A crew of a ship is staked by a monster and taken out one by one. It’s a premise that we’ve seen before to varying degrees of success, most notably in Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’. But imagine if the monster were Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That’s the premise behind ‘The Last Voyage of the Demeter’, a film that’s been in developmental hell for nearly a decade. A spin-off of the classic 1897 novel, this film focuses on the journey of the ship that transports Dracula’s coffin from Transylvania to England, and how it affects the ship’s crew.
After first being talked about in 2004, this adaptation has been dormant since 2011 when David Slade was originally tapped to direct with Noomi Rapace, Jude Law, and Ben Kingsley starring, but things didn’t work out with the ‘Twilight Saga: Eclipse’ director. This past May, the project was revived with ‘The Descent’ director Neil Marshall at the wheel, working from the latest draft from Lowell Cauffiel. Though initially Kingsley and Rapace were still said to be involved, there were no other names attached for the lead. Until now.
According to an exclusive from Bloody Disgusting, Viggo Mortensen has been offered the lead role of Henry Clemens. Other than a name, we have no other information on the character that the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy star would play. Rapace was originally set to play Anna Billington, and Kingsley was to play the captain of the Demeter. Hopefully Marshall, who’s currently riding high after directing what some consider the best ‘Game of Thrones’ episode to date, ‘Blackwater’, can lock down these three big names because they certainly have the star power to draw in the masses to an already interesting story. We can only hope at this point that the scheduling gods of Hollywood will look favorably on the project and we’ll get to see this film sooner rather than later.
