies also burst into flame in direct sunlight , another notable deviation from the book.
• The captain's death bears some specific mention for how it is rearranged. In the novel, he is found lashed to the wheel with a rosary and cross , having starved to death untouched by Dracula. In the film, his cross entirely fails to ward off Dracula, and Clemens actually unties him from the wheel and lets him down so he can die of his injuries.
• While the film shows the Demeter beached on a rocky shoal, in the book the ship practically sailed itself into harbor, with Dracula disembarking in the form of an intimidating black dog. Several paragraphs are even spent on the subject of who is legally responsible for the wreckage.
• Adaptation Explanation Extrication : In the original novel, an impenetrable fog surrounds the Demeter the entire time it is in the English Channel, preventing them from contacting any other ships for help or going to any of the many ports on both sides of the Channel. While the fog can be briefly seen in the movie, the fact that it is the reason they're not putting in somewhere or why the crew doesn't try to get help in one of the world's most heavily trafficked sea-lanes isn't brought up.
• Adaptation Expansion : The film focuses on, well, The Last Voyage of the Demeter , which encompassed a single chapter of the original Dracula novel.
• Adaptational Heroism : Not that the crew in the novel was evil, but their role is limited to being picked off by Dracula, and as awesome as the captain's death is it still leads Dracula to port. In this movie not only they actively try to fight him off, but even attempt to prevent him from reaching the coast. Not to mention that Clemens manages to survive the encounter and vows to hunt him down.
• Adaptational Nationality : The original novel mentions a crewman named Abramoff; in the film, he's changed to Abrams and played by an Irish actor.
• Adaptational Non Sapience : Subverted with Dracula. Early on in the film, Dracula is presented as a feral predator. When he infects Olgaren , not only does he mimic his scared words, but he does it again near the end of the movie when he gives a Shut Up, Kirk! to Clemens, and the movie ends with Dracula having already donned his iconic garb to fit in with the humans in London .
• Adaptational Ugliness : Dracula wasn't exactly a handsome guy in the book, but he was rather humanlike in appearance, being a decrepit-looking old man with a mustache . Here, he's a hideous, batlike Humanoid Abomination , looking and acting more like a wild, feral beast than a human.
• Adaptational Wimp : Dracula's ability to shapeshift, control the weather and the mind of others are all left out of this movie, and he gains a vulnerability to the sun. The trope is hugely downplayed, though, since what is left is more than enough to make him an unstoppable threat. One might assume he still has these powers, but held back because he didn't consider the crew enough of a threat to use them.
• The Alcoholic : Petrofsky. Wojchek waves off his death as having simply fallen overboard from drink (despite the blood on the deck). Other members of the crew are unconvinced, claiming there wasn't enough alcohol on board to get someone with Petrofsky's tolerance drunk enough to fall off the ship.
• Anyone Can Die : Given the Foregone Conclusion of the source material, absolutely nobody is safe. In the end, Clemens is the only survivor.
• Apocalyptic Log : As in the novel, the captain's log, which provides occasional narration as the situation onboard goes from bad to worse.
• The dialogue states that after the ship passes the Gulf of Biscay, their only course of action is to continue on to London, which is absolutely not the case, as by that point they would've been in the English Channel and could've just as easily landed anywhere in Brittany or Normandy if they didn't want to make landfall in England.
• This extends to the entire voyage, as unlike what the movie implies, the Demeter's route would've never taken them to any point where sailing to a port during the daylight time wouldn't have been an option. Were it not for the points of origin and destination, a viewer might be forgiven for thinking the movie depicted a transatlantic voyage.
• Petrofsky and Larsen. The former is a surly drunk who makes derogatory comments about Clemens and Anna, and the latter holds his knife at Clemens when he attempts to retaliate. Fittingly, the two men are Dracula’s first human victims.
• Joseph seems like an all right guy early on , but once Dracula has killed several members of the crew, his self-righteousness boils to the surface. He claims Dracula's appearance is a curse from God, and chews out the crew for various "sins" they committed (while conspicuously not bringing up any "sins" of his own ). He then knocks out one of his crewmates and tries to steal a boat to escape, so the audience is unlikely to mourn him when Dracula simply flies out to his boat to eat him.
• Ax-Crazy : Downplayed. Dracula is more brutal and feral than any other incarnations before, but he's still a cunning and manipulative monster.
• Back Stab : Clemens buries an axe into Dracula's back, although it does nothing but anger him .
