The Dark Universe.
Well that was a major f-up wasn’t it?
If you don’t recall, Universal Studios has been trying to kickstart their own cinematic universe based around their classic monsters like Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman in the style of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Presumably, this would have led to an Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein remake starring Key and Peele.
They gave it a valiant effort with Dracula Untold, which was an attempt to make us see that historical figure Vlad “The Impaler” Dracula was actually a really nice guy. As elder vampire Charles Dance said at the sequel bait ending set in modern day “Let the Games Begin”.
The games began with “The Mummy” starring Tom Cruise, which despite a strong performance from Sophia Boutella was over complicated, confusing, and a failure that featured Russell Crowe doing a bad cockney accent as Mister Hyde/ this world’s Nick Fury.
Universal released this photoshopped still to promote their universe:
Tom Cruise would continue as the new mummy dearest, Johnny Depp would play the Invisible Man, Javiar Bardem would be Frankenstein, The Rock was rumored to be The Wolfman, and Angelina Jolie was going to be the Bride of Frankenstein.
So what happened?
With the failure both critically and commercially of The Mummy, all these plans were scrapped. It was back to step one. Universal decided a lower budget horror based approach with a ton of marketing and a pg-13 rating was more feasible than a big budget action spectacle version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame where Claude Frollo is a master nunchuck user.
So they passed Invisible Man off to Blumhouse and we are where we are now, with a genuinely well made, tense, and successful Invisible Man remake that brings the horror to the modern day. Stalkers are scary and an issue many women deal with, but what’s scarier, an invisible stalker.
What I want to do here today is try to pitch some potential remakes that could reignite the embers of the Dark Universe while keeping things firmly in the realm of horror. I want to pitch modern updates that bring these classic horrors to the present day in ways modern audiences can fear. Let’s start.
CASTING:
The Invisible Woman: Elizabeth Moss (Mad Men)
Imhotep: Alexander Siddig (Gotham)
Dracula’s Daughter: Saoirse Ronan (Lady Bird)
Dracula: Mads Mikkelson( Hannibal)
Van Helsing: Willem Dafoe (The Lighthouse)
Victor Frankenstein: John Hamm (Mad Men)
Igor: Macaulay Culkin (Home Alone)
Frankenstein’s Monster: Chiwetel Ejiofor (The Lion King)
Bride of Frankenstein: Elizabeth Debicki (Guardians of The Galaxy Volume 2)
Larry “The Wolfman” Talbot: Jon Bernthal(The Punisher)
Doctor Pretorius: Ian McKellan (X-Men)
The Gill Man: Andy Serkis (King Kong)
THE WOLFMAN:
The central conflict of a werewolf is the conflict between man and self. You get bitten, and you begin to fear what you will become and how you will hurt the ones you care about. The real horror this film will draw upon is the horror of child abuse. Our hero will be returning home to his family after years abroad. His father is a jerk who pitted him against his older brother and abused his mother. The hero has done everything in his power not to become his father and to be his own man. Lawrence Talbot has a wife and a son and has spent his life trying to treat them right and be a better man than his father. But now, his father is dead and he’s home for the funeral, and he begins to change. He is the eldest son, the man of the house, and that means the curse is his. Lawrence Talbot is becoming all of his worst traits made manifest as a savage monster. His father’s animal spirit possesses him. He is a werewolf.
We set it in modern day in the American Northwest, it’s savage and violent, the effects are practical and the werewolf is a true monster in the style of The Howling or American Werewolf in London. Tension comes from Talbot trying to keep himself from losing control and hurting his family.
THE MUMMY:
Straight up horror for this, in the style of “The Descent” or “As Above So Below”. Archeology by foreigners is a bit iffy in Egypt these days on account of England stealing all their stuff and refusing to give it back so our lead character will be a native Egyptian archeologist. The fears we will be dealing with are claustrophobia, darkness, and fear of decaying corpses. The story?
