Headscratchers / Van Helsing

• Anna's high heels. Her outfit rocks. Those goth hooker boots rock. But they're just not logical to wear when running around fighting monsters.
  • Running around in the woods no less.
  • The corset really isn't any more practical, either.
    • The corset actually is probably fine. Anna is a princess, meaning she'd have her clothes made for her by professional seamstresses. As long as a corset is made for the wearer's body and applied properly, it's easy enough to move around in. Since Anna has no problems in it, we can assume it was custom made for her.
  • It's better than run barefoot in the woods from hungry werewolves and vampire brides that want her dead.
  • Rule of Sexy
    • I've heard that, if the tip of the heel is square and you're used to wearing them, high heels can actually give you more purchase in the ground and help you run faster. I don't know if that especially applies to Anna's case, but still.
    • To add onto this Anna probably wore these type of shoes all her life being from the royalty that ruled Romania or at least. Considering the time she spends with the public (and the fact even her corset dress is sort of fancy), it was probably to show the public she's upperclass and since she's likely more used to these boots than normal flat shoes, she probably feels more comfort wearing them for a prolonged period than regular shoes.
• The grave-digger of Anna's little semi-creepy village claims that vampires don't kill more than they need to survive, "maybe 1 or 2 people a month." But before that, 4 people died within the scope of 10 minutes.
  • Presumably the pursuit of Anna or the unexpected resistance changes the rules for the moment.
  • This is explicitly explained in the movie, that they attacked that one time in retaliation to try and kill Anna. It's made clear that it's not a regular thing in the exact same dialogue where the grave-digger says that...In fact, he says it specifically to illustrate that that attack was unusual. How did you miss that?
  • Quoth Anna "they seem almost desperate to finish off my family". Dracula likewise states that he wants Anna out of the way in case she wrecks his experiment to bring his children to life.
• How did they get back out of that little wintery area? When they first enter it, Carl learns the hard way that they couldn't waltz back through the mirror.
  • I always assumed the mirror only opened after "in the name of God, open this door" was spoken.
  • Yeah, you just need two things to make the passage work, the invocation and a reflection. Even if Dracula knew the invocation, he still wouldn't have been able to use it, but others could... it was built to be used for someone to go and kill Dracula and come back, after all.
  • Carl's exposition says that Dracula was sent through a door from which there was no return. Then Anna says "and then the devil gave him wings". So there is no way back through the door until Dracula is killed.
• Why does it take the clock 10 minutes to strike 12 during the final battle? That completely broke my Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
  • This troper had hers broken after Van Helsing was bitten on the full moon and then told it would be three days until the next full moon.
  • Fridge Brilliance: It's Dracula's clock that counts off those chimes, and Drac wouldn't be above rigging it to chime very, very slowly. That way he'd have more time to administer the lycanthropy-cure to a werewolf that slipped his control, before it became immune to the treatment and thus, would remain a danger to him until moonset.
  • Carl never said "As the clock strikes 12." He says "After the first stroke of midnight." Van Helsing could have taken a whole hour to kill Dracula, as long as he bit him before 1:00.
• Why did Dracula have a cure for lycanthropy when he could have just had, you know, a gun loaded with silver bullets? Seems easier than trying to shove a syringe into the neck of an angry werewolf.
  • Dracula was looking for a power conduit for which to animate his undead offspring and after Frankenstein's monster, a werewolf seemed like the next best candidate. It's possible that the cure was used as bait to lure desperate werewolves to Dracula's castle so that he could capture one for his goal. Presumably Velkan tried to seek it out after he got bitten which is how Dracula got ahold of him.
  • Some cultures believe that silver is just as bad for vampires as it is for werewolves. Sure, Dracula can only be killed by a werewolf, but his brides were much more fragile.
  • Well, if a werewolf isn't under Dracula's control, but doesn't know they can kill him (and why would he tell?) Dracula can say "Hey, I've got a cure. Want it?" Far easier than chasing somebody around with silver bullets.
  • Dracula's been around long enough that he may not consider firearms reliable. Even if primitive ones were available when he was still alive, they would've been prone to failure or even blowing up in the wielder's hands.
