Dracula is terrifying. We all know this thanks to decades of story telling. There are countless stories of Dracula and how he haunted the world with his vampiric ways throughout our cinematic history as well as in novels and beyond. We love him, for whatever reason, and with a story like The Last Voyage of the Demeter, they’re marrying the allure of Dracula with a small chapter from the novel by Bram Stoker.
In order to make Dracula as terrifying as he could be though, they brought in mastermind Göran Lundström to help bring the creature to life. Mixed with CGI in the final cut of the André Øvredal film, the Dracula we see goes through so many stages as he is trying to feed and become his more human self by the time they reach London.
Talking with Lundström about his work on the creation of Dracula, it is clear he had a lot of brilliant ideas of where to go with him and just touched the surface of his power with the film. I asked him about the joy in creating all these different ideas for Dracula, even if they didn’t make the final cut, and bringing him to life in a more terrifying way.
“As a designer, this way of working where they give me little things I have to get in there? Fortunately with these things, I have to make it work. And then I have to make a lot of decisions myself instead of handing concept designs over and then have the filmmakers make a bunch of those decisions there,” he said. “I just listen to what they want and then I’ll create something that they can look at and take in. It was an interesting challenge because it is a weird thing to have that smile in there. But it also made it stand out completely from the Gary Oldman one, it doesn’t look like that at all.”
You can see our full conversation here:
Have you seen The Last Voyage of the Demeter yet? What did you think? Let us know in the comments below!
(featured image: Universal)