An ancient tomb in Egypt, a female native Egyptian archeologist and her team of experts are going to explore it, they need to hurry though because the Taliban are in the area. The woman archeologist seems somewhat obsessive about this tomb. They go in, discovering its seemingly a labyrinth once you get inside and they get lost after a cave in because of a bomb going off on the surface. No way out but to keep going. As they continue, the Egyptian female lead discovers that something has been speaking to her in her dreams, urging her to come to this tomb and that’s why she’s so obsessive about it. As it turns out, she is a direct descendant of whatever is in this tomb and it is awake and alive and it has been for a long time and has been influencing her mind to try and get someone to release it. They’re in a tomb that hasn’t been opened in thousands of years and something is alive. That is scary. Also, it’s not a tomb at all, it’s a prison built by ancient Egyptians for an evil immortal sorcerer. Make it feel really claustrophobic, really dreamlike, hypnotic, and tense. The greatest strength of the mummy is that it is very smart and can get in your head. Make the movie almost Lovecraftian in nature.
The mummy itself is a malevolent inhuman intelligence that messes with our characters minds telepathically and pits them against each other. Can our heroes find another way to the surface and escape, can they defeat a force of pure evil this strong?
The most important aspect of the Mummy is that it’s smart, evil, and can affect you from far away. The set design should be a combination of ancient egyptian architecture as well as HR Giger’s art.
CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON:
With this, we go into the most action movie feeling of these movies because the original was kind of an action movie with horror elements. The original is also in its subtext kind of a movie about man messing with nature. This one is definitely a man versus nature, fear of the unknown kind of movie. It’s set in the present day, let’s say the fires in the amazon rainforest have exposed evidence of fossils that depict a strange evolutionary offshoot in the Amazon. Explorers head into a world they don’t understand to exploit nature and get killed off one by one by a monster. The message: don’t f*** with nature or you’ll get killed by a crocodile man. Humanity has changed the planet by being here and now we’re paying the price, both with climate change and with the creature from the black lagoon. The monster is somewhat sympathetic in that it didn’t come into our house, we went to it’s house. It’s a very territorial animal defending itself. It’s also terrifying. It’s fast, predatory, can move through the forest with ease, is strong, a master of both land and water, it has huge claws! This thing is a perfect predator, unchanged over millions of years like a shark. Nature incarnate.
The Mummy was psychological, this will be a slasher movie with the feel of action horror films like “Predator” or “Anaconda”.
THE BRIDES OF FRANKENSTEIN:
Jon Hamm will play Doctor Victor Frankenstein, a man with a fascination for the idea of curing death, using the teachings taught to him by his old college professor Doctor Pratorius. He’s a war veteran who was a medic in the Middle East where he saved the life of Igor, though at the cost of both of Igor’s legs. Before he went off to war he became engaged to a woman, Elizabeth, and is going to marry her now that he’s home. It’s a plot point that she’s always wanted to visit Europe and they plan to go on a trip someday when his work is finished. Victor is scared to see her again after years apart but Igor convinces him he’ll be okay. Returning home from the war he works as a doctor at a local hospital. He’s crippled by post traumatic stress disorder and guilt over those he couldn’t save, which leads him to experiment on corpses with Igor helping him steal dead bodies from the hospital morgue. He has discovered he can with injected chemicals restore life in dead body parts. It works less and less well the more decayed the body is though. He hopes someday he can bring entire bodies back to life. He ends up stealing a fresh enough corpse to give Igor new legs in surgery. He is discovered and fired from the hospital. Victor has the idea to create a fully new life form and moves himself, his fiancé, and Igor to his ancestral castle home in Germany, which he discovers has a secret passage leading into the cemetery through the family crypt. It would be a crime NOT TO steal these corpses with access being so easy. They learn how to un-embalm buried corpses by pumping blood back into them. He figures out a way around the decayed flesh problem and discovers that with electricity he can exercise decayed flesh and with antibiotics and moisturizing lotion rejuvenate it.