  • Dracula may had also been worried about drawing attention to his only weakness of his if he went around with silver weapons. After all, Dracula's supposedly invincible so why carry anti-werewolf ammunition, it's not he like can be killed by one...oh wait
  • As another note, it depends on how silver is fatal to werewolves. Some works have the idea that silver is the only thing that can pierce a werewolf's hide, but you'd still need to shoot it in a vital area to kill it, or you'd have to wait till it succumbs to its wounds. Even Velkan took hours to die after Van Helsing shot him with, presumably, silver bullets, as it was morning when he finally died. The cure will shortly remove the werewolf from the equation no matter where you sink the needle in, which is important when you're in the middle of combat.
  • And it should be noted that, up until extremely recently in the movie's run time, Dracula also had three brides who could fly and get the drop on any werewolf who might be attacking him. Werewolf attacks him? Verona, Marishka or Aleera can nab the cure and stab him from behind. Then all you're left with is a powerless human who's easy to finish off.
• What the hell is the Creature doing at the end? I know on the official summary it says hes going out to try and live his life, but he's going on a tiny raft through the ocean. WHAT.
  • If you had ever bothered to read the actual book Frankenstein, you would know that he spent a great deal of his time wandering the earth.
  • Traveling by water is presumably safer for him than using the roads. I assume that he's hardier than a normal person and thus better able to survive on a tiny raft?
• If the Valerious bloodline is going to end... why not just have more kids?! Are Anna and Velkan both infertile? Is there a time limit we're not being told about, that it had to be done in nine generations? If that's the case, then they don't spell it out in the film. All Anna and/or Velkan have to do is have kids of their own, and they can put off the curse for another generation. They could use that time to train said kids to kill vampires. Plus, that's two individual sub-bloodlines capable of taking down Dracula.
  • Who's going to agree to have kids that will spend the rest of their lives fighting an immortal demon? The only people who might agree to procreating with Anna and Velkan are Anna and Velkan. Even considering that the time setting probably would've allowed it, they were too busy trying to beat Dracula to take nine months off for a pregnancy.
    • Their ancestors managed to just fine, otherwise Anna and Velkan wouldn't be there. At the very least they aren't the only people who want Dracula off the picture. And it would make more sense for them to put off dealing with Dracula to make sure even if they die all will not be lost for their family. Dracula has been around for 400 years, he can wait for several months. In fact, Velkan wouldn't even need to take such a break, he could return to the game right after his theoretic wife's pregnancy became apparent. What's wierd is them not having any more siblings who could take care of the strategic part of Valerious' war against Dracula (continuing the bloodline), while they are at front lines.
  • Plus, do you think Dracula's gonna sit around and wait for Anna to have kids? He's already attacking her—making herself vulnerable by getting knocked up is a bad idea. And those kids have to grow up—again, you think Drac's gonna just sit and wait?
    • Except Velkan can have kids without getting pregnant and as already stated that family wasn't the only ones after Dracula. The story is just dumb.
  • And what's stopping Dracula from hunting down whoever he gets pregnant and killing them? And again, maybe there weren't any women willing to have kids with Velkan - and he doesn't seem like the sort to force the issue.
  • Dracula is getting especially desperate now that he's close to making his children live, so he's suddenly become more aggressive in taking out the last of the Valerious. Anna also doesn't want anyone's help, so she's likely not prepared to bring an innocent man into this to be the father of her children.
• Anna and Velkan have a whole group of people helping them fight the werewolf at the start. Who are these people and why are they not seen again? Anna could have used all the help she could get.
  • If you realize that Anna is a woman in Victorian Europe as another troper noted above, the villagers might have been willing to help Velkan because they thought he was their last hope and the hero. When he failed not only do they think his sister isn't as capable, their spirits are broken and would rather live under the thumb of a tyrant than risk their lives following a princess.
  • If they are the villagers then the Brides' attack on the village might have put them off helping her. At least four people were killed in that one afternoon. They might have decided they'd rather let Dracula just have Anna since he'd have no reason to hang around in Transylvania any more after he killed her. Or alternately Anna decides to go it alone against Dracula so as not to risk more innocent lives.
