Filling in Dracula's great ellipses

I've been stalking The Last Voyage of the Demeter on iTunes for several months now. On all my previous checks, it was only for $19.99 purchase and then $19.99 rental. Thursday was finally the first time I checked where a $5.99 rental was available, so I snapped it up.

Why the fixation on what was likely to be a sub par movie?

Well ever since seeing Bram Stoker's Dracula more than 30 years ago, I've had an affection for the gothic stylings of the Dracula story. Francis Ford Coppola's film may have been where my beloved wax stamp fetish was born (for more on that phenomenon, read here), and it still remains within my top 100 on Flickchart, its many delights overcoming possibly a few weaknesses. (I say that mostly to throw a bone to the BSD haters out there. Honestly, I love the thing from start to finish.)

Since that first dalliance with Dracula, I've seen a dozen other versions of the character on screen, if you are to consider even parodies like Dracula: Dead and Loving It. It may be more than that. They don't let Dracula rest for very long. The Last Voyage of the Demeter is actually at least the second Dracula movie of 2023, the first being the fun romp that concentrated on his familiar, Renfield.

But no Dracula movie I've seen has said boo about what happened on the count's journey from Transylvania to London.

Andre Ovredal's film is based on the log from the Demeter, the ship that transported him and showed up with its cargo intact but its crew missing (presumed dead). The details of that sea crossing may get some prominence in Stoker's actual book, but they don't in any movie I've ever seen. And I can't really tell you one way or another because the one Dracula-related thing I haven't done is read Stoker's book.

We need more than a hand wave about what happened upon that ship. It's rather significant. 

So here's the plot as I know it to be:

1) Dracula summons Jonathan Harker to his castle in Transylvania to discuss real estate in England.

2) Dracula develops a fondness for Harker so keeps him enslaved to his succubae. 

3) Dracula develops even more of a fondness for Harker's fiancee Mina, who reminds him of his own dead wife. 

4) Dracula decides he most go find Mina in London.

5) En route, Dracula fucks shit up on a boat for two weeks. (Emphasis mine.)

6) Dracula continues his pursuit of Mina.

WHAT? I need to know more about #5.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter to the rescue.

It's the same mentality as taking the Hamlet Cinematic Universe and squeezing out the play-then-movie Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, only its with the Dracula Cinematic Universe. Take a relatively minor part of the story and plumb it for all the wonderful content it's worth.

And I did end up finding this content to be pretty wonderful. To tell you more about it, though, first I must issue a giant SPOILER WARNING.

It's interesting watching a film and being introduced to a bunch of characters, all of whom you know are going to die.* (*It's possible that not all the characters die, but my current analysis does not require me to tell you who if any survive.) It's like the opening of United 93. You are saying goodbye to them even as you are meeting them. These guys ain't going to make it.

As you are meeting the characters, the gruffness of a particular few guarantees their demise. But then there are some really sympathetic characters that you can't imagine going down to a Dracula bite, such as the doctor played by Corey Hawkins, the stowaway played by Aisling Franciosi or the young boy played by Woody Norman.

Let's start by talking about that young boy. Did you heed my spoiler warning?

He's extraordinarily sympathetic, one of those kids whose purity emanates from him in his big pleading eyes that temper optimism with worry. He's a good candidate to leave the boat on a life raft, right?

Nope. He totally buys it. 

In fact, he's one of the first characters to go, which is a really bold choice. Oh, he doesn't go until you've gotten a chance to get to know and cherish him for at least 50 minutes, at which point, him getting bitten is shocking. But then you think "Well, he's not dead, maybe they will bring him back with a blood transfusion or something. He might be undead but they were already using a blood transfusion on the bitten stowaway."

Nope. He totally burns in the agony of the sun, and you watch his charred corpse sink to the bottom of the ocean. 

It's just one of the ways this film goes there on things you wouldn't expect, steering into the horrors of this doomed ship rather than steering away from them.

The burning scenes -- it happens with three characters in total -- always surprised me for the way they lingered, to show us what it really might feel like to burn to a crisp. This is no mild Dracula outing meant to entice Stoker fans of all ages.

