It’s a common joke amongst the Extremely Online that The Last Voyage of the Demeter could be summed up by the pitch “Dracula, but on a boat and it’s really just Alien.” Even director André Øvredal, in a Q&A with Bloody Disgusting, cited the original 1979 Alien as a major influence on Last Voyage.
The comparison isn’t wholly unearned, but it doesn’t fully capture the tone or the mood of the movie. The Last Voyage of the Demeter is less like “high seas vampire Alien” and much more like “high seas vampire Alien 3.”
The Last Voyage of the Demeter adapts a single chapter from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, in which the titular monster makes his way from the Carpathian Mountains to London, by sea. Because Dracula is an epistolary novel, this chapter is composed of log entries from the doomed ship Demeter, recounting the demise of her unnamed crew as they are picked off, one by one, by a stowaway vampire. Most film adaptations of Dracula skip over this portion of the story and choose instead to focus on the novel’s named characters as their lives are entangled in Count Dracula’s decision to find new hunting grounds in England. Stoker’s novel harbors a classist streak atop its more overt xenophobia, presenting any characters not of “respectable” birth as being unfortunate at best and barbaric at worst. The characters of the Demeter log are nameless victims in a ruthlessly efficient chapter that is never again brought up after its conclusion. No one on board the ship survives, but then again, in the novel’s eyes, none of them matter as much as the other point-of-view characters. The crew of the Demeter might as well be long-haul truckers on the high seas, a mere vehicle to get Dracula from one place on the map to another.
The connection between Last Voyage and Alien is a relatively intuitive one: both films are about blue-collar workers transporting precious cargo that will lead to their demise. Alien makes space truckers just as interesting as the elite astronauts of previous sci-fi films; Last Voyage does the work to draw parallels between the crew of the Demeter and the crew of the Nostromo. As in Alien, Last Voyage features a discussion of profit-sharing around a dinner table near the beginning of the film that establishes the class standing of everyone on board. Both the Nostromo and the Demeter house a ship’s pet that serves as a beacon for danger for the rest of the crew: on the Nostromo, it’s Jones the cat, while on board the Demeter, it’s a dog. Last Voyage even dares, early on, to quote an iconic shot from Alien in which a character enters the ship’s hold, framed by a massive door that reveals a cavernous space stacked with boxes, clanking chains festooned from the ceiling.
Both the Nostromo and Demeter crews find themselves isolated, afraid, and alone in the deeps, fighting for their survival against a monster they can’t hope to understand that keeps picking them off one by one. However intentional these similarities, the Alien touchstones in Last Voyage are surface-level signals of the genre the movie is working in, and nothing more. They’re obvious, but they distract from the fact that Last Voyage is spiritually much closer to Alien’s erstwhile sequel Alien 3.
Alien 3 has been reclaimed critically in recent years, but it’s still polarizing, a grim reiteration of the nihilism of the first Alien, without any of the heart or adrenaline of Aliens. David Fincher has disowned the movie, even though it was his directorial debut. The production was troubled, and the story is dark (even by Alien standards) as it follows the standard formula of a xenomorph picking off a small group of people one by one. Its cast comprises a colony of men on a prison planet who might as well remain nameless. When Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) crash-lands on their planet, xenomorph in tow, the prisoners are wary of her presence, afraid of the “temptation” someone of her gender presents to them. The prisoners might be death-row inmates, but they’re also penitential religious fanatics who have chosen to serve out the rest of their sentences far removed from society. Despite their mistrust of her, Ripley manages to rally the men against the xenomorph, and in so doing, she rekindles a spark of humanity that the prisoners had forgotten about themselves long ago. Alien 3 is a movie about the horrors of being stuck in a society that does not value individual human lives in general, and that relegates women in particular to the sidelines as a sort of monstrous “other.”
It’s the sense of isolation and suspicion about an “othered” gender—and stubborn hope from people of that gender against bad odds—that makes Last Voyage more of a spiritual successor to Alien 3 than to Alien. Both films feature a small crew of characters who aren’t particularly distinct from each other. Both start bleak and end bleaker, with most of the cast dead long before the film is over. Both include a funeral scene for a child in which a prayer is spoken over the body claiming that the child is in a better place now, where they’ll no longer feel hunger or pain. Both funeral scenes end with the child’s soul being committed “to the deep,” and with the body falling from a height and being engulfed in flames. The audience is supposed to be deeply affected by the death of a child in both movies, but Alien 3 and Last Voyage treat those deaths as clinical, almost perfunctory. It’s an artistic choice that works if you’re plugged into the movie’s general affect, but if the rest of the movie doesn’t work for you, then this plot point feels callous and detached.