  • Their attempt to capture the werewolf turned into such a clusterfuck, they probably decided that neither Valerious sibling had a clue what they were doing and opted for Screw This, I'm Outta Here
  • Because Anna is trying to do everything by herself. She's so guilt-ridden about the innocent lives lost trying to help her already that she doesn't want anyone to help her and risk getting hurt. Van Helsing is said to be the first one to kill a vampire in over a hundred years, so Anna likely thinks the rest of the villagers wouldn't stand a chance.
• For a Friar/Tinkerer/Comic Relief character, Friar Carl proves to be damn good at making improbably difficult throws. Wooden bucket to a bat in the air? Check. Syringe to someone swinging quickly on a rope well over 20 feet away? Check. Stake to the same person on a castle from an even greater distance? Check! Why is this guy Van Helsing's supply guy instead of kicking ass alongside him?
  • He has no field experience. He's never been outside of the Vatican. And he says he doesn't want to go into battle. Of course his strong point is that he knows his stuff and appears to be good at thinking on his feet. It doesn't mean he'd actually want to do the fighting himself. For what it's worth, there were going to be more movies. Perhaps Carl would have realised he liked the taste of adventure after all?
• The big reveal of Van Helsing is that only a werewolf can kill Dracula, which is oddly convenient considering Van Helsing just became one himself. After all, why would Dracula have a servant that was lethal to him? Wouldn't it be in his best interest to kill them all off? This may be a bit of a stretch, but I came to the conclusion that the werewolves in Van Helsing were originally servants of good that at some point became corrupted or enslaved by either Dracula himself, or some other form of evil. It's really the only explanation he found that makes any sense beyond plain and simple Deus ex Machina.
  • This troper chalked it up to one of two possibilities: the first was that Dracula followed the "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" school of thought (that is, keeping all werewolves where he could keep an eye on them was safer, plus he got some killer bodyguards to boot). The second is that Van Helsing was just supposed to be a Darker and Edgier adaptation of the Universal monster movies. In those, mythology didn't usually matter - anything went! So of course there were convenient connections between all of the monsters. They were following the Universal way.
  • There actually was someone in the Middle Ages-Rennaisance sort of time that suggested the exact same thing. He got whipped for such a suggestion, but its still an interesting idea.
  • The movie would still make sense - perhaps moreso - if it was a Deus ex Machina, because Van Helsing is quite explicitly referred to as a servant of God. We know that Satan helped Dracula rise to power in the movie, so it's just as plausible to assume that Van Helsing received some supernatural help of his own through all of the coincidences that helped him defeat Dracula. Especially the antidote tossing scene.
  • Now that you mention it, I just realized the whole only-a-werewolf-can-kill-Dracula thing is a reference to Universal's older Monster Mash movies (which featured reluctant werewolves) along with the original Dracula novel (which gave Dracula the power to control wolves). The Wolf Man had Larry Talbot get bitten by a gypsy werewolf played by Bela Lugosi. Abbott and Constello Meet Frankenstein had Larry Talbot kill Dracula (also played by Lugosi). So that means that Van Helsing has Dracula killed by a werewolf bitten by a gypsy werewolf controlled by Dracula, while the older stories has Dracula killed by a werewolf who was bitten by a gypsy werewolf played by Dracula. It's a massive continuity joke. The only thing to make it perfect would have been if Igor or the Monster had turned out to be vampires, too. - Polly Nim.
  • Taken from the Our Werewolves Are Different page. "An interesting variation was the Hounds of God. In the Baltic regions, it was believed that Werewolves were given their powers not by the Devil, but by God to battle the forces of the devil". If that's the case then a werewolf being the only one who can kill Dracula, who was raised by the devil, makes sense. Why he kept them around I can't say.
    • If Dracula went around killing any werewolf he had control over instead of controlling it, people might make the connection regarding his weakness faster. That or he might have just been arrogant about it and liked to rub it in fate's face that he was able to so easily control his one weakness.
  • Exactly. When Carl first suggest it, Anna tries to shoot him down by saying "Dracula has been using werewolves to do his bidding for centuries".
  • And werewolves are only lethal to Dracula for an hour on midnight of their first full moon. He just has to be protected for an hour, and then afterwards he has a powerful servant who will never turn on him.
• Hey, anybody miss that Van Helsing's given name in the movie is Gabriel? If he's a servant of God... you do the math. — Manu.
