Here there be monsters.
We might see those words scrawled in the blank patches of ancient maps, often with imaginative illustrations of the monsters themselves. Gigantic serpents writhing in the waves. Titanic lobsters, with men squirming in their claws. Fish with wolves’ heads; lizards with eyes dotting their bodies.
When so much was unknown, the sea was a place of danger—not just from the sea and storms but from the creatures of nightmare.
By 1897, of course, those fanciful notions had vanished from maps, replaced with continents and countries and hard, cold coastlines. The globe had been measured and mapped. And while a trip to sea was still a dangerous enterprise—many a ship still sank in the ocean’s gray waters—its threats were more prosaic. Unexpected storms. Unseen reefs. Accidents. Errors.
Clemens, a doctor serving as a hand on the merchant ship Demeter, appreciates this era of rational seagoing. He’s a man of science, not superstition. He may know that Nicholas is the patron saint of seafarers, but he does not petition him. When a woman is found stowed away aboard the ship, he does not grumble that she’s “bad luck,” like so many of his mates. And he certainly does not believe that there’s a supernatural evil haunting its decks.
Still, as the voyage from Bulgaria to England draws long, it’s hard to ignore the dead livestock—all with their throats torn out. The absence of rats. The crewman who vanishes without a trace. Well, outside all the blood, that is.
The woman keeps talking about a “devil” aboard and how they’ll never reach port alive. And while Clemens doesn’t believe that a devil prowls the decks, it’s obvious that something is.
The waters swirling around the Demeter are dangerous, yes. But the real danger is on the ship. Here, there be monsters.
Clearly, something really, really bad is happening on the Demeter. And when that danger grows more obvious and its goals become known, a handful of survivors band together to try to keep the monster from reaching its desired destination, risking their lives to do so.
When some of the crew want to throw the stowaway woman, Anna, overboard, Clemens is determined to save her. (The captain sides with the doctor but tells Clemens that he’ll be splitting his rations with Anna for the rest of the trip.)
The Demeter’s skipper, Captain Elliott, has brought along his grandson, Toby, as a sort of cabin boy. It’s clear that Elliott loves the boy, and that Toby in turn wants to do the very best job he can for his grandpa.
The monster aboard the ship is none other than Dracula—a vampire. He’s far from the more debonaire figure we’re used to seeing: Indeed, he’s more like a beast or demon than a man. And the monster’s very nature forms the core of an ongoing spiritual debate with Clemens and the crew (and frankly, with Clemens and himself).
Anna knows the creature well, and she’s not intending to exaggerate when she calls it a “devil.” Others familiar with the thing and its legend (it’s well known in the Bulgarian port of Varna, from which the Demeter sets sail) would agree: The creature, they insist, is the walking embodiment of evil, and a very spiritual evil at that.
Many invoke God as well, asking the Almighty to preserve the ship and its crew when they realize what’s coming with them. (One says, in an echo of traditional death sentence language, “God have mercy on your souls.”) In moments of peril, some characters use crosses as amulets of protection against the thing—though, it seems, without much success.
Clemens is increasingly hard-pressed to say that Dracula is merely a product of nature. The fact that some of his victims seem to die and come back to life—and moreover can be destroyed by simple sunlight—speaks to a more supernatural evil. Ultimately, he admits that the monster is not something that “science or reason” can explain.
Most of the humans aboard the Demeter seem to have some form of Christian faith, but the most devout by far is the cook. He tells newcomer Clemens that he won’t feed anyone who takes the Lord’s name in vain. And then, to underline the point, he asks Clemens who St. Nicholas is. (Clemens knows he’s the patron saint of seafarers, though he admits to someone later that he’s not a particularly faithful man himself.)
Unfortunately (if rather predictably), the cook turns out to be a scoundrel. As circumstances grow ever-more-serious aboard the Demeter, the cook says that the ship is being judged for its sins (which, in the cook’s estimation, are many). And in an effort to not be a victim himself, the cook betrays the crew, steals a lifeboat and skedaddles—taking a Bible with him. He offers a prayer in a moment of danger.
Prayers are said, including a rather lovely one at a deckside funeral. Some lament that God appears to have deserted them. One character seems ready to make a deal with Dracula for someone’s life, but later brandishes a crucifix before him and shouts, “I renounce you!”
When the woman is discovered, a crewman says, “We let Poseidon deal with stowaways.” It’s his way of saying that they typically toss them overboard and let the mythical Greek god of the seas take care of them. The Demeter itself is named after the Greek goddess of agriculture and the harvest. (It’s an appropriate name, perhaps, given that Dracula seems to be harvesting and feeding on his victims, one by one.)
A few of the crewmen talk about how they might use their bonus pay, referencing brothels and licentious nights with willing women. 9-year-old Toby insists he knows what a brothel is, explaining that it’s a place “where you take your knickers off.” When the cook lists a litany of the ship’s sins, he points to one of the crewmen as a man who especially likes cavorting with prostitutes.
