Thunder and lightning crack the sky above an abandoned church in New Orleans. The wind howls and the rain lashes, while a terrified film crew takes shelter beneath a 30ft guillotine propped up over the altar, Nicholas Hoult sponging off buckets of blood from his face. If you're going to make a horror movie, this is the way to do it.
‘If you're very quiet,’ whispers Chris McKay, almost a year after a real tornado threatened to flatten his entire film, ‘you can hear something in the wind… just this eerie, haunting atmosphere in the back of every dialogue track. I've spent so long trying to keep as much of that in the mix as possible. I wanted Hammer. I wanted Tod Browning. I wanted texture.’ This, after all, was Dracula. Except this isn't his story…
The last time Universal dug the Count out of his box it was for 2014's Dracula Untold. That film that was rumoured to be the starting point for the Dark Universe, the first in a string of classic reboots for a franchise to rival the MCU. When the film failed to land, the plan rested on Tom Cruise's The Mummy. When that did the same, the whole thing went back on the shelf. By the time the success of The Invisible Man saw shared universe questions being asked again, no one really knew how to answer them.
With everything back on the table, Universal's biggest, oldest, most venerated supervillain was fair game again — with no limitations on where he might be able to go next. Enter screenwriter Ryan Ridley, fresh off Community and Rick and Morty.
‘Robert Kirkman [from ] reached out to me with an idea,’ says Ridley. ‘The moment I heard it I knew what this movie was going to be. This was a superhero blockbuster that wasn't beholden to any other franchises. This is a much weirder souffle than anyone's expecting. It's an action horror and
