Director – Pearry Teo, Screenplay – Nicole Jones, Steven Paul & Pearry Teo, Producer – Steven Paul, Photography – Viorel Sergovici, Music – Mario Grigorov, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jacques Stroweis, Visual Effects – Alverina Studios Ltd (Supervisor – Mikolai Valencia), Boston Mediatech Private Ltd., Creative Visual Effects & Magical Effects, & Dreamcatcher, Animatic Sequence – Radian-Helix, LLC, Special Effects Supervisor – Lucian Iordache, Prosthetics – Ionel Popa, Production Design – David Hirschfield. Production Company – Crystal Skies.
Cast
Luke Roberts (Dracula), Kelly Wenham (Alina/Erzebet), Holly Earl (Esme), Ben Robson (Lucien Merel), Jon Voight (Leonardo Van Helsing), Stephen Hogan (Renfield), Richard Ashton (Andros), Poppy Corby-Tuech (Demetria), Valentin Vasilescu (Wrath), Vlad Radescu (Bishop)
Plot
The year 1453. Dracula, the ruler of Transylvania, returns from fighting the Turkish invaders to find his beloved wife Erzebet murdered. For this, Dracula turns against God and gives himself over to darkness, becoming a vampire. Some years later, sisters Alina and Esme travel through the forest carrying the sword known as Lightbringer that can kill Dracula. However, they are waylaid and taken prisoner by bandits led by Lucien Merel. They are joined by Leonardo Van Helsing only to be attacked by Dracula’s soldiers and Alina snatched. Back at his castle, which is hidden from mortal eye, Dracula notes the striking resemblance between Alina and his beloved Erzebet and believes that Alina is her reincarnation. Meanwhile, having discovered that Lucien can wield Lightbringer, Van Helsing determines to train him as part of his plan to raid the castle. However, Lightbringer is also sought by Dracula, where its powers can also be used to fulfil his dream of creating any army of vampires.
Pearry Teo (sometimes listed as Pearry Reginald Teo) is a Singaporean-born director who has done all his work in the US. Teo first appeared with the SF film The Gene Generation (2007) and has remained a genre regular since with the likes of Necromentia (2009), Witchville (2009), Dead Inside (2011), The Curse of Sleeping Beauty (2016), Ghosthunters (2016), The Assent (2019) and Shadow Master (2022). He has also written The Ghost Beyond (2018) and produced Tekken: A Man Called X/Tekken 2: Kazuya’s Revenge (2014), Strange Blood (2015), Bethany (2017), Stasis (2017) and Day of the Dead: Bloodline (2018). Teo passed away in 2023 aged 44.
Dracula: The Dark Prince was Pearry Teo’s take on Count Dracula. It was made at a time when the Vampire Film was being worked over by Twilight (2008) and sequels, which recast it with a toothless teen romantic spin that served to essentially kill the genre off in terms of horror. Teo draws on the nominal basics from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) – Dracula as Vlad the Impaler, a Van Helsing and a Renfield, who is now Dracula’s actual manservant rather than a lunatic in an asylum. Dracula gets a lot more brides than usual – although there’s a scene that sort of resembles the one in the book where they try to put the bite on Kelly Wenham before Dracula drives them off. However, Dracula: The Dark Prince should not exactly be considered an adaptation of Stoker so much as a free riff on the basics that Stoker established.
Far more than Stoker, what Pearry Teo draws on is other cinematic incarnations of Dracula and the vampire film. Teo may well have made his film hoping to beat the lead on Universal’s high-profile Dracula Untold (2014) origin story (before that proved a flop). As a result, we are given a Dracula origin story. Although the idea of a blonde pretty boy Dracula (played by Luke Roberts) goes against every prior casting, which has always maintained a dark-haired Dracula (as is the case in the surviving portraits of Vlad the Impaler).
Kelly Wenham with Luke Roberts as the blonde Dracula
This is an origin story where Teo is more than clearly drawing his basics from Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), in particular when it comes to explaining Dracula’s vampirism as his turning to darkness in anguish after the death of his wife. Similar to Coppola’s film, we also have the heroine of the show being wooed by Dracula who believes her to be a reincarnation of his wife – although unlike Winona Ryder’s Mina, Kelly Wenham is now a kick-ass vampire hunter.
The other cinematic source that Pearry Teo readily takes from is Underworld (2003) and sequels. Not so much their internecine vampire-werewolf warfare but the slick Gothic poses. This is essentially Dracula reinvented as a low-budget Underworld dark fantasy with everyone in black and leathers and the women wearing very ahistorical Xena-like leathers and combat gear. Not to mention Valentin Vasilescu who wanders through the film in an ornate suit of armour with vast horns on the helmet.
The rest of the show consists of lots of brooding Gothic poses – Dracula gets to sleep in a stone sarcophagus with an elaborately carved vaulted cover, guarded by a stone angel with a giant sword. That and some low horizon action that never amounts to much. The Lightbringer weapon, which resembles a pike with a bony arm extending at a right angle at the top and spinning attachment on its end, looks as though it would be absurdly ungainly to have to wield in battle.
The exact historical period the film takes place in has deliberately been blurred – Dracula is made into a vampire in 1453 but it is not clear how long after this that the events of the film take place. Given that Renfield does not age, you get the impression it is only a few years after 1453, which locates the characters about 400 years before Stoker set the action in his book. To the film’s credit, it is actually shot in Romania and we do hear the background actors speaking Romanian in some scenes.