  • Dracula literally refers to him as Left Hand of God and says that Van Helsing killed him. Carl mentions that it was the Left Hand of God who killed Dracula. Its all but outright stated that Van Helsing is the archangel Gabriel.
  • It was going to be made even more explicit with a scene of Van Helsing taking his shirt off facing away from Anna and she was to notice he has two large scars at his shoulder blades.
• Almost certainly reading too much into it, but Dracula's being a Large Ham despite claiming to be incapable of feeling emotion does make sense if you assume he's deliberately overacting in the hope of Becoming the Mask and regaining the ability to feel.
  • Yep that seems to be the case. He goes from hamming it up over Marishka's death to calmly saying "I am hollow".
• Why don't any of the Villagers carry bows to deter the Vampires? It'd work a lot better than having lame pitchforks and hatchets... and one guy looks to be carrying a rake. Whats he going to do? Create an impenetrable barrier of leaves?
  • They didn't want to fight the vampires. They only killed one or two people a month and the villagers put up with that in order to live almost peacefully in the village.
    • 12-24 presumably healthy people per year is too much for any village. The movie completely fails at math. It is easily possible to calculate minimum population size that can be stable with such attrition rate above the normal, so they should have done it.
    • ...maybe most of them weren't villagers. Tourists, anyone?
    • They could handle his brides, but not Dracula himself, who would probably interfere when he finds out his brides are being shot at.
    • Look at how small the amount of villagers is. Perhaps the vampires had slowly worked their way through a good portion of them.
    • They may kill one or two people out of the entire region, not just that particular village. Dracula's territory apparently includes Bucharest, after all.
  • Anna says that the vampires never attack in daylight, so the villagers weren't prepared for them. They were armed against apparently human intruders like Carl and Van Helsing. And Anna's first orders were for them to turn over their weapons. And for what it's worth, archery is a difficult skill to master, and in a chaotic village battle, you're likely to end up with more dead villagers from accidental hits.

    Anna: A silver stake? A crucifix? What, did you think we haven't tried everything before? We've shot him, stabbed him, clubbed him, sprayed him with holy water, staked him through the heart, and STILL he lives! Do you understand? No-one knows how to kill Dracula!

• Speaking of the above quote, WHAT? If it's been a century since they've managed to kill a bog-standard vampire, how did they ever test all this on the vampire king? Is Drac a troll and let them do it as demoralization, or were Anna's distant ancestors superhumans of some kind? It seems to me if you can manage to contain Dracula long enough to test all this (you certainly could not club Dracula to death unless he was restrained), then they should have been able to lock his ass up indefinitely.
  • Dracula's been around for 400 years. She's not saying they tried all of it at once, she's saying over the course of 400 years, at some point they've tried everything and nothing's stuck.
  • And since the family is destined to kill Dracula, any attempt at killing him has probably been recorded so the next attempts don't waste time trying the same things.
  • Also, as to "Is Drac a troll...?" Well, in this movie alone, we see him deliberately let himself get impaled in the chest twice, just to smile and taunt his attacker. So, yes, I can totally buy that Dracula politely greeted previous Valerious vampire hunters, stood there, let them splash him, club him, burn him and impale him — maybe even acted like he was being seriously harmed — and then stood up, brushed off his coat and chastised them for being so rude.
• Why did Dracula kill Dr. Frankenstein? They only realise later that they can't make it work, and he was the only one who knew how... well, duh?
  • Vampires have a long history of being complete jerks to the living.
  • The reason they can't make it work is because they don't have the monster—the machine worked fine, they just didn't have the power source. It was only after Drac kills the Doc that he loses the Monster—at that point, he figured he had everything he needed. Also, Dr. Frankenstein did just run Dracula through with a sword. Sure, it didn't do anything more than put a hole in his suit, but it was pretty clear the good Doctor wasn't planning to cooperate.
  • And Dracula had already got Igor to defect, and he was the doctor's assistant, so they already had someone who knew how to work the machine mostly.
• Why does Verona save Anna? When she cuts herself free from Aleera she was heading for the ground head-first so why does Verona pull her out of the air? They wanted her dead and she would have died if she'd hit the ground.
  • They wanted to kill her by drinking her blood. Assuming this movie follows most other vampire tropes, blood from a dead person is either poisonous or outright lethal. They probably assumed they'd have all the time they needed once they caught her.
