★★★★☆
Stoker’s classic is relocated to a sparse, dreamy Los Angeles, pitched somewhere between Larry Fessenden and Jean Rollin, and ending up as the best Dracula film of the decade.
Chris Schwab’s take on the most-adapted vampire in the horror canon strips the story to its bones and trusts the sickly, ominous vibes to carry the day. The action is updated to present-day Los Angeles, where asylum doctor John Seward (Eric Toms) finds a flicker of fragile hope in his new neighbour Mina (Marlene Mc’Cohen) and her young daughter Lucy, just as something ancient stirs in the sewers below and starts gathering its brides.
Schwab is after mood over spectacle: a sparse visual language, long dreamy passages, an earnest emotional register that plays the familiar material sincerely rather than winking at it. This Los Angeles is a site of spiritual desolation, a hollow place, even before Dracula turns up. Key to all of this, of course, is having a great Renfield, and Dracula: The Night Around Us has a wonderfully unnerving one in the superb Spencer Weitzel.
The craft is reminiscent of the handmade American gothic of Larry Fessenden, and the desolate atmosphere brings to mind the nightmare reveries of Jean Rollin, with the film sinking into its haunting textures as portents of infection and moral corrosion gather.
For some viewers that stripped-back approach may occasionally leave them wishing for a few more strands of narrative flesh on the bone before the film moves on. But there’s a real sincerity to it, a willingness to take on Dracula at his most corrupting, stalkerish best that sets it apart from the glut of ironic or action-packed reinventions. If you prize vampiric vibe and miasmic melancholy over flashy set-pieces, this is a quietly bewitching gem – for me, it’s the best Dracula movie of the decade.
Dracula: The Night Around Us played at Tubi FrightFest in London.