Remember the Dark Universe? It was this thing where Universal tried to make all their classic monster properties sexy and modern by hiring top tier actors as the monsters and giving them big budgets and a shared universe. It didn’t really work out though. It’s not hard to see why. The whole thing was a bit silly. At one point, there were even talks of a Tom Cruise Mummy movie. I can’t even imagine what that would look like.
With that failure, the Universal monster movies ended up in limbo, waiting for someone to figure out how to bring them into the 21st century. Along came Blumhouse and Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man which took an old concept and attached it to something true and terrifying that many people can relate to, rather than focus on how wild and wacky it is to have a guy be invisible.
And now Blumhouse thinks they can do it again with the most famous vampire there is: Dracula. I’d be skeptical but their chosen director shuts me right the hell up. According to THR, The Invitation’s Karyn Kusama will direct from a script written by frequent collaborators Matt Manfredi and Phil Hay.
I don’t usually find vampires all that interesting, Dracula in particular. But there is no way I’m not going to see this. Any Kusama movie is a must-see affair, but her taking on perhaps the most classic of the classic Universal horror monsters is pretty exciting news. I can’t wait to hear its sure to be interesting premise.