[FrightFest 2026]: Dracula: The Night Around Us

Seward's Eye

Embracing the classic gothic vampire tale by Bram Stoker, director and writer Chris Schwab puts a modern spin on it with Dracula: The Night Around Us, which has its UK premiere at this year’s FrightFest. A depressed doctor, who works at an institution for the criminally insane, comes up against an ancient evil foe and must do whatever he can to protect his neighbour Mina, and her young daughter Lucy.

Doctor John Seward (Eric Toms) finds his day-to-day life dismal, coping with his job at an asylum, dealing with annoying work colleagues, as well as a mysterious patient whose deranged ramblings and penchant for eating insects disturbs the doctor to his core. However, Seward soon begins to find some levity in his life when he forms a connection with single mom Mina (Marlene Mc’Cohen), who lives across the hall with her sleepwalking daughter Lucy (Raelan Mackiewicz). Unfortunately, the forces of darkness soon intervene in their lives when a shadowy figure fixates on the young Lucy, and works towards building himself a harem of vampiric brides in his underground lair. 

Dracula and Lucy

Cinema audiences are currently in the throes of the popularisation of Dracula adaptations, like Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2025), something that could possibly be attributed to either a fear of the foreigner for those who fall on that particular side of politics, or maybe the enigmatic count represents a shadowy figure (facism), reaching across the world, and infecting people with evil and darkness. Dracula: The Night Around Us seems to have sided with the second representation. Dracula in this instance is a dark figure who rises up from the sewers to attack women, and has set his sights on a young female child, who he wishes to take away from her mother and bring her down to nest with him in his coffin. If this isn’t a direct metaphor for the state of the world, and maybe in particular a reference to certain infamous child trafficking perpetrators, then the filmmakers are definitely missing a trick.

Spencer Weitzel as Renfield

Dracula: The Night Around Us outshines all recent Dracula adaptations in its use of lo-fi cinematography visuals and audio that creates a sense of grim seediness reminiscent of exploitation horror from the 1970s, creating a sense that the evil in this world is insidiously hopeless and bleak – noone wins, and there is no hero. The performance of asylum patient Renfield by Spencer Weitzel is a standout, playing the vampire’s familiar with a delirious and frenzied desperation, he steals the scenes, and is part of one of the most shocking conclusions that has been seen in any Dracula adaptation. Dracula: The Night Around Us is a breath of fresh air amongst the many many films utilising Stoker’s text, not just regurgitating the original material, but re-imagining it in a way to fit into a modern world, with all of its modern evils.

4 Screams out of 5