Tagline: Adventure lives forever.
During a time in history when the supernatural still seemed as conceivable as the everyday, when storytellers supplied imaginative reasons for the unexplained and when mythic creatures still crept by night…there was a single figure fighting against the dwindling mysteries hidden in the encroaching darkness: Van Helsing.
Gabriel Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) is a man cursed with a past he cannot recall and driven by a mission he cannot deny. Charged by a secret organization to seek out and defeat evil the world over, his efforts to rid the world of its nightmarish creatures have been rewarded with the title that now follows him: murderer.
Van Helsing roams the globe an outcast, a fugitive, a loner, himself hunted by those who don’t understand the true nature of his calling. When dispatched to the shadowy world of Transylvania, Van Helsing finds a land still mired in its past…where legendary creatures of darkness come to life…a place ruled over by the evil, seductive and undefeatable vampire, Count Dracula… and it is Dracula that Van Helsing has been sent to terminate.
Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale) is one of the last of a powerful royal family, now nearly annihilated by Dracula. A fearless hunter in her own right, Anna is bent on avenging her ancestors and ending an ancient curse by killing the vampire. Joined by a common foe, Van Helsing and Anna set out to destroy Dracula along with his empire of fear. But in challenging an enemy who never dies, Van Helsing uncovers a secret he never imagined and comes face-to-face with the unresolved mysteries of his own enshrouded past.
Van Helsing is a 2004 American dark fantasy action-adventure film written and directed by Stephen Sommers. It stars Hugh Jackman as vigilante monster hunter Van Helsing, and Kate Beckinsale as Anna Valerious. The film is an homage and tribute to the Universal Horror Monster films from the 1930s and ’40s (also produced by Universal Studios which were in turn based on novels by Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley), of which Sommers is a fan.
The eponymous character was inspired by the Dutch vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing from Irish author Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. Distributed by Universal Pictures, the film includes a number of monsters such as Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and werewolves in a way similar to the multi-monster movies that Universal produced in the 1940s, such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and House of Dracula.
The film opened at #1 in the weekend of May 7–9, 2004. The film grossed US$300,257,475 worldwide of which US$120,177,084 was from the US.
Van Helsing (2004)
Directed by: Stephen Sommers
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Kate Beckinsale, Richard Roxburgh, David Wenham, Shuler Hensley, Will Kemp, Kevin J. O’Connor, Elena Anaya, Silvia Colloca, Josie Maran, Sam West
Screenplay by: Stephen Sommers
Production Design by: Allan Cameron
Cinematography by: Allen Daviau
Film Editing by: Bob Ducsay
Costume Design by: Gabriella Pescucci
Set Decoration by: Cindy Carr, Anna Pinnock
Art Direction by: Steve Arnold, Keith P. Cunningham, Giles Masters
Tony Reading, Jaromír Svarc
Music by: Alan Silvestri
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for nonstop creature action violence and frightening images, and for sensuality.
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Release Date: May 7, 2004
Visits: 65
