André Øvredal’s horror movie, heavily inspired by “Alien,” traps a bunch of people on a boat and proceeds to have Dracula pick them off one by one. This is lifted directly from Stoker’s novel, and believe it or not, “Demeter” ends up giving us our most book-accurate take on the Count’s monstrousness yet. In the book, Dracula travels from his native Romania to England stowed away in a crate full of his native soil (vampires have to sleep in dirt from their homeland, it’s a whole thing). The same thing happens in the film, and while the movie fleshes things out to fill a feature-length runtime, it remains true to the events of the book.
Dracula lays waste to the crew, an animalistic monster who isn’t concerned with seducing anyone. He just wants to feed. While the book character is never as monstrous-looking as the Dracula in the movie (played by monster actor extraordinaire Javier Botet), his general countenance makes that of the book perfectly. As in the book, Dracula is a monster. He has no real feelings other than hunger. He’s like a plague, or a storm rolling in. Storms have no emotions; they just destroy.