The Last Voyage of The Demeter (2023)

If you know Bram Stoker's Dracula, then you know The Last Voyage of The Demeter.

Inspired by the book's single chapter that details the captain's log of the doomed voyage from Bulgaria to England, Bragi Schut Jr. and Zak Olkewicz's script, directed by Trollhunter's André Øvredal, extrapolates those few pages into a near-perfect 119-minute 'spam in a cabin' horror flick.

It's July 1897 and the merchant ship Demeter is carrying cargo bound for London, including - unknowingly - a number of boxes of Transylvanian soil and one holding the sleeping body of the vampire lord, Count Dracula (Javier Botet).

Once the ship is at sea, with the crew eager to get to England quickly to earn some bonus pay, the deaths begin.

First the livestock, which was to be the crew's food for their journey, is mysteriously butchered.

Then the crew start being killed off.

The Last Voyage of The Demeter is Alien on a nautical vessel rather than a space vessel, the ship's small crew trapped at sea, being hunted by a supernatural killing machine that dines on them as they bring him closer to his desired destination: the fresh feeding grounds of Victorian England.

Kong: Skull Island's Corey Hawkins is the new ships doctor, Clemens, a man of science to counter the superstitious crew, headed by the ever-excellent Liam Cunningham (aka Game of Thrones' Davos Seaworth, another sailor of note) as Captain Eliot: an almost unrecognisable David Dastmalchian as Wojchek, the quartermaster; and Jon Jon Briones (the genie from Sinbad; The Fifth Voyage) as Joseph, the highly religious ship's cook.

A young Romani stowaway, Anna (Aisling Franciosi) is found when one of the boxes of soil is accidentally opened by rough seas, and we later realise that she was Dracula's packed lunch for the voyage.

Captain "this is my last voyage, I'm going to retire" Eliot even has his eight-year-old grandson, Toby (Woody Norman), along with him and if you think "oh, they wouldn't hurt a child" you clearly haven't been paying attention.

The fate of the Demeter and its crew is inevitable, a foregone conclusion set down in the text of Stoker's game-changing vampire opus.

But that doesn't stop The Last Voyage of The Demeter being nail-bitingly tense and claustrophobic, with several good jump scares, oozing atmosphere from every frame, and featuring a genuinely monstrous depiction of Dracula.

The vampire is no suave British character actor, instead starting a gaunt, grey ghoul and evolving through the film into a giant, Nosferatuesque bat-creature, unsentimental in its brutal slayings.

What adds to the terror is the realisation - to a modern audience - that these people have no idea what a vampire is or how to kill it, they don't know its powers and weaknesses and there is no spoonfeeding of exposition to give them a clue.

All Clemens learns from Anna is that the beast is Dracula, it drinks blood and has kept her people in servitude through fear of its wrath.

Unfortunately, The Last Voyage of The Demeter falls down in its denouement, at the very last moments when it suddenly decides to try and give the tale a pointless "feel good/Hollywood" ending, when the source material's nihilistic resolution would have had a more lasting impact.

The Shed (2019)

Having been attacked in the woods by a Nosferatu-like vampire (Damian Norfleet), hunter Joe Bane (Frank Whaley) crawls away to a nearby shed to recuperate... and complete his transformation into a bloodsucker.

The shed stands in the garden of Bane's neighbour, 17-year-old orphan Stan (Jay Jay Warren), who lives with his alcoholic and abusive grandfather, Ellis (Timothy Bottoms).

After the vampire kills Ellis and his dog, Stan realises he can't go to the authorities as his grandfather was the only thing standing between him and another spell in a juvenile detention centre.

Thus, he confides instead in his best friend, Dommer (Cody Kostro).

Unfortunately, Dommer immediately sees the "pet monster" as a weapon to strike back at the school bullies, Marble (Chris Petrovski) and his cronies, Pitt (Francisco Burgos) and Ozzy (Uly Schlesinger).

Naturally, things don't really go well for anyone, eventually culminating in Stan and his cute ex-girlfriend Roxy (Sofia Happonen) besieged in his house by a small horde of vampires.

Slightly reminiscent of several classic urban vampire flicks, from the original Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie and Fright Night to Near Dark and Salem's Lot, The Shed is an innovative, tight, well-made, well-acted, low-budget, low-key monster movie that, ultimately, doesn't quite live up to its potential.

Jay Jay Warren has a certain Anton Yelchin-like quality about him and together with Sofia Happonen they make for charming, easy-going leads, while Cody Kostro's Dommer, especially when he finally gets one over on Marble and cracks, is superb.

Spanning a three or four day period, the 98-minute movie is well-paced and a believable slice of small town American life in a community where everybody knows everybody.

However, a couple of things stand in the way of The Shed being a truly great horror flick.

