Abraham’s Boys Is a Clever Horror Drama on the Isolation and Uncertainty of Childhood
I don’t know whose decision it was to amend the title of horror author Joe Hill’s short story “Abraham’s Boys” with the subtitle A Dracula Story when it was adapted to feature film, but that was a bold bit of calculation. Perhaps writer-director Natasha Kermani is the one I should be tipping my cap to, but it’s a choice that is key to the smoldering new horror drama’s inherent ability to subvert genre convention; a choice bordering on purposefully misleading, but one that ultimately registers as clever misdirection. Before watching the new Shudder horror film, one would likely assume the subtitle was some kind of producer-mandated tack-on, a failsafe to make sure that more casual potential audience members will have some expectation of seeing a “vampire movie.” After watching Abraham’s Boys, the subtitle is revealed as far more deeply metaphorical, leaving the (possibly bewildered) viewer questioning what “vampire movie” even implies, at the end of the day.
Rest assured, the Dracula connection is quite literal, at least in terms of how it’s tied to Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic horror novel. The “Abraham” of the title is Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, the novel’s polymath physician and undead expert; the man who eventually assembles a team to hunt down the vampire after Dracula travels to London seeking Mina Harker. Abraham’s Boys functions as a direct Dracula sequel, taking place nearly 20 years later, with Abraham (Titus Welliver) having now seemingly married Mina (Jocelin Donahue) himself after the death of Jonathan Harker. Fleeing the lingering memories of vampiric contagion and Mina’s psychic scars from the ordeal, the pair resettled in the untamed western wildness of California’s central valley in the year 1915, raising two sons: Older teenager Max (Brady Hepner) and preteen Rudy (Judah Mackey). There, they lead an uneasy pastoral life, with Mina subject to fitfulness and residual illness, and the broodingly intense Abraham doling out both affection and severe judgement to his sons, wary of the return of a vampiric menace.
Thus, obvious expectations are set: This is clearly a story about Dracula finding his way to America for vengeance on the Van Helsing clan, both to conquer his archnemesis and win the prize in Mina that was denied to him in London. The “boys” of the title, meanwhile, implies that we’ll see the story through the eyes of the next generation as they come of age and take up the responsibility of continuing their father’s righteous work. You can picture the climactic siege of their frontier western homestead, as the evil king vampire seeks to redress his embarrassing defeat. It (perhaps hackily) writes itself!
Except … no, that’s not the true intent or trajectory of Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story, not by a long shot. What we have instead is a slow burn psychological horror drama about fatherhood, religious mania, unreliable narrators and the recontextualization of a story that absolutely any horror geek knows, with more in common with Bill Paxton’s Frailty than Terence Fisher’s Horror of Dracula. Abraham’s Boys casts doubt upon the motives and escapades of familiar stock characters, not just in this film but in the events of Dracula as well. But more than anything, it functions as a powerful encapsulation of the death of innocence in youth; a distillation of the moments when we come to terms with the realization that our parents may not be the valorous outlines we’ve built them up to be.