Dracula Remains Very Much Un-Dead

Dracula Remains Very Much UN-DEAD
From: Yahoo! Movies: Movie News -
Thursday May 17 12:58 PM ET

There have been countless spin-offs, take-offs and rip-offs of the original vampire character, but The Un-Dead has a pedigree.

By Dennis Michael, FilmStew.com

From Count Chocula to Grandpa Munster, thousands of characters owe their undead existence to the fact that Dracula is a public domain character, in the United States at least. But now a new chapter in the Dracula story has the proper, shall we say, bloodline. The Un-Dead, a novel by Bram Stoker's great grand-nephew Dacre Stoker, is on its way to the screen.

The Un-Dead will be made into a film, with a script by Stoker's co-writer Ian Holt. Ernest Dickerson is set to direct, and the entire project has the endorsement of the Stoker family. Shooting will begin late this year in Eastern Europe with some private financing shoring up production investment by AEI and Jan De Bont's shingle Blue Tulip Productions.

The storyline of The Un-Dead picks up 25 years after the end of the original Stoker book, and ties in Jack the Ripper and the notorious Madame Bathory in the plotline. Reportedly some details in The Un-Dead were originally in Bram Stoker's Dracula, but the book was reportedly heavily edited when it was first published. No casting has been announced as yet.