After years of writing and acting in some of the best and most successful horror movies in the industry, Leigh Whannell is now in the director’s chair, making some of the most interesting genre films in the last few years. His last film was the impressive low-budget sci-fi action spectacular Upgrade, and now he’s moved on to the Universal Horror stable, where his new reboot of The Invisible Man is earning rave reviews for taking the iconic monster back to basics.
Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man removes most of the familiar images and tropes we’ve come to associate with the well-known character and, instead, focuses on what makes the basic concept of a madman we can’t see frightening. It’s an intimate horror film based on real psychology, and that got us thinking… how would Leigh Whannell reboot some of the OTHER Universal Monsters?
Fortunately, Whannell was game. So in a recent interview with Bloody-Disgusting, we got the director talking about how he’d bring Dracula back to his terrifying roots!
“Here’s what I think,” Leigh Whannell says, brainstorming. “I think the best thing you can do for, say, Dracula, is just strip it down. Strip away all the iconography, a lot of which was added later. Think about it. The cape and everything, a lot of that stuff is not part of Bram Stoker’s novel. It comes from the play that originally happened, and the Bela Lugosi version.”
“This is the same thing that happened with Sherlock Holmes!” Whannell says, excitedly. “The deerstalker hat is not a product of Conan Doyle. Nowhere in those novels does he mention a deerstalker cap. But yet if you ask someone to draw a picture of Sherlock Holmes they’ll draw you that cap. It’s funny how these whales of pop culture, they collect plankton as they go through, and oftentimes where they end up [looking very different].”
“The bolts in the neck of Frankenstein, that’s a cartoon that was drawn. If you watch an original, if you look at an original cover, it’s horrific. A body, a person stitched together made out of bodies,” Whannell recalls.
“So what I would do is try to forget all the iconography – capes, bolts, fangs – strip it right back and pretend this character has never been done before.
“No Dracula novel was written. How would I present that character today if I was Bram Stoker in 2020 and I just thought of it? How would it be presented?” Whannell wonders aloud. “You know it wouldn’t be presented the same way. I don’t know that I would do a castle in Transylvania.”
“I think I would try to get at the essence of what makes Dracula scary, which is, to me, what makes Dracula scary is his lack of mercy. The fact that he might pretend,” Whannell considers aloud. “Like, he’s not a romantic. He needs to drink blood. What parallels in life can you think of that equate to someone without mercy. It’s a psychopath, right? A psychopath.”
“I watched a true crime documentary last night that chilled my blood about a bunch of people murdering a child. The lack of empathy for the suffering of a child. Everyone in life flinches when a puppy gets hurt except a small subgroup of people who have no empathy. In fact, they might be the ones doing the hurting. And for me, that’s Dracula,” Whannell says.
“So to have this conversation with you, I’m spitballing here, I would take the character right back to that and be like, I’m going to make the psychopath version of this,” Leigh Whannell pitches. “The person who just doesn’t give a fuck. Maybe he drinks blood but beyond that, there’s no capes, there’s no lightning, there’s no fog, no wolves. It’s just a psychopath who drinks blood.”
Would that chill us to our bones the way The Invisible Man does? We may never know… unless Universal gives Whannell even more keys to their vast horror kingdom!