“Evil is on board,” a crew member intones ominously in this trailer for director André Øvredal’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter. With a peppy, positive-outlook title like that, surely everything will be fine! No big deal that something is ravaging all the animals on the ship, and everything is so dark no one can see, and surely none of this has anything to do with the creepy large boxes in the hold. Man-sized boxes, you might say.
Fair warning, by the by: I don’t think things are going to go well for the sweet dog.
“The movie is really Alien-on-a-ship in 1897,” Øvredal (The Autopsy of Jane Doe) told Entertainment Weekly, which sums it up pretty straightforwardly. It’s also an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, specifically the chapter “The Captain’s Log,” which is about the good old count traveling to England on a merchant ship.
It’s a ship captained by one Davos Seaworth—or rather, Liam Cunningham. The Suicide Squad‘s David Dastmalchian is the first mate; Corey Hawkins (The Walking Dead) as a doctor; and Aisling Franciosi (Game of Thrones) as a stowaway. Javier Botet (Slender Man) is Dracula. The screenplay is by Zak Olkewicz (Bullet Train) and Bragi F. Schut (Ninjago).
The trailer is very dark and foreboding but also features the single funniest use of Smashing Pumpkin’s “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” that I’ve heard in a minute.
Set sail on the Demeter on August 11th.