Interview: Bragi F. Schut

A conversation with the co-screenwriter of the horror movie The Last Voyage of the Demeter.

There’s a new horror movie opening in theaters across North America this weekend called The Last Voyage of the Demeter. Here is an excerpt from a Bloody Flicks interview with the movie’s co-writer Bragi F. Schut whose other credits include Escape Room and Samaritan.

Tell us how you came up with adapting the narrative of Last Voyage of the Demeter?

I originally wanted to write a horror film set in space. I’m a huge fan of ALIEN and ALIENS and I wanted to try something in that same genre. But no matter what I thought up, everything just felt like an Alien ripoff. So I shelved my plans. Anyway, when I first arrived in Hollywood, I managed to get a job working in a model shop. I became friendly with the model makers and one of the guys had his portfolio and he showed it to me. He had all these wonderful miniatures in it, things from “Total Recall,” and “Edward Scissorhands,” and a bunch of other movies… and there were these photos of this fantastic schooner with bloody tattered sails. Well, they caught my eye and I asked him what they were from, and he replied, “that’s the Demeter. That’s the ship that carried Dracula from Transylvania to London. It was used for a few shots in Coppola’s Dracula movie”… and it hit me — that was my way into an alien-type story. But instead of setting it in the future in space, I would set it in the past, on a boat.

You are extracting part of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, how will this differ from the source material?

I tried to construct the story so that it wouldn’t violate what was in the book. There are these journal entries told from the perspective of the captain, and I wanted to try to preserve those. But in expanding one tiny chapter into an entire movie, I also knew that I had to expand and invent a bunch of new material. So it was a tricky balancing act. There are a few cheats — elements I added that are not in the book — but in general I think it’s very much true to the spirit of the book and the differences can be explained in ways that don’t violate the journal entries that people know from the book.

Without giving away plot twists, this is a tricky question to answer… but hopefully when everyone sees the movie it will make more sense. There are new elements, but the story very much fits into the story that we all know and love.

Here is a trailer for The Last Voyage of the Demeter:

For the rest of the interview, go here.

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