Screenwriter Jon Spaihts on Re-Creating Van Helsing for a Modern Audience
Jon Spaihts has had a lot of credits as of late, with Prometheus in his archive and Doctor Strange and Passengers still to come this year. Speaking with Collider, the writer called the film a "new creation," distancing itself from the Hugh Jackman-led film in the early 2000s.
"It’s a new creation, so it doesn’t owe much of a debt to prior films, but it is still a very romantic departure from the character as incepted in Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, where it was a Dutch doctor who figures out a very surprising answer to an odd medical question. This is a monster hunter with encyclopedic knowledge, but it’s set in the present day and it’s just filled with good stuff I’m not allowed to talk about.
"But I’m very excited about this new incarnation of Van Helsing, and I hope that as the Universal Monsters Cinematic Universe begins to take flight, we’ll see him cropping up in other stories, as well."
It seems like a tricky one to slot him into Universal's monsters universe. We don't quite know whether the idea is to have these monsters become sympathetic leads, but if so then Van Helsing could prove damaging to that. May we learn that his role would be better suited to cameos and appearances in other films, rather than his own film?
But Spaihts says that the franchise is not a campy one, instead leaning toward horror. "We’ve gotten really good at scaring people in movies. So, the nice thing about this Mummy is that it has the swash-buckling action-adventure character of a modern epic action movie, but it’s legit terrifying. It will scare you."
Source: Collider