Victor builds his monster to be better than humans, unable to die, made out of the bodies of intellectuals and artists, and he uses a lightning storm to bring it to life. The monster escapes when Igor decides to torture it because Igor is secretly a psychopath. The monster runs amok, learns English after befriending a blind guy, gets chased out of the blind guy’s home by his visiting family who are not blind and are horrified, and accidentally kills a little girl it was trying to play with which sends a lynch mob after it. Victor believes he can save his monster and rehabilitate it as his wedding approaches.
The whole film should be Victor going too far trying to save the world, traumatized by what he saw in the war, continuing to believe in his idea, refusing to acknowledge that his friend Igor is a violent psychopath and his creation is hurting people until it all comes crashing down. It’s about how trauma and loss can destroy your life.
Igor is killed, Elizabeth is killed, the monster, alone in the world and enraged at its “father” for creating it, decides to seek revenge. He has taken Victor hostage and is demanding he bring Elizabeth back to life as a mate for the monster. Victor has a conversation with his “son” where he learns the monster wishes it had never been born and Victor explains to his son he still believes he’s doing the right thing and regrets nothing as he tries to stitch his dead fiancé back together. He hopes he can save her and once she’s done he will bring Igor back too, people don’t have to die anymore. Things will be different. No one has to die ever again.
Frankenstein and his monster develop a tense camaraderie as mutual Stockholm Syndrome sets in, and they work together to fix Elizabeth.
Police raid the castle, the monster fights and kills them while Victor works. Victor is okay with this because he can bring the police back to life later.
Elizabeth is brought back as a horrible monster that wants to die and is horrified by what Victor has done. Elizabeth kills herself. Victor thinks something was wrong with her brain. He can fix this and bring her back right next time. The monster realizes it was wrong to put another person through the pain it’s gone through and kills his father by throwing him off the castle tower. Then he wanders off into the woods.
Now onto the big guy. The most famous universal monster of all: Dracula, but Dracula needs some build up. Instead of starting with Dracula, we’re setting him up with...
DRACULA’S DAUGHTER:
Dracula’s Daughter will actually be an adaptation of the classic novel Carmilla, an early vampire story that predates Dracula. It’s about a young woman who lives in an isolated castle with her religious doctor father in the middle of no where in Austria who befriends a young girl, Carmilla, who turns out to be a lesbian vampire who is trying to drain her life from her. It’s set in the Victorian Era. I recently read the novel and it's great. In the original novel her father teams up with a general who lost his daughter and goes after Carmilla. For a modern day adaptation we would have to go more sympathetic with our main vampire, we can go into a tragic backstory where Carmilla’s father, the evil vampire Dracula, turned her into a vampire and then abandoned her to fend for herself 200 years ago. She’s now just as isolated and alone as the protagonist and wants to turn her into a vampire for love and companionship which creates a very sympathetic title character.
Give it the feel of an art film. Something like Persona(1966), Portrait of a Lady on Fire(2020), and mix that with the atmosphere of something like The VVitch and The Lighthouse.
This movie sets up Dracula for his own movie.
DRACULA:
This is it, the big one. Dracula. The most famous of the universal monsters and one of the most famous antagonists in all of fiction.
Casting: Mads Mikkelsen as Dracula.
Van Helsing? Willem Dafoe.
This one is set in the modern day. Jonathan Harker and Mina Harker travel to Romania for their honeymoon and because Jonathan, for his job as a lawyer, has been sent out to speak to Count Dracula, an old Romanian nobleman who is tired of living in a dilapidated castle in the old country and wants to buy a home in New York City. In Romania, Dracula is feared, all the villagers know his name. Once, long ago, he was powerful and wealthy and a prince of men and his castle was beautiful and he held such extravagant parties and he danced and fed until his belly was full but then came the revolutions and uprisings and plots on his life by the peasantry. The land went bad and the people left him to sulk in his castle alone as it fell into disrepair. No one here respects nobility anymore.
