Much like director James Wan, with whom he co-created the Saw franchise with, it seems Leigh Whannell may be one of the next big horror filmmakers to look out for. The screenwriter made his directorial debut in 2015 with Insidious: Chapter 3, before directing Upgrade in 2018 and then helming the recent The Invisible Man movie that is turning out to be a massive success for Blumhouse, both in financial terms and critical terms thanks to its smart take on the concept.
It’s no surprise that Blumhouse has signed the director for more movies. What exactly are those movies? Well we don’t know officially just yet but in a recent interview with Bloody Disgusting, the director spoke about how he would like to possibly adapt Dracula with a modern-day setting and put a spin on this popular monster character in much the same way he did with The Invisible Man:
I think I would try to get at the essence of what makes Dracula scary, which is, to me, what makes Dracula scary is his lack of mercy. The fact that he might pretend… Like, he’s not a romantic. He needs to drink blood. What parallels in life can you think of that equate to someone without mercy. It’s a psychopath, right? A psychopath… So to have this conversation with you, I’m spitballing here, I would take the character right back to that and be like, I’m going to make the psychopath version of this. The person who just doesn’t give a f***. Maybe he drinks blood but beyond that, there’s no capes, there’s no lightning, there’s no fog, no wolves. It’s just a psychopath who drinks blood.
That certainly sounds like the type of Dracula move I would be interested in seeing. Ultimately this is just Whannell hypothesising on an idea here and he is in no way currently attached to any Dracula project for now. Still, given the trouble that Universal Pictures has had in trying to get their own monster movies to be a success, it might be worthwhile for them to team up with Blumhouse and Whannell to see what they could do with it.
Last Updated: March 4, 2020
