Star Trek Nemesis doesn’t suck as a Dracula movie
By Mike Poteet
Star Trek Nemesis is the vampire movie to watch this Halloween.
Whether or not Star Trek Nemesis was a satisfying conclusion to the journeys of Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his Enterprise crew is now a moot debate, given the impending arrival of Star Trek: Picard Season 3. But in my mind, there’s no question that Nemesis makes a pretty satisfying vampire story.
I realized the true nature of Star Trek Nemesis when I first read the vampire story which, while not the first vampire story, is the standard by which all others are judged. Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897. In Dracula, Stoker wove together myriad strands of vampiric lore to create a tense tale of terror and suspense that still holds up, and still casts a spell on legions of readers.
Other observers have commented on similarities between Star Trek Nemesis and Dracula. “[E]ven though I have no idea if it was intentional,” Darren Franich wrote for EW in 2016, “I have to assume it was at least partially purposeful that Nemesis occasionally and specifically follows the structure of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” And last Halloween, Joe George at the official Star Trek website noted how the Remans in Nemesis “quite resemble” Count Orlok in Nosferatu (1922), the silent German “unauthorized adaptation of Dracula.”
Let’s take a look at some similarities between Star Trek Nemesis and Dracula by Bram Stoker.