• She later gets another one minutes later when she cuts the ropes to send a wooden pole into Dracula to try and kill him.
• The Bad Guy Wins : A Foregone Conclusion , since the Demeter 's fate is established in the opening of the film and this is merely a single chapter in the larger story of Dracula. Clemens survives, and has a haunting encounter in a busy pub where Dracula taunts him before vanishing into the foggy streets .
• Bat People : The final form that Dracula adopts once he starts attacking the crew openly is a humanoid creature with bat wings, though Anna notes that he's capable of appearing human to disguise himself when he so chooses .
• Bittersweet Ending : With the exception of Clemens, everyone onboard the Demeter dies, and Dracula has made it to London along with Clemens. However, he is dedicated to finding the vampire and killing him for good.
• Black Dude Dies First : Inverted with Clemens who survives and seeks to hunt down Dracula .
• Call-Forward : Clemens uses blood transfusions to treat Anna when he first discovers her, the same treatment Van Helsing would prescribe for Lucy Westenra in the novel.
• While most of the crew were never directly named in the original Dracula novel, a log does enumerate them: 1 captain, 2 mates, 1 cook and 5 hands, with no doctor being mentioned, so this applies to Clemens who also survives the events of the story and is last seen hunting Dracula down in London .
• There is, naturally, no mention in the novel of a female stowaway being found in one of Dracula's crates full of dirt.
• The captain's grandson Toby is likewise a complete fabrication for the film.
• Classy Cane : While searching the cargo for signs of the monster, Clemens discovers an elegant cane with a dragon's head partially buried in one of the boxes. Dracula later uses this cane to taunt Clemens in a busy pub, tapping it on the floor to draw his attention before vanishing into the streets .
• Closed Circle : The Demeter is a cargo vessel in the middle of the ocean, preventing the cast from leaving when things start to go wrong. Even worse, they had an opportunity to stop in port early on when the animals died, but if they did that they would lose their early delivery bonus and so chose not to.
• Continuity Nod : The Brides themselves do not appear, but Anna indicates that her people have been giving people to Dracula for centuries to appease him. She is merely the latest "gift" offered to him, and yet another woman being preyed upon similar to Lucy and Mina.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character : Clemens is one for Abraham Van Helsing. Both men are professional doctors and men of science in general, but while Van Helsing is already well versed in the supernatural and quick to identify the threat's origin , Clemens has no such background and initially tries to find more mundane explanation for the threat facing them . Because of the above-mentioned knowledge, Van Helsing is able to better plan against Dracula's actions with the loss of only a single member of his group, Clemens ends up being the Sole Survivor of his own . Van Helsing also commands considerable respect and is a fairly big name in the medical world, while Clemens struggles to find work due to the racism he faces (which makes this contrast a twofold, since Van Helsing is accepted despite being a foreigner, while Clemens is ostracized despite being English).
• Death by Pragmatism : Joseph decides to steal a lifeboat in the middle of the night to escape Dracula. That would have been a smart decision if Dracula wasn't killing the crew one at a time to make sure they last the journey and are able to keep the ship going. By already removing himself from the crew, Joseph just made himself Dracula's next meal.
• Death of a Child : As one might expect from a story with such a Foregone Conclusion , Toby does not survive the events of the story. This pretty much destroys the captain's spirit.
• Defiant to the End : Thankfully averted as Anna saves him. Clemens as Dracula has him at his mercy, says to him in a defiant tone Clemens : [as Dracula has him by the throat.] I do not fear you.
• Despair Event Horizon : Toby’s death breaks Captain Elliot, and after getting over a brief delusional episode where he thinks Dracula can revive him, he resolves to go down with the ship.
• Developing Doomed Characters : Dracula doesn't really make his first appearance until the half-hour mark, with the time before that spent getting to know the various seamen before they become vampire chow.
• Doomed by Canon : Clemens ends the movie pledging to hunt down Dracula. Since he's a Canon Foreigner and there was no mention in the book of anyone else pursuing Dracula outside of our protagonists, we know Clemens' quest is doomed to failure.
• Dracula : The vampire menacing the crew, naturally, though it isn't until about halfway through the film that he finally gets name-dropped by Anna.
• Evil-Detecting Dog : All the animals freak out when Dracula emerges from his hold. Early on, Huckleberry the dog is shown barking through the floor at Dracula's shadow down in the cargo area.
• Evil Sounds Deep : The few times Dracula talks his voice is very deep and menacing.
