Van Helsing (film) Van Helsing (film) Van Helsing is a 2004 American horror 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
Dracula (1924 play) Van Helsing addresses the audience with a warning that "there are such things". The Irish author Bram Stoker wrote the novel "Dracula" while working as a manager for Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre in London; he continued to work for Irving after it was published in May 1897. Stoker secured his theatrical rights to the story that same month by holding a staged reading at the Lyceum; this hasty adaptation was never performed again. In 1899, Hamilton Deane, a young Irish actor whose family owned an estate next to one belonging to Stoker's father, joined Irving's company. In the early 1920s,