Some other things I really liked:

1) A crucifix? Ha. To underscore the bleakness of their circumstances, writers Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz have a character attempt to ward off the monstrous incarnation of Dracula you see above -- which is really his only form in this whole movie -- with a crucifix on a chain. Does it work? Hell no. The captain played by Liam Cunningham (of Game of Thrones fame) raises the dangling cross and shouts "I renounce you, devil!" several times. This does not even break Dracula's stride. Seconds later he's munching the captain's neck.

2) The doctor played by Hawkins is, in many ways, an example of color blind casting, since most would say there was little historical likelihood that anyone in Stoker's novel would have had black skin. But instead of the movie just pretending his race doesn't enter into it, the fact that he's Black is touched on several times and adds context to some of his motivations. The social positive of casting actors of color is one thing, but when you can fit an actual thematic subtext of race into a story about a vampire tearing a ship's crew to shreds, that's one better.

3) There didn't need to be a Titanic-style secondary antagonist. In Titanic, which of course I love, it's not enough that the ship is sinking, there also has to be a crazed Billy Zane firing shots at you. Here, despite their gruffness, there's no character that is trying to undermine the common good of fighting off the vampire, and with only one very minor exception, each shows courage when that is called for. I found this to be a valuable sense of optimism within all the bleakness.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter exceeded my expectations in all regards. Now all that stalking really seems justified.

Origins of a band name

My son got me up at 5:30 yesterday morning, at least a half-hour earlier than he usually gets me up. Since the previous night was the first night in ages we hadn't taken him into bed with us, I was fine with it.

But it meant I needed something to do for the hour-and-a-half before I had to go to work. Really more like an hour-and-fifteen.

I thought of watching a movie, but it would have to be a really short one, like, under 75 minutes. As I was scrolling through the Netflix streaming options, I saw one that would qualify quite nicely: the 66-minute White Zombie from 1932. In fact, it was even better because I only needed to watch 58 minutes of it. I'd watched the first eight minutes of it something like three months earlier, and Netflix hadn't forgotten that fact.

And so it was that I watched a 1932 horror movie starring Bela Lugosi before work on an average Wednesday.

But the reason I started watching it two months ago was because of the band White Zombie.

I'm not a huge fan of White Zombie. I bought their album Astro-Creep: 2000 primarily because of my affection for the song "More Human Than Human," which I couldn't get enough of back in the late 1990s. Back then, if you wanted a song, you often had to buy the whole album. Sometimes you'd be fine about this, if you wanted to take a gamble on the band, based on your feelings toward the song you know. That wasn't the case for me with White Zombie. I was familiar enough with the rest of their stuff that I knew I wouldn't become an ardent fan. I don't dislike the rest of the music, but suffice it to say I've probably only listened to that album all the way through once, nor did I expect to listen to it more than that. That's how much I liked that song.

Still, I'm quite interested in Rob Zombie as a person, probably because he's also a director. Musicians make the transition to being actors all the time, but directors? Doesn't happen nearly as often. I have a surprising amount of affection for the two Zombie movies I've seen, The Devil's Rejects and House of 1,000 Corpses (I saw them in that order, not realizing the first was actually a sequel to the second). There's something about his violent, twisted, go-for-broke sensibilities that makes me deliciously frightened to see what he might imagine next. And I like the guy as a solo artist -- well, I like him exactly as much as I like his former band, which is to say that for a period of time, I couldn't get enough of one song in particular ("Dragula").

It was much more recently that I realized that the band White Zombie was preceded by a movie called White Zombie. Preceded by over five decades, in fact. For some reason, if Rob Zombie (born Robert Cummings) named his band after a horror film, I think he'd call it Leatherface or Chainsaw Massacre or Last House. (He couldn't go for the full titles with those films, it would be too on-the-nose). A black-and-white horror from the 1930s -- now that surprised me.

So I wanted to see what this movie was all about, this Bela Lugosi movie from 1932 that was instrumental in shaping Robert Cummings' very identity.

Let me start by saying that White Zombie reminded me a lot of Dracula, which was released the year before. Not just because both movies star Lugosi, and because both directors (Victor Halperin for Zombie, Tod Browning for Dracula) use the same effect of shining a light on Lugosi's intense eyes to make him seems more fearsome.

No, it's because both movies had much more of a capacity to be chilling than I gave them credit for. (I described the creepy aspects of Dracula here if you want to read them.) While I was creeped out by the visual touches Browning brought to his film, it was the sound design in White Zombie that really made me take notice. But let me give you a little bit of a plot synopsis first so you know what I'm talking about.