• Face Death with Dignity : Unlike Olgaren and Toby, who both die screaming, Anna makes no sound as she lets the sun’s light ignite her.
• Facial Horror : The scene with a vampiric Olgaren burning in the sunlight, with a closeup of his skin bubbling like boiling water .
• Foregone Conclusion : Anyone who has read the original Dracula knows that the Demeter arrives in England with no surviving crew. This is played with slightly in that while Clemens survives, he arrives in England separately from the Demeter and makes no report of his survival, leaving the newspaper accounts to match those in the novel .
• Genius Bruiser : Dracula might be at first looks like a fierce, savagely beast but he's actually very smart and diabolical as the protagonists finds out at their own expenses.
• Genre Blind : Played for Drama . Despite having several clues about how to best confront Dracula, the characters' unfamiliarity with their monstrous foe causes them to miss these and plays into the Foregone Conclusion of the crew's fate. From not realizing that vampirism is infectious and that vampires can be harmed by daylight, despite witnessing two infected crew members go up in a conflagration in the morning sun , to not realizing that a holy object and sufficient faith can repel Dracula. This leads to their final plan to kill Dracula being to attack him with guns during the nighttime when he appears, rather than striking when he's vulnerable in daytime.
• Glowing Eyelights of Undeath : Dracula possesses these, and make him easy to spot when he's lurking in the shadows.
• Hard Truth Aesop : Clemens delivers a sad but true fact about life to Toby when Dracula kills his dog Huck . He notes that sometimes, things out of your control can cause things to go horribly wrong despite your promises, and all you can do in the face of that is to do your best. It proves prophetic when despite the heroes' best efforts, Dracula makes it to London and the Demeter is lost with all hands save Clemens.
• Harbinger of Impending Doom : The scarred old man in the opening of the film, who changes his mind about joining the crew once he sees the dragon on the boxes they're carrying and loudly tells them why. Unfortunately for the Demeter , no one heeds his warnings until it's too late.
• Notably averted, as a departure from the source material (where Dracula can be repelled by holy objects). There are several deeply religious characters on board and multiple rosaries that get significant, lingering shots during the movie. Captain Elliot even holds one up when making his final confrontation with Dracula . They do absolutely nothing, though whether this is because Elliot's faith was not strong enough, or if holy objects really do nothing against this incarnation of Dracula, is not made clear .
• Possibly played straight with vampire Olgaren. When Toby clutches a rosary and starts silently praying, he seems to stop trying to break down the door, but this might have just been because Dracula was already in the room with him and he was letting his master close in for the kill.
• Hope Spot : The vampiric Olgaren attempts to break into the captain's quarters where Toby is hiding, but is ultimately stopped by the rest of the crew. All seems well, until the child realizes he isn't alone inside the room. The crew's frantic efforts to finish breaking into the room are too late to save Toby, who dies soon afterwards from the bite and becomes an Undead Child .
• How We Got Here : The film opens with the wreck of the Demeter being discovered by the police, then spends the rest of the movie showing its slow demise at Dracula's hands.
• Human Sacrifice : Routinely sacrificing villagers to appease Dracula's hunger is apparently how Anna's village survived living under his rule for hundreds of years. It's implied she was specifically raised for this purpose herself.
• It Can Think : The crew slowly realize the monster aboard is smart . Using misdirection, targeting them in vulnerable areas and using strategy makes Dracula far more dangerous.
• Jack the Ripoff : In the final scene, Dracula is dressed to the nines in a fancy coat and top hat that invoke the Trope Namer .
• Kick the Dog : Dracula parroting a crew member's words ("Please, no") who begs for his life before trying to kill him.
• Jump Scare : Several in the film, the most effective being ones where Dracula is illuminated by a flash of lightning, and the most egregious being early on when Olgaren suddenly sees Dracula's face through his spyglass when looking around the ship at night (only to see nothing when he lowers it).
• Let's Split Up, Gang! : Downplayed. When searching the ship after discovering the injured Olgaren , the captain insists that everyone break off into pairs rather than going off on their own. This still results in Toby being unaccounted for, and leads to his subsequent death.
• Looks Like Orlok : This incarnation of Dracula takes many design cues from Orlok , most notably the bald head and pointed ears. Dracula is also distinctly needle-fanged in this version.
• Mercy Kill : Wojchek shoots the vampire Olgaren to give him a quicker death than burning alive in the sun.
