In 2020, director Karyn Kusama was tapped to direct a new version of Dracula for Blumhouse Productions. Like The Invisible Man before it, the Dracula movie was going to be set in the modern day: a chance for Universal to reboot its continually doomed Monsterverse.
But Kusama was going to put a twist onDracula. For one, the movie was going to be called Mina Harker instead, and focus on the female protagonist of Bram Stoker’s original novel, with Jasmine Cephas Jones tapped to play her.
Given Kusama’s legacy of movies about complicated and powerful women, like Jennifer’s Body, Æon Flux, and Girlfight, Kusama’s take on Dracula would’ve given the old story an interesting edge and point-of-view.
But just three weeks before filming started, Kusama’sDracula movie was canceled. And she’s pretty sure why. “I would say that the Dracula movie I was making wasn’t a straightforward monster movie,” Kusama shared with Polygon in a video interview. “And so perhaps that was its problem.
It was very much rooted in the monsters that start at home in humans. That’s what was going to make it distinctive was that Dracula was more than a force of evil.