The first is that, for a film that isn't a Nightmare on Elm Street, it spends far too long in Stan's dreamscape, unless this is somehow connected to a previously unknown power of the vampire. Sadly, this is never explained.

Secondly, the abrupt ending feels like writer/director Frank Sabatella just suddenly ran out of ideas (or money?) and called a halt.

Too many questions, many of them practical and grounded in the real world, are left unanswered.

And there's the obvious Chekhov's Gun of Deputy Haiser (Mu-Shaka Benson), introduced early on and clearly having a grudge against Stan, who then never appears again, even after his boss, Sheriff Dorney (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) fails to return from a routine call-out.

It feels as though The Shed could have done with, at least, five or 10 more minutes of run time to wrap up its many dangling plot threats.

Shadow Of The Vampire (2000)

The darkly humourous Shadow Of The Vampire is the perfect companion piece for Nosferatu. Its canny conceit is that the dangerously eccentric and driven director Frederich Wilhelm Murnau (John Malkovich) has made a devilish pact with a real vampire (an almost unrecognisable Willem Dafoe) to play the role of Count Orlok in his film, Nosferatu.

His payment? The chance to feed on the lead actress, Greta Schroeder (Catherine McCormack) during the climax of the movie.

Unfortunately for Murnau, things don't run smoothly as 'Max Schreck' aka Count Orlok starts killing off his crew.

Having been told that the actor 'Max Shreck' is a deep method actor, who always stays in character as the vampire, the cast and crew of Nosfesatu quickly find their location shoot in Czechoslovakia is anything but routine.

Suspicions arise, and producer Albin Grau (Udo Kier) and cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner (Cary Elwes) conspire to unmask 'Shreck' and end his reign of terror.

Shadow Of The Vampire's (totally bogus) 'secret history' of the making of Nosferatu borders on slapstick with much of its camp delivery.

However, it then manages to slickly change gears for powerful moments such as Orlok's discussion of the inherent sadness of Bram Stoker's portrayal of Dracula (in the novel that Murnau couldn't get permission to officially adapt).

Watching the two films back-to-back allowed me to mentally place the scenes being created for Shadow's movie-within-the-movie in the real movie, but also - especially during the multiple murders in the final scene - to realise where it deviated dramatically from the actual Nosferatu.

As well as an amusing vampire film in its own right, Steven Katz's script - under the guidance of director E. Elias Merhige - gives us a fascinating insight into not only the silent movie making processes of the 1920s but also the lengths an 'inspired' director will go to to craft his masterpiece.

Ultimately Murnau is driven insane by the process and is willing to allow people to literally die, on camera, for his art (even as he is creating the first snuff movie).

Nosferatu - A Symphony Of Horror (1922)

The first, albeit unofficial, cinematic adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu takes the novel's core elements, gives the characters new names, and delivers a chilling and iconic vampire tale.

Told in five delineated acts, the striking images we know so well come, primarily, from the climax of the movie when Count Orlok (Max Schreck) arrives, by boat, in the German city of Wisborg and stalks the maiden Ellen (Greta Schröder).

She's the wife of real-estate agent Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), who traveled to Transylvania, at the behest of his increasingly insane boss, Knock (Alexander Granach), to negotiate the purchase of a property in the city for the enigmatic Count Orlok... who happens to be a vampire.

Orlok spies a picture of Ellen in a locket of Hutter's and immediately knows where he's dining once he arrives to take up residence in Wisborg.

As a film that's almost a hundred years old, Nosferatu has a very different narrative structure to that which we are used to today. For instance, Hutter - the protagonist - has no involvement in Orlok's eventual demise, this is all down to Ellen, who takes it upon herself to act as bait for the vampire.

Nosferatu is a silent foreign-language film, meaning the intertitles (the cards that appear onscreen, between live-action shots, with dialogue or narrative) are written in German, with English sub-titles.

However, the result of this is that sometimes, when the intertitles contain a lot of text, the sub-titles clash with the text underneath, which is somewhat annoying.

I know the restoration of this movie for the Blu-Ray was striving for authenticity, but perhaps an option to view the film with English intertitles might have been an idea.

The print is tinted, alternating between, mainly, yellow and grey, but as far as I could tell there was no pattern, or meaning, to the changes of colour, it just helped make the film's imagery pop a bit more.

Of course, the main draw of Nosferatu is Max Shreck's incredible portrayal of the vampire count. With a single performance he encapsulated, and created, an entirely new vampire sub-species, with its own mannerisms and abilities that are, at once, similar but markedly different to the traditional (Hammer/Universal era) vampires we generally think of today.

Shreck's Orlok is not charming, suave, or romanticised, but an otherworldly beast that happens to have taken a human form. He is the living embodiment of plague - a theme echoed in The Strain television series (and books and comics), whose vampires bear more than a passing resemblance to Orlok.

Graf Orlok - portrayed by Max Schrek