• Monster Progenitor : Dracula's bites infect his victims with vampirism when they die, as per the source material, though unlike in the novel it doesn't seem to make them into a being like himself. Rather, his progeny appear to be more like classic undead, semi-mindless slaves with none of his special powers and easy prey for the typical vampire weaknesses, like sunlight.
• Monstrous Humanoid : Dracula starts out desiccated from not having eaten in some time, and when the crew stumbles across his emergency rations (Anna) he decides to go on a feeding frenzy, ending the film as a monstrous bat-person with a fang-lined mouth.
• Moody Trailer Cover Song : The song for the trailer is none other than a moody remix of "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" by The Smashing Pumpkins .
• Offscreen Teleportation : Dracula can disappear if the camera is off of him even for a moment. One notable example is an upward panning shot that shows Dracula's legs underneath the table, but once the camera gets above it, he has vanished.
• Ominous Fog : Happens a few times during the movie, with one particular instance near the end heavily implied to have been summoned by Dracula himself to make him harder to spot for the crew.
• Outliving One's Offspring : This already happened in regards to Captain Elliot and his daughter, and then he essentially goes through it again when Toby dies.
• Pragmatic Villainy : Dracula brought Anna aboard to feed on her blood, presumably so as not to draw the crew's attention. When Clemens gets her out of reach, he makes do with eating the livestock and the rats, and only attacks the crew when he runs out of those. Even then, he only kills one at a time , both to "ration" their blood, and to make sure the ship has enough people to get him to England.
• Raised by Grandparents : Toby is being raised by his grandfather, Captain Elliot.
• Rain of Blood : How the crew find Olgaren in the rigging after he goes missing—Clemens sees the blood dripping onto Toby's shirt.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech : Clemens gives one of these to Dracula at the end, emphasizing that while the others believe he's a devil or a god, the fact that he feeds on them to survive means that he's just as mortal and scared of death as the rest of them. This ends up saving his life, as Dracula makes a point of sadistically toying with him afterwards rather than just killing him outright, which gives Anna time to save him. Clemens : [ Defiantly calling out to Dracula.] You want them to believe that you're a god! You and I both know that you're not! You bleed like any of us! You sleep in dirt! You feed! Above all else, you feed! You want us to... to fear you! Underneath, you're afraid! You're afraid of what lies on the other side as any other living thing!"
• Recycled In Space : Inverted - it's Alien but with Dracula on a boat!
• Retirony : Captain Elliot states early on that he intends to retire, and this will be his last voyage. He's correct about the second part, but will not survive to enjoy the peaceful life he'd planned for his retirement.
• Romanticism Versus Enlightenment : Clemens is a learned man from Cambridge, a doctor who professes a desire to understand the world and make sense of it, and insists on using logic and advanced (for the time) medical practice in the face of the horrors on the ship. Meanwhile the crew is established as being superstitious and emotionally-charged. Toby even remarks early on how Captain Elliot prefers the Demeter , an old wooden ship, to a more modern steam-powered vessel. Dracula himself is presented as a distinctly "old world" monster from a very feudal country, one who is aided by the crew's supernatural beliefs rather than thwarted by them. Notably, the "enlightened" Clemens is the only survivor of the crew . This is actually in line with the original novel, where Dracula represented the old world and superstition while Van Helsing was a man of science and reason although, unlike Clemens, he had no issue mixing it up with faith (also some of his tools, like phrenology, would be considered superstition rather than science today). Van Helsing's greater success is due to, among other factors, having a crew that actually listens to him .
• Rule of Three : Over the course of the story, three people are transformed into vampires and then killed by sunlight.
• Scary Teeth : Dracula's razor-sharped teeth, of course.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here! : Joseph tries to escape the Demeter alone on a lifeboat when Dracula starts killing people openly. Since Dracula has wings by then, it doesn't work out for him .
• Sadist : Dracula loves to play with his food a lot like mockingly repeating a crew member's words when he begs for his life and then smiling cruelly. He seems to be a massive one towards Clemens as he's probably impressed by his courage to face him and even taunting him and he seemingly plans to prolong his suffering instead of just kill him.
• Sequel Hook : [[spoiler. The movie ends with Clemens still hunting Dracula in London.]]
• Shoot the Dog : Subverted. After Toby is bitten but left still alive, Clemens worries aloud about his chances of survival, recalling how Olgaren turned and became a threat as a result of his wounds. Wojchek starts to hand him a gun, demanding he "look him in the eye" when he does it, and Clemens balks at the implication and turns him down. Considering Toby's ultimate fate, it might have been kinder if he had .