The movie concerns a couple who travel to Haiti to be married. I can't right now remember the reason they go to Haiti, since that was in the eight minutes I saw three months ago. But they're staying in the home of a man who longs for the bride-to-be -- so much so that he visits a witch doctor (Lugosi) to see if he can figure out how to make her "disappear" long enough that he can have her to himself, without interference from the groom. The witch doctor gives him a substance so potent that only a "pin prick" (Lugosi uses this phrase a couple times) will make her appear dead, only to revive later on. Of course, when she revives, she's a zombie -- you'd think this other suitor would have realized that when he visited the witch doctor's lair and saw a team of zombies working in assembly line on some kind of wooden machine with a large wooden wheel that makes it go.

It's this scene at the witch doctor's lair that features the first sound effect that really chilled me. It's the only sound in the soundtrack for a good minute, the grotesque squeaking of this wooden machine as it goes about its business. The zombies themselves are utterly silent.

A later effect really got me, too. A vulture factors significantly into the plot, yet the vulture doesn't make ordinary vulture noises, whatever they may be. It makes a noise that seems to be a blend of a bird squawking and a human screaming, and just thinking about it is making my flesh crawl as I type this.

But I don't intend this post to be a review of the merits of White Zombie, which were considerable for a movie made in 1932. Rather, what I really want to know is the effect it had on Robert Cummings, to cause him to name himself and his band after the movie.

And I'm ashamed to say that nothing is jumping out. For its time, I think the movie is quite an incredible achievement -- it's got some great camera setups, and even the beginnings of some legit special effects. But it's also of course dated in many ways, and it only hints at the kind of violence and gore that would become Zombie's trademark as a director. Alas, I've googled, and I can't immediately find any comments from the man himself that shed any further light on the subject. (Okay, I read the wikipedia pages for the band and the man, and scanned the first page of google results using only one pair of search words.)

Anyway, I'm glad I saw it. And having now seen two horror films from the 1930s that were more effective than I thought they had any chance of being, now I'm eager to delve a bit further.

The 1930s: Negative prognoses, tyrannical sea captains and Bela Lugosi

On to the 1930s!

It was a relief to get out of the 1920s, three films of which I watched in September, but one thing that amazed me was how quickly filmmaking leaped forward to what we would consider a fairly modern incarnation of the form, so relatively soon after spoken dialogue was introduced to the medium.

But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. I have to explain what this post is first.

This is the fourth in a monthly series called Decades, in which I watch three films I haven't seen from a specified decade each month, then report on them at month's end. I'm concentrating on the decades between the 1920s and the 1970s, to help fill in my knowledge gaps among older films. Selecting randomly, I hit the 1970s in July, the 1960s in August, the 1920s in September and now, the 1930s in October. Which means only two decades left to take me up to the end of 2010.

But back to what I was saying ... what astonishes me is how fully developed some of these films are, for cinema seeming to be in its infancy as recently as ten years early. Now, I know that's not really true -- filmmakers in the 1920s were doing astonishingly sophisticated things. I think it's just that having dialogue cards on the screen held back the perception of what filmmakers were accomplishing, like if you had a super computer that you had to start with a foot pump. Well, no longer. In the 1930s, more or less modern cinema arrived.

Shall we get into the specifics?

Dark Victory (1939, Edmund Goulding). Watched: Wednesday, October 13th

I had seen Dark Victory on the library shelves a couple times before, and thought that the title sounded provocative. I imagined it to be some kind of war movie, or perhaps something to do with evil forces. I also knew it was one of the ten films nominated for best picture in the year (1939) the Academy cited as evidence of why ten nominees could work again, when they implemented ten nominees again in 2009. For the record, the others that year were Gone With the Wind, Love Affair, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Of Mice and Men, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights and Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Not a bad year indeed -- even with having seen relatively few movies that came out in the 1930s, I've still seen four of those.

And Dark Victory makes it an even half of the nominees from that year. However, I was really lucky to come across it. Having gone the first half of October without seeing my first movie from the 1930s, I was running dangerously close to my dad and his wife arriving to see the new baby just two days later, at which point I knew I wouldn't be able to watch anything for the following week. So I made a desperate lunchtime trip to a different branch of the library, not the one where I'd originally seen Dark Victory on the shelves. It just so happens that Dark Victory was the only movie from the 1930s that they had that I hadn't seen. At least there was one. It's rare and precious these days that I'm able to squeeze in movies that my wife is not also watching, so I didn't want to have to squeeze three movies from this decade into the last ten days of October.