It’s worth noting that Last Voyage is set on a wooden sailing ship that’s increasingly detached from reality, not just because it’s out to sea, but also because it’s on the edge of becoming a relic, captained by a man who’s ready to leave his voyages behind to finally retire. One of the early scripts for Alien 3 was set on a planet made entirely of wood and populated by Luddite monks; while the all-wood planet was abandoned after David Fincher took over, the low-tech attitude of the script remained. The prisoners of Alien 3 are armed with torches and “harsh language,” as one of them puts it. Likewise, the crew of the Demeter scarcely stands a chance against a bestial Dracula, armed as they are with simple knives, muskets, and their suspicions about their own female stowaway.
Last Voyage circles around an original character named Anna (Aisling Franciosi), a woman who has lived under the shadow of Castle Dracula her entire life. When she’s discovered in one of the boxes on board, the crew treat her with the same suspicion that the prisoners of Alien 3 treat Ripley with. One sailor repeats that it’s “bad luck to have a woman on board,” and Anna, like Ripley, is reticent to talk about her connection with the monster stalking the crew. Anna and Ripley both know that no one else will believe their stories, and they’re keenly aware of their vulnerability due to the prejudices the men around them carry towards their gender. Neither woman is treated fully like a human being; they’re both considered a threat above anything else by the men around them. Ripley and Anna each have a single ally in their situation: a doctor who cares for them when they’re first discovered, injured and weak. Conveniently, the doctor in Last Voyage (Corey Hawkins) and the doctor in Alien 3 (Charles Dance) are both named “Mr. Clemans.”
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Anna’s character arc in Last Voyage closely mirrors Ripley’s in Alien 3. Anna is connected to Dracula; she can sense his presence, and he can see through her eyes. He won’t kill her, because she’s a useful pawn, and eventually she’ll turn into a vampire like him. Likewise, the xenomorph in Alien 3 won’t kill Ripley, because she’s carrying an alien queen inside her chest. Both women are inextricably connected to their respective monsters in a way that they know will kill them. Both choose to fight back anyway, helping the crew on the Demeter and the men on the prison planet, even though both tasks are thankless and hopeless. Ripley falls into a tank of molten lead to prevent Weyland-Yutani from getting a hold of her alien. Anna intentionally exposes herself to sunlight, bursting into flames as a result of her gradual turn towards vampirism. Both women choose how they go out, immolating themselves so that they won’t be a conduit for more evil. Anna refuses to become a vampire; Ripley won’t become the mother of a monster. Neither of them owes the world that shunted them to the sidelines anything, and yet they’ll still each sacrifice everything in order to keep the innocent safe from ravenous monsters.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter takes a stab at trying to explain why the characters in a neglected chapter of Dracula also matter. Alien 3 attempts the same, to slightly greater effect. Neither movie fully succeeds, but if you’re tapped into the general vibe of Alien 3, Last Voyage might just work for you for similar reasons.
Sarah Welch-Larson is interested in feminist theory and theology, sad men in space, and stories about agency and creation, especially when they include cyborgs or androids. She is the co-host of the Seeing & Believing podcast, a staff writer at Bright Wall/Dark Room, and the author of the book Becoming Alien: The Beginning and End of Evil in Science Fiction’s Most Idiosyncratic Franchise. She lives in Chicago with her husband, their dog, and about three dozen houseplants.
It’s worth noting that Last Voyage is set on a wooden sailing ship that’s increasingly detached from reality, not just because it’s out to sea, but also because it’s on the edge of becoming a relic, captained by a man who’s ready to leave his voyages behind to finally retire.
There are two points that are worth making about the Demeter chapter.
First of all, the crew are not just there as a means for Dracula to get to England. Stoker could simply have had him arrive by ship without killing the entire crew – we haven’t had it established that Dracula needs to kill every night in order to survive, and in fact the entire rest of the book suggests that he doesn’t. He kills the Demeter crew for two reasons, in story terms. First, it establishes that he’s truly a monster; Dracula kills even people who have helped him, even people who are no threat to him, even people who he doesn’t actually need to kill. And second, it establishes that he is a short-sighted monster; everyone in England hears the story of the Demeter arriving, and it actually tips off our heroes to the fact that something terrible is going on. If he’d left them alone, he’d have been much safer.
The second point is one you hint at in the quote above. The Demeter is not cutting-edge technology, and the whole book is about how technology (shorthand, telegraph, railways, blood transfusions) beats backward superstition. Thematically, Dracula has to arrive by sailing ship.
<i>The prisoners of Alien 3 are armed with torches and “harsh language,” as one of them puts it.</I>
I think that line is actually from Aliens.
GORMAN
Shit.
(into
mike)
Apone, collect magazines
from everybody. We can’t
have any firing in there.
INT. ALIEN STRUCTURE 87
The troopers look at each other in dismay.
WIERZBOWSKI
Is he fucking crazy?
HUDSON
What’re we supposed to use,
man? Harsh language?
