Dracula: The Night Around Us (2026)
There is no character in the whole of cinema who has been to the screen more often than Dracula, which means every new version arrives carrying an impossible weight. How do you say anything fresh about a story we have all seen dozens of times, from Lugosi through Christopher Lee to Coppola and, only a couple of years ago, Eggers turning Nosferatu back into an event? So I have real sympathy for what Chris Schwab is attempting with Dracula: The Night Around Us, a scrappy, modern set, low budget retelling that turns up at FrightFest with a Portland Horror Film Festival win already under its belt. Judged for what it is, rather than against a century of definitive versions, it does a lot right.
Schwab moves the old bones into the present day. Dr. John Seward is a depressed physician at an asylum for the criminally insane whose life lifts a little when he grows close to his new neighbour Mina and her young daughter Lucy. Beneath the city, though, something ancient is stirring in the sewers, and Dracula is quietly assembling a harem of undead brides with his eye on Lucy. If you know your Stoker you will recognise every name and most of the moves, and the film is content to work the familiar machinery rather than reinvent it.
What genuinely surprised me was the effects work. For a film made on clearly limited means, this is where the money and the imagination have gone, and it shows. A car crash early on is staged with a real punch that would not look out of place in something far pricier, and the practical work on Dracula and his thralls is excellent, all texture and menace rather than the weightless digital smear that so often lets low budget horror down. When the film leans on things you can actually build and shoot in camera, it earns its scares the honest way, and I came away with a lot of respect for the craft on display.
The story around all that is more ordinary. This is a fairly basic take on the genre, and it rarely finds a fresh angle on material that has been mined so thoroughly for so long. I do not hold that against it too harshly, because standing out from the most adapted tale in the medium is a near impossible ask, but it does mean the film lives on its execution rather than its ideas. The acting, for the most part, is perfectly fine, a committed ensemble doing solid work without anyone quite stealing the thing.
Where it stumbles is the pacing. Even at a lean seventy minutes there are stretches that drag, and the culprit is mostly the dialogue, the scenes around Seward in particular, which slow the momentum just when the film wants to be tightening the screws. A story this familiar needs to move, and every time it settles in to talk you can feel the tension leaking out of the room. A tighter edit through the middle would have made a real difference.
It rallies for the finish, though. The ending is a decent payoff, and the gore in the closing stretch is genuinely impressive, the practical team saving some of their best for last and sending you out on a high. Three stars. Dracula: The Night Around Us is a really decent low budget horror, so long as you walk in expecting exactly that. Meet it on its own terms and there is a lot of honest, hand-made craft here to enjoy, and a film-maker with a clear eye for a set piece I would happily watch again with a bigger budget behind him.
Reviewed from a screener provided ahead of the film's UK premiere at FrightFest, where Dracula: The Night Around Us screens in the Discovery strand on 30 August 2026.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from the 2020s: Look Back (2024), The Whale (2022), All That's Left of You (2025)
More horror: Verena (2026), The Mummy (2017), The Girl We Let In (2026)