Okay, enough about the logistics of watching the movie, and on to its substance. The movie was not about naval battles or necromancers, but rather, a young socialite (Bette Davis) who has a brain tumor. One of the primary characteristics of the tumor is how it affects her vision -- therefore, her attempts to beat cancer, or at least diminish its influence over her spirit, is considered to be her "victory over the dark" (as spoken in a line of dialogue). If this were Seinfeld, however, the movie would have almost certainly been called Prognosis Negative, as the various second opinions on Judith Traherne's health read ominously "PROGNOSIS NEGATIVE" at the bottom of the page. (Despite the cancer going into a temporary, symptom-free remission state.) In fact, one wonders if the Seinfeld writers weren't making a direct reference to Dark Victory in coming up with their fictitious film Prognosis Negative for the show.

It's a melodrama alright, but in the best sense of the word -- melodramas don't necessarily have to be melodramatic, if that follows. There seem to have been a number of disease movies from this period in which the heroine (it's always a woman, isn't it?) has a death bed scene in which the music swells and she raises the back of her hand to her forehead in a gesture of exaggerated angst. Except the difference here is that Davis is a really good actress, and though she has a scene that fills this function, she underplays it terrifically. She isn't always victorious over the dark, however, as this movie has some definite darkness to it -- times when she loses her will to live and acts out against the world in surprisingly reckless and boozy ways.

What I was really surprised by was the excellent cast. I don't know why I should have known that he was in this, but Humphrey Bogart plays what amounts to a supporting role with one big scene in a horse stable. His Irish accent goes in and out, but it was fun to see him. Even more fun to see was Ronald Reagan, our former president. I went through his film catalogue afterward and realized that this was the first time I had seen Reagan on anything other than my TV screen. His role is even smaller, but it was really fun to see him so young, and doing the thing that made him famous in the first place. I also like the male lead, George Brent, playing Judith's doctor, who falls in love with her. I probably should have been familiar with him, but wasn't.

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, Frank Lloyd). Watched: Wednesday, October 27th

The second 1930s film I watched was not just a nominee, but an actual best picture winner. Oddly enough, Mutiny on the Bounty won just that single award, something that almost never happens. (I think it's happened another time but can't be bothered to look it up.) My wife and I had had a project of trying to catch up on the best picture winners we hadn't seen, but this was the first one in over a year, and since she'd already seen it, she didn't watch it with me. But I always like ticking a best picture winner off my list. I actually have a spreadsheet where I have a list of all the best picture winners, and put a check in the column next to the title each time I see another. I'm sure it surprises you not at all to know I have a list like this.

I probably should have seen Mutiny on the Bounty before now, considering how generally famous it is and how generally rousing I found it to be. I was glad to see that it stars Clark Gable, one of my favorite actors from this period. But I was perhaps more impressed by Charles Laughton as the nefarious William Bligh, who was surely one of the great film villains of the 1930s. As the captain of the titular vessel, Laughton is mercilessly domineering, unendingly petty and paunchy in a cowardly way. In other words, he's not impressive per se, but he is effective, even when at his most weaselly.

And the interesting thing about his character is that he also pulls off a feat that truly is impressive. When the crew, led by Gable's Fletcher Christian, finally stops tolerating his cruel and monstrous behavior, and performs the mutiny of the title, you'd expect the defeated captain to wither up and die. In fact, that's the most likely outcome for any person in his position, regardless of personal fortitude, as Christian basically gives him and a dozen or so followers a death sentence, leaving them in a boat with minimal food, 3500 miles from the nearest port. Yet Bligh somehow makes ten days' worth of water last a staggering 40 days, until land is finally spotted on the horizon. You could say that the thirst for vengeance alone kept him alive.

This passage with Bligh's survival at sea is cunning in the sense that it shows the movie's shades of gray. One would expect a lack of ambiguity in a tale of a righteous officer (Christian) and a malevolent tyrant (Bligh), but this passage shows Bligh's capacity for something like heroism, while back on board the boat, the victory of the mutiny seems decidedly hollow for Christian and his followers, especially since one other officer (Franchot Tone as Roger Byam) has been left on board despite disagreeing with the decision to mutiny. His undying allegiance to the chain of command comes to seem equally heroic to Christian's support of the abused men -- maybe even more so. It's shades of gray for sure.