  • Dracula says to Anna at the ball that he wants to make her his bride. Presumably the others had orders to take her alive so Dracula himself could turn her.
  • Alternately they wanted to make an example out of her. Accidentally dying from falling isn't going to do the trick. She's the last of the Valerious family so they want her death to have oomph. The vampires seem to be very theatrical - Marishka taunting Van Helsing, Aleera toying with Anna etc.
  • They're clearly relishing the chance to bite her when they have her cornered. Aleera taunts Anna right before Anna stakes her. Basically they want to kill her dramatically.
  • It's also said that Van Helsing is the first one to kill a vampire in over a hundred years, with even his gattling crossbow having little to no effect until he loaded it with holy water. They have good reason to be overconfident.
• Why is Velkan's gun the only one with silver bullets? Wouldn't it be easier to shoot and kill the werewolf at the beginning if everyone had at least one silver bullet?
  • Silver's fucking expensive, even nowadays. Imagine trying to find enough of it to make enough bullets for a hunting party's worth.
  • They could have raided the entire castle's supply of silver for just that one hunting trip. They also might have wanted to save the silver since there's so little of it. So they give it to Velkan the leader so it doesn't get wasted.
  • Who's to say they haven't already done that years ago? And now they're almost out of silver.
  • The initial plan probably wasn't to kill the werewolf on the spot, but to capture it alive and interrogate it once it reverted to human form. Velkan talks to himself while he's posed "helpless" on the stake, and his words imply that he wants to find out why Dracula had sent the werewolf out, in the first place. Just killing it out-of-hand wouldn't answer that question, and the silver bullets only become a necessary recourse when their attempt to trap it in the pit and cage it went all wrong.
• How was the Frankenstein monster affected by an ordinary knockout dart?
  • Why wouldn't he be?
    • He's an atomic-powered artificial lifeform who can put his head back together when broken. Does he even have blood?
    • Since the dart worked on him, apparently yes he does have blood. Just not in his head.
    • Also, Van Helsing regularly goes up against hulking monsters. His knockout darts are probably designed to knock out creatures much larger than a human.
• If the people at the ball are all supposed to be vampires... why do they have reflections?^note In the long shots of the ballroom, you can see the reflections of the dancers in the mirrors. It's only when Dracula dips Anna over that they don't have any.
  • Out-of-Verse, it's a production flub. In-Verse? Vampires, and Dracula in particular, are usually depicted as having mind-control powers. Anna may have been too strong-willed for him to actually dominate mentally - she's a Valerious, after all - but he could have clouded her mind just enough that she thought she was seeing reflections, until he dropped the effect for the shock value. We, the audience, see them because Anna does.
• This just bothers me; How was the Paris policeman able to identify Van Helsing at the top of Notre Dame, at night, looking up towards the moon?
  • There were wanted posters for Van Helsing all over the city. Presumably, some Parisian eyewitness spotted him approaching Hyde's hiding place and told the police that the fugitive they're looking for was near the cathedral. Then a dead body plummets from the roof, and a guy with the same distinctive silhouette can be seen on its pinnacle. Not too big of a leap to assume it was him.
• I realize that it would've been expensive to digitally remove Dracula's ring finger for all of the scenes in the movie, but was it really necessary for it to be removed at all? He could've just worn gloves for the majority of the movie and then remove one at the end to reveal the stump. Then we could assume that the glove contains a prosthetic finger.
  • Maybe Dracula did still have a ring finger, and was just folding it down to demonstrate it to Van Helsing that it was missing. Probably one of his theatrical bits, like his dancing and when he went over-the-top at Marishka's death.
• Why didn't Victor Frankenstein become a vampire? Dracula bit him on the neck. And it's not Our Vampires Are Different, because when arriving in Transylvania, Van Helsing basically confirms that vampire bites are what turns people. But Dr. Frankenstein just...dies.
  • How could Van Helsing possibly confirm it? He isn't an expert. And the villagers say that Dracula and his brides feed on and kill people regularly. There's nothing in the movie that implies that all vampire bites make people vampires.
    • "Not an expert"? A man who hunts monsters for a living is not an expert?
