THE VIEWING GUIDE
A deep dive into the must-see moments from the month’s big release
Renfield
CHRIS McKAY’S RENFIELD brings the same dry wit and keen eye for a genre trope that the director brought to The Lego Batman Movie, as Nicholas Hoult’s long-suffering title character tries desperately to extricate himself from the most toxic of bosses: Count Dracula (Nicolas Cage). Here, McKay tells us about some of the film’s standout scenes.
FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS
Renfield begins with Nicholas Hoult’s Robert Montague Renfield informing the audience, via voiceover and flashback, of how he came to be Dracula’s familiar, supplying the vampire with plentiful food in exchange for a form of immortality. One incident he recounts is an attempt on Dracula’s life, when a group of vampire-hunters meet a sticky end while trying to impale Vlad. The hunters are never named, although it seems a fairly safe bet that one of them is supposed to be a version of Van Helsing. Not so, says McKay. “There are choices that we made to suggest that there’s a world of vampire-hunters out there,” says McKay. “It would not be a huge leap to suggest that Van Helsing would be [still] out there.”