Screenwriter Craig Mitchell steps behind the camera for his first directorial feature in decades with Los Vampires, a film that digs into one of Hollywood's most curious production stories: Universal Pictures shooting Dracula twice in late 1930, on the same sets, with different casts and directors. Variety published its review of the film on 31 July 2026, the same day the picture screened as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival's 30th edition in Montreal.

The history is worth knowing. Universal's English-language Dracula (1931), directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi, is the version most audiences remember. But each night, after Browning's crew wrapped, a separate Spanish-language unit came in — directed by George Melford, starring Carlos Villarias — and filmed the same script on the same stages. That Spanish-language Dracula was largely forgotten for decades until a 1990s restoration and revival led some viewers to argue it was the better of the two versions. Variety, reviewing Mitchell's film, lays out this backstory as the foundation for the fiction.

Los Vampires takes that dual-shoot history and spins it into drama. Henry Ian Cusick plays a fictionalised stand-in for Carlos Villarias; Thomas Kretschmann takes the corresponding role as a fictionalised Bela Lugosi. The two characters orbit each other across the same soundstage, each filming their version of the same story while the other waits in the dark. Mitchell shot the entire film on a soundstage, leaning into the claustrophobia of the original production setup. Ricardo Jattan served as production designer and Petra Larsen as costumer, with Daniela Couso and Carol Abney in supporting roles.

Festival programmers at Fantasia, who announced the film in their second wave of titles on 4 June 2026, described it as an occult-tinged bittersweet love story — a framing that sits comfortably alongside the festival's genre-heavy lineup. Rue Morgue, which covered the programming announcement, echoed that description. The Fantasia screening on 23 July 2026 gave the film its festival platform before Variety's review brought it to wider attention. For Mitchell, whose screenwriting credits span years but whose directorial output has been sparse, the film marks a return to directing after a long absence.

The appeal is obvious for anyone interested in the machinery of filmmaking itself. Two casts, one set, two languages, and a studio trying to squeeze two films out of one build — it is the kind of production story that rarely surfaces in fiction. Mitchell has built his film around exactly that tension: the actors who never shared a frame but shared a soundstage, shooting through the same nights toward the same story told in different tongues.