Threatening a real-life, not-as-terrifying “Monster Mash” with those hordes of Frankenstein updates that are staggering a path of mutually assured destruction toward screens and big and small, there are suddenly an awful lot of new versions of Dracula in the works—a realization sparked by today’s Deadline report of a new Dracula “origin story” that’s just been acquired by Sony. Much like its fellow competing attempts to return the vampire to his classier Old World origins, before he began thirsting equally for blood and Paul Mitchell styling paste, this as-yet-untitled take on Dracula from writer Jason Keller (who just did this same thing for Snow White with Mirror Mirror) will be a “period origin story on the Dracula mythology” that Sony is hoping will launch a franchise. They are also hoping it will somehow differ from Universal’s Dracula Year Zero, which has pretty much the same logline.
While Deadline explicitly mentions both of these alongside two other modernized takes on the Dracula mythology—adaptations of both Justin Cronin’s The Passage and Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s The Strain trilogy—they’re just part of a list to which we would also add NBC’s Dracula drama , the Adam Sandler-voiced Hotel Transylvania, the Dracula “reimagining” Harker (which, at last report, may or may not star Russell Crowe). And hey, you could even add that potential adaptation of Anne Rice’s The Tale Of The Body Thief; it’s also got some old-fashioned Dracula appeal, and will probably also feature a vampire in a blouse. Anyway, it appears this growing army of the night will form rank to suck the last remaining blood out of the vampire trend, which will continue so long as regular guys insist on being so boring and unsexy.