Another director spills the beans today, this time on his current project rather than his next projects. "The Mummy" helmer Stephen Sommers goes gothic for this Summer's opening blow - the big supernatural action FX vehicle "Van Helsing" and he spoke with SFX Magazine about it recently. Amongst the new information gleaned from the interview:

The title character's first name will be Gabriel rather than the famous Abraham - ""I think of him as Van Helsings younger brother. For one thing, I dont like the name Abraham. I can't name my lead character Abraham. That isnt going to cut it".

He treats the three famous horror characters seriously - "I didn’t want this movie to be Mummy 3 with different monsters. I went into this saying, ‘There are no monsters, just people with really bad problems!’ They’re all human; they’re all people. Even Frankenstein is a man…welll, he’s seven men…but he’s still human. This film will still have a lot of fun, but it’ll be more dramatic, I took Dracula, the Wolf Man and Frankenstein seriously as characters. You can’t be tongue-in-cheek and you can’t be winking. It’s got to be inherently more dramatic".

Whilst the Frankenstein of the film will utilise Mary Shelley's original story heavily, the Dracula takes a bit of a departure from the classic Bram Stoker tale - "Dracula is the source of all vampires. You can’t kill him with a crucifix or a stake in the heart. Nobody knows how to kill Dracula...Well, he doesn’t like sunlight".

Also whilst there will be quite a bit of CG, don't expect too much of it - certainly not in the first 2/3 anyway - "I’d rather work with actors. But then CG is…terrifying. Here we have Richard Roxburgh as Dracula – but Dracula is also a CG monster. I hold off his other persona until the third act. This is one thing you have to think of going in, having lead guys encased in something-or-other. Most good actors nix that right away. So I came up with some interesting ways to get them in and out of ‘costume,’ if you will. I like watching CG creatures fight for, like, eight to ten seconds and then it’s, ‘Come on, let’s get on with something!’ Keep it interesting".

A transcript of the full interview can be found here.

Thanks to 'Nic'.