I absolutely loved Last Voyage of the Demeter. Yes, it had some convenient shortcuts that strain believability (Anna, from an isolated Wallachian town in the shadow of Dracula’s castle, speaks perfect English? Some very dodgy blood transfusion science? The crew of 9 only searching the relatively small Demeter after 2 people have vanished?) but the monster design was fabulous (Javier Botet doing what he does best) and I loved the return to a Nosferatu-style vampire.
captained by a man who’s ready to leave his voyages behind to finally retire.
To quote again from Aliens: “Oh, man. And I was getting short, too! Four more weeks and out! And now I’m gonna die here on this fucking rock!”
(And one could of course quote from many, many other action films of the same vintage…)
Looking at the original chapter, I notice I’d misremembered. Dracula doesn’t kill every night – in fact he gradually ramps up his killing as England grows closer.
The ship leaves Varna on 6 July. The first crewman is reported missing on the morning of 16 July. Another vanishes on the night of 23-24 July. The second mate vanishes at night on 28-29 July. On 29-30 July, as the ship nears England, two more disappear. Four of the complement are now left. One more goes at midnight on 1-2 August and another at some point late on 2 August. (The mate kills himself on 3 August.) The captain dies at some point in the night of the 6-7 August. The ship comes into harbour on the night of the 8-9 August.
So it’s ten days before the first kill, then eight days, then five days, then one day (to a double kill) then two days, then less than a day, and then he leaves the captain alone (because the captain is protected by a crucifix. Not because he needs the captain to steer the ship – the captain’s been dead two days by the time the ship comes ashore.)
And (sorry for monopolising the thread!) this is the classic pattern for deaths in a horror film, with the horror escalating slowly. In Alien, in a 112 page script, Kane dies on page 66, Brett on 76, Dallas on 84, Ash on 96, Lambert and Parker on 104. 66-10-8-12-8. Presumably it’s the same in screen time.
Similar pattern in Alien 3.
The Demeter chapter is a very short monster movie stuck in the middle of a Gothic horror story, and it’s very bright of Ovredal to notice and realise that it could be expanded out.
an iconic shot from Alien in which a character enters the ship’s hold, framed by a massive door that reveals a cavernous space stacked with boxes, clanking chains festooned from the ceiling.
Three things you’ll never actually see in a real ship, because:
the sea can have waves on it (source: personal experience) which would make stacks of boxes fall over, so you fill the hold from the bottom up and pack the boxes etc as tightly as possible from side to side, you don’t stack them up with aisles between them like you would in a warehouse;
there’s no reason to have a massive door into the hold because you load and unload cargo through the big hatch in the deck rather than through a big door in a bulkhead, and if you need to get into the hold en route you’ll just climb down through the hatch. You don’t want great big holes in the bulkheads, because they’re there to add transverse strength to the hull, and also to contain flooding;
and dangling chains would thrash around and damage the cargo in rough weather, as well as injuring any crew who happen to be down there, so you’d have them put away (and what would the chains be for, anyway? You hoist cargo with a block and tackle from a yardarm, and you don’t use chain for that, and if you did you’d put it away afterwards rather than hanging it up like a christmas decoration.)
Having seen this film at long last, I’d happily call it a very solid vampire feature, but one that ignores too much of what makes Count Dracula more than just a standard issue bloodsucker for me to call it a good DRACULA movie – if nothing else, having The Count casually ignore a crucifix should always be a No No, on the grounds that showing Dracula think his way around this particular protection would have been an excellent way to display his intelligence, and also because if any vampire should flinch from a holy symbol it’s a bloodsucker whose very name means ‘Devil’ and/or ‘Dragon’.
In a less ‘Gothic Grognard’ level, I do feel that the film made a more elementary error by showing it’s vampire early and often: for my money we should not have been given a clear view of The Count until the scene where he reveals himself in the Captain’s cabin (I also thought it a bit too ‘gotta catch them all!’ for our villain to chase down the cook as he row-row-rowed his way off on an ill charted course that may well have killed him with thirst, exposure and hunger).
Also, while I genuinely enjoyed Anna’s character arc, for my money it would have been more thematically-appropriate for her to have been picked up along the way from Castle Dracula to Varna, rather than somebody from the Count’s own native soil: having somebody who can conclusively identify the threat (By name, even) doesn’t really fit a scenario where what really kills our protagonists is the Unknown (A creature outside their experience and quite beyond their power, in the absence of solid intelligence on it’s strengths and weaknesses).
I did like the characters a great deal – Anna, the Doctor, that stubbornly-sensible First Mate (Mr David Dastmalchian definitely has a face that belongs in Gothics: he actually fits the mental image I had formed of the Demeter’s Captain from reading the novel) and the rest.
I also respect the film’s ruthlessness in killing off it’s cast of characters (and rather enjoyed it’s finish, which gave a much-needed shot of Classic Dracula).
So, all in all a good film, but not the best Dracula movie.