Blumhouse’s Dracula reboot wants to recapture the mystery of the iconic vampire

When it comes to reboots of popular franchises, its often best for the filmmakers to try and tell it from a fresh perspective rather than mimic the formula of other versions too closely. While nostalgia is often nice and originality is not easy to maintain, the more a film can stand out and build its own unique take on the subject matter, the more respect and interest it is likely to earn from tired audiences who aren’t interested in seeing the same thing in a different coat of paint.

In the case of Blumhouse’s upcoming Dracula reboot, the studio is certainly trying to stand out from all of the other Dracula movies that have come before it. And they’re planning to do that by not treading in completely new territory but rather by drawing closer inspiration from the original novel by Bram Stoker, which most movies have actually avoided doing over the last few decades. As director Karyn Kusama explained in a recent interview with The Kingcast:

I think something that gets overlooked in the adaptations of Dracula in the past is the idea of multiple voices. In fact, the book is filled with different points of view. And the one point of view we don’t get access to, and all most adaptations give access to, is Dracula himself. So I would just say in some respect, this is going to be an adaptation called Dracula, but it’s perhaps not the same kind of romantic hero that we’ve seen in the past… in past interpretations of Dracula.

Dracula was originally meant to form part of Universal Picture’s Dark Universe that they were putting together, with many other popular horror movie monsters like The Invisible Man, Jekyll and Hyde, The Wolfman and The Mummy. The latter being the first movie in the franchise that starred Tom Cruise and tanked spectacularly. This led them to abandon the whole idea and now we have Blumhouse making individual movies based on these characters instead. If last year’s The Invisible Man is anything to go by, the studio is not planning to just rehash these popular stories but give us a complete fresh take on them that makes them better than ever.

It looks like we can expect more of the same with this take on Dracula as it steers clear on focusing too much on the character himself, and rather tells his dark and mysterious story from the viewpoint of others. Mystery like that is often more terrifying than coming face to face with the enemy.

Last Updated: June 10, 2020