The Dracular Dossier - Game Trailer

As I've posted before, I tend to see campaign pitches as movie trailers. Here's one for the Dracula Dossier, which is blowing through stretch goal after stretch goal on kickstarter.

In A World....

 

Airport bar, a beautiful British woman (Peta Wilson) is talking to a burned American spy (Jeffrey Donovan).

Woman: Are you familiar with book ciphers?

Burned Spy: Sure. Use a common book as the key for a cipher. The only way to decipher the message is to know what book is being used and an index for how to use it as a key.

Woman: Exactly. And twenty four hours ago, Romanian Secret Police broke into a secure vault and stole the master book for a code Britian has been using for well over a hundred years. I need you to steal it back for me before it leaves the country. I’ve put together a team-

Burned Spy:A team you can hang out to dry if the Romanians catch them.

Woman (shrugs): A team that will be each paid half a million dollars if they recover the book.

Burned Spy: So what’s the book?

Woman: A first edition copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Burned Spy: I loved that book as a kid. Scared the crap out of me.

Woman (close up, hey look, she’s wearing a scarf around her neck): Yes… the book was quite scary.

WE GO TO A MONTAGE.

Cut: The Cat-Burglar (Anne Hathaway) wearing goggles doing that “bob and weave through laser grid" thing.

Cut: The Hacker (Felicia Day) in a waiter’s uniform , hiding under a desk in the Romanian Embassy, typing furiously on a laptop. 

Cut: The Con Man (Josh Holloway) and the hitter (Adrianne Palicki) talking a female guard so he doesn’t see the Hacker come out of the office.  It’s one of those Embassy Balls that spies love to crash so they can wear tuxedos and gowns. 

Con Man: Excuse me darlin’. Freckles here needs to use the little girls room.

Guard: I’m sorry, is that way.

Hacker gets clear. Hitter and Con Man turn around.

Hitter: Call me freckles again and I’ll snap your tibia.

Con Man: Promises, promises.

Cut: The Burned Spy and the Wheelman (Emile Hirsch) are in the front of a panel van. The Hacker, Hitter and Con Man are piling in. The Cat-Burglar is in the back with a book.

Cut: A dirty warehouse. The team is waiting for the handoff. 

The Hacker is flipping through the book.

Burned Spy: Hey, don’t read that.

Hacker: Like I care about a hundred year old code. Come on. This is a first edition of Dracula. Bram Stoker even signed it to his brother George.

The Con Man (looking over her shoulder) Cool. Where’s the sexy brides of Dracula. I dug that part of the movie.

Hacker: Ug. Read a book. Hey… wait, this isn’t a code book. There’s a bunch of notations.

There’s a noise.

Burned Spy: There’s something wrong.

Driver, Con-Man, Burned Spy and Hitter draw guns and look around.  The Hacker hugs the book to her chest.

A group of armed men in suits and ski-masks come in. There’s a brief firefight and the intruders all fall down.

As the smoke is clearing… The Burned Spy is kneeling down over one of the bodies.

Burned Spy: I want to know who this guy is. He was the leader.

Con Man: How can you tell?  

Burned Spy: It's my job.

Just after the Burned Spy pulls the mask off the “dead” guy, its eyes open, blood red. He hisses through a wide mouth of fangs and THROWS THE BURNED SPY ACROSS THE ROOM.  The others react, and it’s a good thing only the leader was a vampire because he’s tossing them around like ragdolls and laughing at their puny guns.  At some point a wooden table gets broken. 

The FREAKING VAMPIRE closes in on the Hacker, who was wisely hiding and is still holding the book.

Freaking Vampire: Give it to me.

The Hacker holds up a tiny cross necklace and the Freaking Vampire flinches. The distraction was enough for the Hitter to jam a convenient broken table leg through the vampire.

The vampire falls over and starts turning to ash. The survivors look at each other uncomfortably.

The group is holed up in a hotel room. There’s about fifteen crosses hanging around (along with Stars of David and other religious icons) and garlic hanging over the door and windows. The Hitter is sharpening a stake with her Bowie Knife.

The Hacker: Guys. Dracula wasn’t a novel. It was a redacted after-mission report by British Intelligence. They weren’t trying to kill Dracula. They were trying to recruit him.

Con Man: How does that sound like a good idea?  What have they never seen a vampire movie ever?

Hitter: There weren’t movies back then, genius.

Cat-Burglar: Let’s just go. Split up. They won’t catch us all.

Driver: Have you never seen any vampire movie ever? We split up, they kill us all.

Cat-Burglar: So what do we do?

The Burned Spy: We show them what happens at the end of every vampire movie ever.

Hacker: What’s that?

The spy takes a cross from the wall and a stake from the Hitter.

The Burned Spy: The vampires realize they screwed with the WRONG people.

CUT TO

A fancy office, the sort you’d expect to see Judy Dench from the Bond movies in. The British Woman watching the scene that just happened on a computer monitor. She leans back in her chair, nods to herself, then picks up the phone. 

British Woman: This is M. The operatives have the Dossier.

M loosens her scarf, there’s a nasty vampire bite scar there.

M: God help them.