So, Dracula, becoming creepily obsessed with Jonathan’s wife Mina, decides to buy a building in New York City, Mina and Jonathan’s apartment building. He moves to the city, quickly adapts to the upper crust society of the American independently wealthy and throws parties for the ultra rich where he can feed on high class blood. He stalks Mina and Jonathan, and Mina’s rich best friend Lucy, as a wealthy psychopath who because of his class, his wealth, and his power( he’s turned the police Commissioner into a Renfield- like thrall so police will look the other way) can get away with any crime. Dracula will represent the fear of people like Jeffrey Epstein and OJ Simpson who can do whatever they want without consequence because of their connections and wealth. Eventually, Jonathan and Mina have to get help to stop this monster from Willem Dafoe’s Van Helsing, a crazed monster hunter.
New York is a symbol of the modern world in a way London no longer is like it was in the book so that’s why I’ve chosen New York, the city that never sleeps where Dracula will spread the disease of vampirism like the Black Plague. There will be a moment where as his plague starts to spread among the upper class the city falls apart and paranoia builds that anyone could be a vampire.
Dracula himself will look like Nosferatu when you first meet him but that’s just because he’s been starving without blood. Once he sinks his teeth into someone he’ll deage and resemble Mads Mikkelson but creepier.
Also, Dracula’s origin is that he made a deal with the devil to get his powers.
Those are the mainstays, but new interpretations could be done of
The Man Who Laughs
The Black Cat
The Hunchback of NotreDame
The Phantom of The Opera
The Raven
Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde
The Island of Doctor Moreau
And more iconic classic horror figures.
Now, I said these would be horror, but now… I want to try my hand on how this “Dark Universe” could come together “Avengers” style
HOW IT ALL COMES TOGETHER:
Spoiler alert, Elizabeth Moss killed the Invisible Man and stole his invisibility suit.
At the end of The Wolfman, our Wolfman jumped off a cliff to save his family from being killed by him and died.
At the end of The Mummy, our mummy had escaped his tomb and was looking with wonder at the modern day as a plane passed overhead.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon is still alive in the jungles of the Amazon.
Frankenstein has been wandering the most isolated parts of the world for centuries as a hermit.
Dracula’s Daughter is presumably still alive, having fled from vampire hunters at the end of her film in a tragic romance kind of way.
Dracula was burnt alive by sunlight and is dead.
Where things start to come together is a remake of the classic...
FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN:
Larry Talbot awakens in his tomb and discovers he is in fact not dead. He tries to once again kill himself, but he just wakes up healed a few days later as before. He will meet John Hamm’s wealthy Doctor Pretorius, the mad scientist who taught Victor Frankenstein everything he knew who offers to cure him or his lycanthropy if he can capture Frankenstein’s monster, who has been roaming the most inaccessible parts of the world as a hermit since his creator’s death. Pretorius has the makings of a James Bond villain with his own private mountain laboratory and an army of henchmen. Talbot after capturing the creature will discover that the Frankenstein Monster is both intelligent and misunderstood and that Doctor Pretorius is dying of a rare degenerative disease and wants to put his brain in the monster’s body so he may live forever. Frankenstein’s Monster and Larry Talbot battle Pretorius’s henchmen, kill the mad doctor, and escape his laboratory. Talbot goes to secretly watch his widow and son with the Frankenstein monster then leaves, hoping to someday find a cure with the monster’s help.
THE MONSTER MASH:
The Invisible Woman, a woman who stole her dead abusive husband’s invisibility suit and now uses it to assassinate spousal abusers.
Dracula’s daughter, a lonely depressed and immortal vampire. The woman she loved died of old age in the early 1900’s and she has no reason left to live save for an urge to feed on blood.