• Toby's dog is named Huckleberry . It's quite probably a reference in-universe as well given that the books involving him were originally released in 1876 and 1884 and the film is set in 1897.
• Sole Survivor : Clemens. While he and Anna make it off the ship, she lets herself burn in the sunlight before she gives in to her vampirism, and Clemens makes it to London alive.
• Something Only They Would Say : A non-verbal version. Early on in the film, Toby teaches Clemens the particular knock-on-wood signal the Demeter's crew uses to communicate around the ship to indicate all's well. In the epilogue, Dracula tauntingly repeats this same signal to get Clemens' attention in a crowded London pub, using his Classy Cane to make the knocking sound, before leaving into the streets, to tell the ship's Doctor that all is not well with him still being alive, and challenging him silently to finish what they started on the ship, if he dares .
• Slasher Smile : The expression Dracula makes towards most of his victims before feasting on them. Enhanced by his many bulging sharp teeth.
• Slashed Throat : How Dracula kills Petrofsky before feeding on him.
• Spoiler Title : The Latin American title for the film is "Dracula: Sea of Blood".
• Suicide by Sunlight : Anna chooses to climb onto wreckage to greet the rising sun, rather than become another monster. Unlike the other vampires burned by the sun, she dies peacefully .
• Tainted Veins : Those who are cursed with vampirism seem to show these, most notably Toby and Anna shortly before they catch on fire .
• Uncertain Doom : Since Clemens isn't part of the Dracula novel, it can be assumed that his path never crossed the Harkers and their allies. That, and the way Dracula seems to be baiting him into following at the end of the movie, it could be that he's Killed Offscreen , but there's no way to know for sure.
• Undead Child : After being killed by Dracula, Toby briefly resurrects as a vampire in the middle of his Burial at Sea , before he is quickly ignited by the sun’s rays and tossed overboard.
• Vagueness Is Coming : As the unsettling events begin to pile up, Olgaren, who saw a glimpse of Dracula the previous night, concludes that "evil is onboard".
• Vampire Bites Suck : We get varying levels of gore on the vampire bites, from Petrofsky getting a huge chunk taken out of his throat, to Anna having several hideously bruised bite marks, but in all cases Dracula's bites are vicious and painful for his victims.
• Vampire Hunter : Clemens becomes one at the end of the story, vowing to hunt Dracula down and put an end to his evil.
• Viral Transformation : Early on, the crew worry that whatever killed the animals might be contagious. They are partially correct, as is Clemens' theory that Anna's condition is the result of "infected blood". Everyone that is bitten, but not immediately killed, ends up turning into a vampire. The blood transfusions are able to delay the change, but ultimately cannot save Toby or Anna from turning .
• Voluntary Shapeshifting : He's never shown doing it, but it's clear that Dracula can grow and retract his wings at will.
• Weakened by the Light : We never see if Dracula is susceptible to sunlight, as all of his scenes take place at night, but the victims he's turned all painfully combust once exposed to the light of day .
• What Happened to the Mouse? : Wojchek hires three new crewmen in Varna. One of them quits after seeing the dragon emblem on the crates, and is replaced by Clemens, but the other two disappear from the film completely after the ship leaves port.
• Worthy Opponent : Granted, it's mostly tinged with sadistic intentions, but Dracula seems to form this opinion towards Clemens over the course of the film, openly confronting him when Clemens gives a passionate The Reason You Suck speech over how he's ultimately as mortal as the rest of them, aiming to break his spirit for the insult. Whilst they both mutually fail to kill the other, in The Stinger Dracula intentionally alerts Clemens to his presence in a London pub before vanishing into the streets, clearly inviting him to have another go at stopping him so they can both settle their score .
• Would Hurt a Child : Dracula has no issue targeting little Toby and killing him like the other people onboard.
• Wouldn't Hit a Girl : Captain Elliot spares Anna from being tossed overboard as a stowaway because she's a girl.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit : Dracula appears to Petrofsky as a malnourished and frail creature just seconds before he reveals his true strength and kills him.
• Yank the Dog's Chain : Early in the film, the crew happily discusses a bonus that has been promised to them if they can deliver Dracula's cargo to London early. Needless to say, he doesn't give it to them.

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Javier botet's dracula.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is an expanded adaptation of "The Captain's Log", a single chapter of the original Dracula novel.

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