July 11, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Natasha Kirmani
Culture Representation: Taking place in 1915, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the horror film “Abraham’s Boys” (based on the short story of the same name) features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few black, Latin and multiracial people) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: Abraham Van Helsing is a strict patriarch who wants to teach his two adolescent sons how to be vampire slayers, as Abraham’s wife Mina begins to show signs that she could be turning into a vampire.
Culture Audience: “Abraham’s Boys” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of movies that have characters connected to Dracula lore, but “Abraham’s Boys” has very little horror, a few brief sightings of Dracula, and a tedious story about a famly with a controlling patriarch.
The drab and dull horror film “Abraham’s Boys” has the misleading subtitle “A Dracula Story.” Dracula is barely in the movie. It’s really just a mopey and sluggish origin story of the Van Helsing family of vampire hunters. (The character of Abraham Van Helsing first appeared in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula.”) The majority of the “Abraham’s Boys” plot is about people waiting around for something bad to happen.
Written and directed by Natasha Kirmani, “Abraham’s Boys” is based on the short story of the same name that was in Joe Hill’s 2004 anthology book “The Many Faces of Van Helsing.” The short story was also adapted into the 2009 short film “Abraham’s Boys,” directed by Dorothy Street, who co-wrote the film’s screenplay with Matt Duffer. The feature-length version of “Abraham’s Boys” had its world premiere at the 2025 Overlook Film Festival.
“Abraham’s Boys” takes places in a rural part of the San Francisco Bay Area in 1915. The movie was actually filmed further south in the California cities of Simi Valley and Monrovia. Almost the entire story takes place in and near the farmhouse of the Van Helsing family, a clan of four people who live an isolated existence where the parents and children have no social life outside of the house.
There’s a reason why they live like recluses: Family patriarch Abraham Van Helsing (played by Titus Welliver) and his wife Mina Van Helsing (played by Jocelin Donahue) consider themselves to be refugees who fled their native Dutch city of Amsterdam nearly 20 years ago. It’s later revealed that Abraham and Mina are trying to hide from a certain vampire whose name starts with the letter “d.”
After Abraham and Mina settled in the United States, the couple had two sons together: Maximillion “Max” Van Helsing (played Brady Hepner), who has a generic personality in this movie, is about 16 or 17 years old when this story takes place. Rudolph “Rudy” Van Helsing (played by Judah Mackey), who is quiet and obedient, is about 12 or 13 years old. Max gets much more screen time than Rudy because Max is the next-in-line heir to the family’s secret profession.
Abraham is a scholar and a medical doctor. This poorly written movie never reveals how the family makes any money. Abraham mostly just lords over the house like a stern and occasionally cruel school headmaster who homeschools his children. Abraham (who spends more time with Max than with Rudy) sometimes treats Max like a promising protégé or a detestable disappointment.
For example, there’s a scene where Abraham berates Max for not better at mathematics. Abraham also hits Max hard in the face when he thinks Max is being lazy. But other times, Abraham has a lot more patience for Max. Rudy seems to be spared from Abraham’s abuse.
One day, Abraham tells Max that something evil is targeting the family: “Perhaps I was foolish to think I could hide away forever. I’ve known for a long time it was coming. I’m going to need your help and cooperation. You’re a good boy, Max.”
Mina is a mostly passive parent who seems to be experiencing an undetermined physical illness that often keeps her in bed. She’s also having nightmares and hallucinations. And when she sees a bat that dies in the house, she almost has a mental breakdown. Mina tells Max, “The devil is coming, and I want to be ready for him.”
Abraham later drops some hints to Max about the family’s secret: “Years ago, your mother and her friends called on me … She was attacked by the enemy, and her blood was infected … I fear for your mother’s soul.”
“Abraham’s Boys” can become very monotonous as it drags from scene to scene of the Van Helsing family waiting for “the devil” to show up. There are boring scenes of Max chopping wood outside, which is the movie’s way of foreshadowing that he knows how to use an ax that will be used for more than chopping wood. Max is so underdeveloped as a character, viewers of “Abraham’s Boys” will have a hard time remembering anything he says in the movie.
There are scenes of Max starting to have terrifying dreams and visions. In one of these dreams, Max sees Mina standing in the corner of a hallway and appears to be in a blood-sucking ritual with a tall pale man (played by Forrest McClain), who is only seen in the shadows. No one says the name Dracula out loud in the movie, but the tall pale man is obviously supposed to be Dracula, whose sightings in the movie are fleeting and total no more than 10 minutes.
“Abraham’s Boys” begins by showing a woman named Ada (played by Fayna Sanchez) in a field, as she seeks a ride into town during the day. She is suddenly attacked by a shadowy figure that is supposed to be a vampire. Ada shows up again in the movie as someone whom Abraham believes is turning into a vampire. But if that’s true, why did the vampire attack during the day? Don’t expect the movie to answer that question.
Some of the dialogue in “Abraham’s Boys” is just nonsensical and add nothing to the plot. For example, early on in the movie, Mina tells Max: “I’ve always wanted a daughter—softer and more difficult to keep safe.” It a bizarre thing to say in this family that has been hiding for years from danger and presumably wants it to be easier to keep the children safe.
The Van Helsing family gets a few visitors. Two young adult siblings named Eddie (played by Corteon Moore) and Elsie (played by Aurora Perrineau), who are both railroad workers, show up at the house because Eddie broke his rib during a work accident nearby. The rib punctured Eddie’s lung. Because Abraham is a medical doctor, he is able to give emergency treatment to Eddie.
Later in the movie, a lord named Arthur Holmwood (played by Jonathan Howard), who is someone from Abraham’s past, shows up in front of the Van Helsing house in a very contrived-looking way. Arthur’s only purpose in the movie is to talk about some background information about Abraham that’s not surprising or interesting. Viewers still won’t know much about the personal backgrounds of Abraham and Mina by the end of the movie.
Perhaps the biggest failing of “Abraham’s Boys” is that it’s not much of a vampire movie, because there are only a few scenes that show actual vampire activity. And if Abraham is supposed to be teaching his sons about how to identify and kill vampires, then he does a terrible job of preparing them and giving them necessary information. The only things that Max and Rudy learn how do out of necessity is to use weapons with blades or sharp endings. No one in the movie talks about vampire lairs, holy water as a weapon, or how sunlight can affect vampires.
At one point, the movie just becomes an unimaginative slasher film with a huge, unexplained plot hole that’s impossible to overlook. The acting performances aren’t terrible, but they’re not terrifying either. “Abraham’s Boys” is an empty tease of a horror movie instead of being an actual horror movie that can deliver genuine scares.
RLJE Films and Shudder released “Abraham’s Boys” in U.S. cinemas on July 11, 2025.