The Wolfman, Larry Talbot, looking for a cure for lycanthropy with his friend and companion:
The Frankenstein Monster, a philosopher hermit made from corpse parts in a world that fears him for his appearance. Larry Talbot is his only friend.
Van Helsing, a monster hunter dedicated to ridding the world of evil.
The Creature From The Black Lagoon. A predator from deep within the Amazon. The most dangerous animal alive.
Imhotep. An ancient immortal magician that has recently escaped his tomb and now seeks to take over the world in the name of the dark gods he worships.
In this film, Imhotep, in his plot to destroy the world and remake it in his image, travels to Brazil to an ancient Egyptian Pyramid hidden in the jungle to find The Necronomicon, which can allow him to open a doorway to the dimension of his gods. He will discover the Creature From the Black Lagoon living in the pyramid and using his powers to speak to it, convince it to work for him to destroy humanity because they’ve destroyed the environment.
Meanwhile, Van Helsing is hunting Carmilla, Dracula’s Daughter, in Paris. The Invisible Woman will stumble upon this and save Carmilla, who appears to be a teenage girl being attacked by a mad man with wooden stakes. Carmilla will try to feed on Cecilia but be discovered and end up trapped by the sunrise and forced to explain the truth about what she is to Cecilia. Carmilla explains she was turned against her will by Dracula and is trying to only feed on animals now but it’s difficult. She’s in Paris looking for a cure for vampirism.
Cecilia will feel sorry for and develop a motherly relationship with the eternal 19 year old.
The Wolfman and Frankenstein meanwhile, are in Paris as well as a mysterious letter offering The Wolfman and Frankenstein “peace” was sent to them while they were looking for a lycanthropy cure in Nepal. In Nepal Larry was trying to learn how to lucid dream so he could control himself in werewolf form.
Eventually, it will be discovered that in The Paris Catacombs, Imhotep is raising an army of monsters, vampires, and werewolves, offering them a new world of gods and monsters where they can come out of the shadows. No more hiding, no more hunger, no more being hunted by monster hunters!
Imhotep will reveal he plans to use the necronomicon to raise every corpse in the catacombs as a zombie, Wolfman and Frankenstein try to stop him, fight the Creature From The Black Lagoon, but fail. Zombies attack Paris to the horror of Carmilla, Cecilia, and Van Helsing.
Cecilia and Van Helsing join forces with Frankenstein and The Wolfman but Carmilla, convinced by Imhotep’s message of self acceptance and no longer needing to hide, joins Imhotep and The Gillman. They all escape together.
The Necronomicon is revealed to be missing an important page and the zombie attack was a distraction so Imhotep could steal the missing page, held in a Paris museum. With the page, Imhotep can open a portal to another dimension and unleash an evil tentacle monster he worships as a god: Nyarlathotep, a being that has gone by many names, including Satan, Lucifer, and Set.
Imhotep, Carmilla, and Gillman return to Brazil to open the portal at the ancient pyramid in the Amazon.
Larry has transformed into the Wolfman and Van Helsing, Cecilia, and Frankenstein fight him while within Larry’s own mind he attempts to lucid dream and literally battle his inner demons, convincing his werewolf alter ego to join forces with him for the good of the planet.
Van Helsing, Cecilia, The Wolfman, and Frankenstein join forces to stop this and head to Brazil where they fight vampires, werewolves, and Doomsday Cultists. Carmilla switches sides and rejoins them after discovering Nyarlathotep will kill billions once unleashed on Earth.
Imhotep kidnaps The Wolfman’s wife and son to use against him, he saves them and reunites with them.
They defeat Imhotep and the pyramid explodes as Imhotep is eaten by Nyarlathotep for failing him. The Creature From The Black Lagoon returns to the jungle. The world is saved.
In a post credits scene Dracula is risen from the grave by the Doomsday Cultists.
Tell me what you think in the comments! That’s my pitch, everyone stay inside and stay safe from the real horror, all that coronavirus craziness going on!