Karyn Kusama hasn’t directed a film since 2018’s “Destroyer.” She came very close to helming one when, in 2020, she was tapped to helm a new version of Dracula for Blumhouse. Like “The Invisible Man,” her Dracula was going to be set in the modern day.
Kusama’s Dracula was actually called “Mina Harker,” and focused on the female protagonist of Bram Stoker’s original novel, with Jasmine Cephas Jones tapped to play her. It was going to be a “feminist” twist on the source material. However, three weeks before filming was set to begin, the project was canceled.
Kusama’s had a history of strong female led films, having directed “Jennifer’s Body,” “Girlfight,” “The Invitation” and “Destroyer.” Speaking with Polygon, Kusama says she knows exactly why her film got canned, and it had to do with its portrayal of men:
I would say that the Dracula movie I was making wasn’t a straightforward monster movie. 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. He was a man, and that is, in some ways, both its reason for being and its obstacle. It was really hard to get the movie made. And even though we got so close, three weeks from shooting, people lost their nerve.
It’s a curious way for Kusama to describe why her film failed. When the project got canned, official wording was that it was “due to creative differences.”
While “Mina Harker” did not materialize, and Kusama hasn’t directed a film in over six years, she’s been keeping busy with television projects. She serves as an executive producer on Yellowjackets, and will be directing the first two episodes of AMC’s upcoming anthology series “The Terror”.
Ideally, Kusama hopes to return to movies sooner rather than later, and she has a very specific notion of what kind of movie she wants to make next.
“I need to be making personal movies again,” she says. “That’s sort of where I really learn and flex and experiment and fail and try and all of it. So that’s kind of what’s next for me, is just figuring out what the next feature is going to be.”