There is something almost perversely refreshing about a Dracula movie that doesn’t arrive dressed like it just robbed a Hot Topic. Chris Schwab’s Dracula: The Night Around Us drags Bram Stoker’s bloodsucker into the modern world, throws him beneath the city streets, and lets the old bastard get back to doing what Dracula does best: corrupting people, collecting women, and making everybody’s already miserable existence considerably worse. Schwab isn’t interested in worshipping at the altar of Stoker so much as digging around underneath it. His John Seward is already emotionally circling the drain when Mina and her daughter Lucy enter his life, offering him the smallest suggestion that maybe everything doesn’t completely suck. Naturally, Dracula shows up to correct that misunderstanding.
That setup is where The Night Around Us finds its nastiest little pulse. Dracula isn’t simply an elegant stranger standing in a doorway looking sexually constipated while everyone wonders why there are suddenly bats outside. There is something grimier happening here. He is down in the sewers building himself a harem of undead brides, which gives the movie a wonderfully diseased quality. Schwab takes the romantic mythology surrounding Dracula and rubs some dirt into it. This is hunger without the perfume. The vampire mythology remains recognizable, but the surroundings feel lonely, contemporary, and rotten. Eric Toms, Marlene Mc’Cohen, Spencer Weitzel, Raelan Mackiewicz, and Brent Jones inhabit a world where depression and isolation have already taken bites out of these people before Dracula ever gets his teeth involved.
And that is ultimately why the movie works. There have been so many Dracula adaptations that another one should probably require a permit. We know the cape. We know Mina. We know Lucy. We know Seward. We know somebody is eventually going to have a very shitty evening involving two holes in their neck. Schwab understands that familiarity and doesn’t waste the entire movie pretending he has discovered Dracula underneath a rock. Instead, The Night Around Us plays with what these characters mean when dropped into a more psychologically damaged world. The horror isn’t simply that an ancient monster has returned. It is that he finds people already cracked open and waiting. Dracula doesn’t necessarily create the darkness here. He recognizes it, crawls inside, and starts redecorating.
There are bigger, slicker and considerably more expensive versions of Dracula wandering around cinema history, but polish has never guaranteed a pulse. Dracula: The Night Around Us has one. A nasty one. Schwab’s modernized approach embraces the sadness, sexuality, decay, and predatory ugliness that have always been lurking underneath Stoker’s mythology without turning the whole damn thing into another reverential museum tour. Winning the Goule D’Or at the Portland Horror Film Festival makes sense because this is exactly the sort of independent horror that benefits from refusing to behave itself. With its UK premiere at Tubi FrightFest on August 30, 2026, the Count gets another resurrection, and somehow the bloodsucking son of a bitch still has something left in him.
Turns out Dracula wasn’t dead. He was just waiting in the sewer.
MPAA Rating: unrated.
Runtime: 70 mins
Director: Chris Schwab
Writer: Chris Schwab
Cast: Eric Toms; Marlene Mc'Cohen; Spencer Weitzel
Genre: Horror
Tagline: The Night Around us
Memorable Movie Quote: "It is know, even in scripture, that blood is life."
Distributor: Strike Media
Official Site:
Release Date: August 30, 2026
DVD/Blu-ray Release Date:
Synopsis: A disillusioned doctor regains his faith in humanity from a mother and daughter, only to be hunted by an evil force that thrives on destruction.