    • Not an expert on vampires. He outright says at the beginning that he doesn't really know specific traits and weaknesses because his view on monsters in general amounts to, "Shoot, stab, set on fire until it stops getting back up."
  • Well, it's quite often that vampires kill their prey by sucking them dry, but turn them by biting while leaving them enough blood to survive (If it weren't a vampire bite). Alternately, sometimes vampires can decide whether they want to kill or turn, that might be in effect as well.
  • Frankenstein's corpse probably burned to ashes in the windmill's ruins, long before it could turn.
  • Or perhaps it follows the lore that vampires need to drain them, then make them imbibe the vampires blood, it's a way for most vampire stories to avoid this exact question, the whole vampirism being The Virus, caused by just being bit is actually quite a recent thing media timeline-wise.
  • In the original novel, even after Dracula infected Mina and Lucy, it took them a long time to turn. It was at least a day for Lucy to rise from her grave. So if Victor were going to become a vampire, getting burned up in the windmill fire would have seen to that.
• Speaking of which, it's pretty clear that Dr. Frankenstein had no idea Dracula was a vampire. But then Dracula tells him his plan. Granted, the audience doesn't hear it so as to preserve the twist, but think about it: for Frankenstein to know that his plan was evil, (which he clearly did) he'd need to know the babies were vampires. So he'd have to know Dracula and his brides were vampires. But even if he'd just figured that out, he still threatens Dracula with a sword like that would work and looks surprised when it doesn't.
  • This just isn't a world where everyone knows about vampires. Dracula and his brides may well be the only ones in the world. Listen to what Anna says — over the years, her family has tried everything to kill him. When he meets him, Van Helsing tries stabbing him, too. So, clearly, all the weaknesses and capabilities of vampires are not well known.
    • Except him and his brides are shown NOT to be the only ones in the world. Remember the ball party which had hundreds of vampires?
    • Which were made by Dracula and/or his brides. They weren't occurring elsewhere, is the point.
    • Perhaps those vampires were all of the villagers that Dracula and his brides had been taking over the years?
    • So who were they eating? 1 or 2 people a month wouldn't go very far with that many vampires.
  • When was it ever stated that Victor didn't know Dracula was a vampire? We and Victor see the guy teleport all over the laboratory in the opening scene! Dracula doesn't seem to have been hiding his undead nature from Frankenstein, only his real agenda. For all we know, he'd claimed he'd been funding Victor's research in hope it might one day cure his own half-dead condition. The only thing we can be sure Victor was ignorant of is the fact that swords don't work on vampires.
  • Since Dracula was funding his research, Frankenstein didn't seem to realise the extent of Dracula's monstrous plan. Perhaps Dracula told him that with his research, he could cure vampires such as himself and his brides and it wasn't until later that Frankenstein realised he intended to bring still-born vampires to life.
• If this version of Van Helsing is implied to be an angel bound to Earth, why is he susceptible to lycanthropy? Isn't it a condition that affects humans only, given that there don't seem to be any werewolf-horses or werewolf-sheep roaming around Transylvania? Also, if the Church he works for considers anything inhuman too dangerous to live, why haven't they killed him for the not-at-all-human trait of being The Ageless?
  • There's no way of knowing how him being forced into a human form affected him on a biological level, and he's only been working for the Order for the last seven years; he could hardly have been expected to age to such an extent that the Order would have explicitly realised that he wasn't actually doing it.
• Why does Dracula even want to give life to those batthings? I mean, if he wants progeny, he can just turn someone. He can even turn a Claudia type if that's his mood. It seems like an awful lot of work just to have a bunch of mindless little pets.
  • Because with those horrible bat-things, he can take over the world and vampirise everybody. Also, think of it as adopting versus actually having a kid.
  • He explicitly states that his brides are insisting on it, which implies that it was their idea. Also, there are thousands of offspring, which he animates all in one go. Also, his offspring might be different from the humans he has turned, he was certainly tougher than his brides, maybe his offspring would develop similar durability at some point. We know that the devil resurrected him, maybe the children were part of some scheme or another. That could explain why he's kicking it up a notch compared to the last 400 years.
  • It seems to me that he's been siring vampires for years and boy have they piled up. He may have had this as his intent all along. But only now has a man as brilliant as Victor Frankenstein come along to bring the plan to fruition. And Dracula, root of all evil, doesn't really mind if everybody in the world is now meat for his progeny.