One part of the film that really surprised me was the time spent in Tahiti. I expected the whole story to take place on the boat, and was prepared for that. A 15-minute stretch in the middle on the island of Tahiti, with beautiful native girls and the British navymen scampering in small bathing suits, was therefore something of a tonal shift. At first I wasn't sure what I thought of it, but in the end, decided that it worked for me. I was especially surprised to learn that this portion was actually shot in Tahiti. The production cost $2 million -- a staggering cost for 1935 -- but obviously paid off, as it is a grand adventure in every sense of the word, and a best picture winner.

Dracula (1931, Tod Browning). Watched: Friday, October 29th

I had hoped for this to be our Halloween night viewing, but my wife let it be known that that was pretty unlikely. So I moved it up by two days and allowed it to kick off Halloween weekend after she went to bed on Friday night.

Dracula seemed like as much of a must as anything on this list. Not only is it considered by many to be the consummate cinematic version of Bram Stoker's tale (I still like Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula best for that, just for the sumptuous production design), but it's the movie that made Bela Lugosi famous. And if I thought the fact that I had not previously seen a Ronald Reagan movie was bad, the fact that I hadn't seen anything starring Bela Lugosi made me feel like a real pretender for sure. (White Zombie, which also stars Lugosi, was a candidate to be viewed this month as well, but Dracula took the one available horror slot.) I have long been a fan of the Bauhaus song "Bela Lugosi's Dead," so I thought it was finally time to see Bela Lugosi when he was still alive.

But the name that may have attracted me most was director Tod Browning. I guess Browning directed a lot of monster movies, but the one I was most familiar with before now was Freaks, the controversial 1932 film in which actual "freaks" -- little people, a man without any arms and legs, and other circus attractions -- are used in the making of a horror in which these characters rise up and kill the normal people who taunt them. I saw this movie a couple years back and was amazed at what Browning was able to get away with, in an era that I previously assumed was characterized by a certain conventional morality in filmmaking. In truth, the 1930s in general were a lot more daring than some of the subsequent decades, when the standards became considerably more conservative.

Anyway, I knew Browning could bring a real weirdness to this movie, and indeed, he does. The opening of Dracula, when the action is set in Transylvania before moving to England, is by far the creepiest and most affecting passage. There's a deafening silence in the soundtrack that sets the mood of the film, as Renfield (the spooky Dwight Frye) visits Count Dracula to set up his real estate deal in England. (As a side note, that's not how the action occurs in Bram Stoker's Dracula -- it's Jonathan Harker who makes the visit to Transylvania that we see on screen, and I don't know which is actually more true to Stoker's source material.) The dark passageways leading up to Dracula's castle are foggy and mysterious, and it only gets worse inside the castle. And here's where I really saw Browning's touches, as you see close ups of scurrying insects inside the mouldering grounds, and then -- most effectively -- a couple armadillos walking around. Armadillos? Yes indeed, and they feel as unholy as anything you've ever seen on screen, so strange is their presence. Browning also uses an interesting technique to give Lugosi that otherworldly vampire quality, shining pricks of light on his intensely staring eyes to give him that indelible, iconic appearance.

The movie loses some of its steam in England, when (as my colleague at my website describes it in his review) the film "deteriorates into a drawing-room drama." Having Bram Stoker's Dracula as my reference point, I was expecting a lot more darkness and mystery to endure here. The mood is still there, but the action begins taking place in a lot of well-lit rooms and bed chambers, and there's a lot of standing around and talking. It's still the Dracula we know and love, but it just doesn't have the corporeal eeriness involved in the opening 20 minutes of this film. And that may be the best indication that this film was made only a few years after dialogue was introduced into filmmaking -- it's still basic in some important ways. However, the ways it's advanced, and represents outside-the-box thinking, are the more important takeaways from Browning's Dracula.

Okay, what's in store for November? We only have two decades left, the 1940s and 1950s. Excuse me for a moment as I draw randomly between them ...

The 1950s it is. Perhaps the most conventional decade of them all in terms of filmmaking? Here's hoping I can come up with something good. Hey, Hitchcock was working throughout this decade, so I'm sure I will.