Anna, we learn, was “given” to Dracula by her own village to protect the rest of its citizens. The monster regularly feeds on her (she pulls down a portion of her top to reveal several bite marks on her bare shoulder and upper arm). But the legend of Dracula—beginning with Bram Stoker’s original book—has always come with an undercurrent of sex, and Anna’s stories wouldn’t sound out of place when talking about a sexual predator.
Speaking of Dracula, the creature here doesn’t wear clothes. But this Dracula is far more creature than man—sort of a demon bat, if that makes sense—and no discernible private parts are ever visible.
Dracula is a messy eater.
He starts with the livestock, and we see their mangled carcasses stained with blood. Once he progresses to people, the carnage grows worse. One man has his throat slashed open and is allowed to stagger across the deck—bleeding profusely—before the monster knocks him down and begins to feed. Most of his victims predictably have their necks torn open, but Dracula does like some variety: One character’s head is bashed repeatedly against the deck until the head is bloodied and broken. Another man is yanked into a sail, leaving a bloody stain on the cloth. Dracula likes to play with his food, too, dragging a sharp talon across someone’s neck to draw a trickle of blood.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter embraces the idea that vampires (or those infected by them) are seriously allergic to sunlight—and boy, what an allergy we see here. A few folks are victimized twice—once by being bitten, fed on and apparently killed by Dracula, then again when they’re exposed to sunlight and allowed to immolate in a frenzy of blisters, burns and screams. (One man is burnt by a flaming corpse himself.)
An infected man tries to gain access to a cabin by smashing his face against the door. (Naturally, his face suffers just as much damage as the door does.) Someone’s knocked out. Guns are pointed, and bullets sometimes rip through flesh. A boy is almost crushed by a giant box. People are thrown about. Needles are inserted into arms.
[Spoiler Warning] While The Last Voyage of the Demeter is predictably bloody, it stands apart for its storytelling sadism. For those who are particularly bothered by violence against children, this is a movie to avoid.
We hear a smattering of profanity, including one use of the word “a–” and a few apiece of “h—” and the British profanity “bloody.” God’s name is misused around five times, and Jesus’ name is abused once.
Characters drink some sort of alcohol with dinner, and others contemplate getting drunk while on shore. A gambling scene features plenty of cups on the table, likely filled with liquor.
It’s obvious that Clemens, who is Black, has dealt with plenty of racism in his young medical career, unable to actually practice medicine most anywhere. Meanwhile, on the Demeter, he’s again treated unkindly—not because of his skin color, but because of his education.
Clemens gambles with several men.
The crew of the Demeter is promised a hefty bonus if the ship reaches London before August 6. When Clemens is asked what he’d do with his share, he says that what he most wants is something that gold can’t buy: He simply wants to understand the world.
“The more I see of it, the less of it makes any sense,” he says.
You could say the same thing about the movie.
Certainly, this is the case on a superficial level. The movie has more holes in it than some of Dracula’s victims. But spiritually, and tonally, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is particularly inconsistent.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter is based on one chapter from Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula. Written from the perspective of the captain’s log, the chapter is filled with unseen dread. Crewmen disappear one by one. Survivors whisper of an unknown man aboard, “tall and thin, and ghastly pale.” Only near the end of the chapter is the voyage’s true horror revealed. The captain is later found dead, a cross around his neck and his hands tied to the wheel.
Two things to make note of in Stoker’s narrative: First, the haunting restraint shown by the author. No gore-strewn decks, no exhaustive descriptions of the monster. The terror is hidden in the ship’s shadows.
But second, within those shadows, we see a glimmer of hope: The cross around the captain’s neck. The captain was dead but unmolested. The captain knew what object the monster “dare not touch; and then come good wind or foul, I shall save my soul, and my honour as a captain.”
In The Last Voyage of the Demeter, no horror is unseen, no atrocity unheard. Stoker’s shadowed evil becomes a CGI ghoul. The way in which the film treats its characters goes beyond hard or tragic to merely—and sometimes laughably—sadistic. The movie, like the monster itself, seems to revel in the blood, draining it of interest as it abuses its on-screen characters.
And despite the presence of a clearly supernatural creature, it throws its spiritual antidote—the presence of the cross—overboard like so much bilgewater.
The movie isn’t anti-Christian; its muddled message is more mixed than that. It gives us a man of reason and science as our hero, then shakes his form of faith. It offers a beautiful prayer to a dead victim, then undercuts that prayer with a scene of despairing violence. The more this movie shows, the less sense it makes.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter tries to flesh out (if you will) a haunting chapter in a Victorian classic. But in so doing, it loses sight of what made it haunting—and what makes Stoker’s story still resonate 130 years later. The film, like Dracula himself, comes to the fore filled with blood but without a soul to speak of.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
