Dust and grain spit through the inky shadows of Dracula: The Night Around Us, a subtly revisionist but searingly fresh take on a familiar story.
Dr John Seward (Eric Toms) is a doctor working in a state hospital, disillusioned as much by his fellow staff as his disturbed patient Renfield (Spencer Weitzel), who possesses uncanny knowledge of his personal life. He finds meaning when he bonds with new neighbour Mina (Marlene Mc’Cohen) and her daughter Lucy (Raelan Mackiewicz). But a darkness is growing around them—an evil force with sights on mother and child, and this time it’s just a mild-mannered doctor that stands in its way.
VFX artist Chris Schwab, the writer, producer and director of this adaptation of Bram Stoker’s gothic horror tome, makes a wise choice in bringing out the shears. This is a dramatically trimmed-down version of the story rather than a retelling, which relocates it to the streets, sewers, and corridors of modern-day Los Angeles. Notably, it concentrates on one of the novel’s unfortunate but lesser characters. Unlike the Dr John Seward of the book, there’s no Van Helsing-style mentor to lean on, or a gang of concerned suitors desperately teaming up to save their friends and fiancées. There’s just the doc.
Schwab cuts ‘Dracula’ to the bone, reassembling it as a short and sharp greatest hits, and in doing so, he rediscovers the chilling and scary heart of the idea. This vampire master is dark, feral and silent, inexplicably stalking California; a presence that often bleeds from the shadows to entice or savage; why should it worry about a meek human opponent?
Seward’s bloody journey gives him some scenes usually associated with other characters. In Jonathan Harker’s absence, it’s Seward who encounters Dracula’s three acolyte vampires, this time against the glow of a TV while the master works his implacable evil across the corridor.
Several sequences like that burst with stunning imagery and brilliant sound design in the space freed up by such a lean structure. As Schwab handpicks notable scenes from Bram Stoker’s original tale, his atmospheric close-ups and cutaways capture both sweet character moments and terror. Often, the camera is locked, holding the space in frame as characters desperately work in and out of it. Combined with some very specific grading and score, it all contributes to a distinctly Lynchian vibe. One awkward dinner scene even feels like it should be in Eraserhead-style black-and-white.
In other places, the effects fold into a streamlined palette. The dark bloodsucker only really emerges at the halfway point but is most effective in shadow. One reveal, with the vampire’s arm wrapped around a victim, is startling. Elsewhere, light billows and blossoms in beautiful opposition to the dark antagonist. One impressively harrowing sequence has Lucy sleepwalking across a busy road, the cars and trucks eerily speeding by with gorgeously haloing headlights.
Things undeniably slow down during dialogue scenes, but a lot is carried in the quiet sequences, particularly as we watch Seward seize the initiative against his impossible foe. Turning Lucy into a child brings an impressive poignancy and a new slant to the actions of Seward, Mina and Dracula.
With this vampire presented as a silent, madness-inducing horror, a sense of Lovecraft can’t help creeping in, and it’s an influence that works wonders. So many adaptations show how easy it is to fumble the fly-chewing Renfield, but Weitzel’s hideous creation, set against some swirling strings and distortion, is genuinely alarming and irredeemable. It’s in the doctor-and-patient relationship that Dracula: The Night Around Us is most revisionist. Audiences may well scream at the screen as they watch something that arguably should have happened a century ago. Still, despite Seward being reforged as a man of action, it’s an undeniably empty world he steps out into.
For all its brevity and sharpness, Schwab’s vision provided an atmospheric and strangely affecting close to the Tubi FrightFest Discovery Screen 1 on a Sunday night, and an impressive tonic to the lavish scope of Robert Egger’s 2024 take on Nosferatu.
Dracula: Night Around Us had its international premiere at FrightFest 2026 on Sunday, August 30.