  • Maybe they only look like that because they're still infants and with time they'll grow into vampires like Dracula with a human form ontop of the demonic bat form rather then his converts who are all human primarily with a demon bat form they can assume? Then they have all his extra strengths, none of the weaknesses of the vampires turned from humans, and they're Dracula's direct biological descendants.
  • He wants to stick it to God and prove that he's not the only one who can create life.
• Why is it at the end, Werewolf Van Helsing kills Anna? up until that point he had been in almost complete control, able to concentrate on Dracula, it's shown that it takes a good few hours into the transformation for them to become evil/corrupted, and that was with Annas' apparently "weak willed" brother, Van Helsing clealry had the willpower to refrain from attacking, but no, right after midnight he apparently goes all rabid.
  • Because he was losing control. That's kind of the whole thing about werewolves — it's not about being "weak willed," eventually, you will lose control to the beast. Plus, Anna was running at him, arm raised with the syringe — which, to an animal's instincts, looks a hell of a lot like she's attacking him.
  • Not to mention, just because he wasn't being controlled by Dracula doesn't mean that he was able to control himself as a werewolf. Van Helsing in his wolf form was extremely vicious, and while obviously that's what got the job done there's nothing to say that he wouldn't have attacked Anna just as quickly as Dracula if she'd gotten into the room earlier.
  • Some stories depicting people in the process of becoming a werewolf/vampire/whatever suggest that it's making a first kill that renders them fully monstrous. Unfortunately for Anna, were-Van Helsing killing Dracula apparently counted for that purpose.
• Why doesn't Dracula just fly away during any of the periods when Van Helsing turns back into a man? He can fly, werewolves can't, and in just a short period of time he'll be able to control Helsing like he's controlled every other werewolf. Plus, he was clearly losing during the periods when Helsing was a werewolf. He gets multiple chances to salvage the situation by simply flying off, and he never does.
  • It's a bit of a copout answer but for all his claims of having no emotion, Dracula clearly has a personal axe to grind when it comes to Van Helsing. He might be letting his frustration and desire for revenge override his self-preservation (which he doesn't entirely seem to value much in the first place, as he laments that he is "hollow and will live forever"). He does have scenes losing his temper several times throughout the movie. Not to mention the humiliation of running away from his greatest rival like a chump (from his own lair no less).
  • The OP needs to re-watch the fight. It is incredibly short, and the first portion is solely Werewolf Van Helsing attacking Dracula, and dragging him down when he repeatedly tries to fly away and escape, Dracula only attacking initially and actually having the upper hand briefly before he tries to get out of range and presumably wait it out. The part where Van Helsing is a man is only one portion, where Dracula gives off severe Smug Snake vibes, apparently thinking Nothing Can Stop Me Now, and either intending to kill or talk down Van Helsing while the moon is covered, but it got uncovered a bit too quickly, and Van Helsing was able to get a single throat-tearing bite into Dracula's neck immediately after. At that point, it was well and truly over. Dracula pretty much barely fought, instead doing nothing but flying away from Van Helsing, only to overestimate his temporary opportunity to end the threat to his existence and leave himself open when things turned back in his opponent's favor.
• Why did Igor call out "Dr. Frankenstein!" at the beginning, he knew his real master, Dracula, needed the monster intact to enact his plan, but instead lead the mob right to it? For that matter, the village seems to have been under Dracula's thumb for quite a while, and it seems the Valerious family weren't really involved in storming Castle Frankenstein, couldn't Dracula or his brides have been a bit more proactive in making sure the village didn't attack Frankenstein?
  • For the first question, Igor was trying to help Dracula, by getting the mob to chase the Monster down and corner it for them, but presumably he expected Dracula and the Brides to get there first before the villagers actually caught it, or he didn't expect the villagers to burn the monster, just corner it in the windmill. Second question could have multiple reasons, Dracula and the Brides only put the village under their thumb in response to losing the Creature at their hands, they underestimated the problem a bunch of "lowly bloodbags" could cause, or Dracula would have scared them off if the Monster hadn't been completed by then, and he didn't think he NEEDED Dr. Frankenstein then, or the Castle.

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