Abraham’s Boys
It has been eighteen years since Abraham Van Helsing led Wilhelmina and Jonathan Harker through the Carpathian Mountains to defeat Count Dracula, breaking the monster’s hold over her but never ending the curse, a woman always frightened and still sickly, moving from England to Amsterdam to America in the company of her second husband, taking care of their two sons, Maximillian and Rudoloph.
In in the year of our Lord 1915, the Van Helsings live out in the valleys of California beyond civilisation but Abraham knows the coming railroad will bring changes, the isolation needed to protect his family under threat, his fear that the infection which still haunts his wife, the evil which he believes could overwhelm the entire world if unchecked, lurks in the night, ever closer, seeking them, in the very blood of his wife, calling her.
Inspired by the short story of the same name by Joe Hill, gathered in his 2005 collection 20th Century Ghosts alongside The Black Phone, Abraham’s Boys was previously adapted as a sixteen-minute short in 2009 by Dorothy Street but has now been prolonged rather than expanded by writer and director and V/H/S/85 contributor Natasha Kermani, starring Bosch’s Titus Welliver as a restrained and glum Abraham Van Helsing.
A younger version of the character than is customary, only in his forties when the events of Bram Stoker’s novel took place, nor is he as eccentric or kindly, a man focused on a stated goal of eradicating the world of vampires which he does not appear to be pursuing, berating Max and the headstrong Rudy (Brady Hepner and Judah Mackey), his former Dutch accent moderated by his travels and asking his sons to take on faith the hidden horrors of the world.
Mina (The Last Stop in Yuma County’s Jocelin Donahue) weary of “his bloody crusade” and still suffering from nightmares of “cold breath and pale lips,” Abraham’s Boys proceeds at the pace of a heat stricken horse a pulling a heavy cart, the characters shuffling with emotional exhaustion, a reinterpretation of the familiar story, not the first and not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but one which suffers from a focus on the details of time and place, costumes and manners, rather than character.
Subtitled A Dracula Story, presumably for commercial reasons of brand recognition, with any menace confined to nightmares Abraham’s Boys drags itself to the same final resting place as Hill’s twenty-three page story but with a lethargy which blunts any impact, the ambiguity of the questions raised indifferent rather than anxious, leaving only a pale shadow tapping at a window after Sinners revamped the genre with hot urgency and The Vourdalak took a gleefully twisted approach to the literary traditions.
Abraham’s Boys will be available on Shudder from Friday 7th November
