Titus Welliver Teases His Next Supernatural Horror Role After Shock ‘Bosch’ Cancellation [Exclusive]

Titus Welliver is trading cold cases for cold-blooded monsters. With Bosch: Legacy wrapped and the Ballard spin-off about to begin, Welliver is stepping into very different territory in Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story, a haunting new reimagining of Van Helsing lore from director Natasha Kermani. The film, based on Joe Hill’s short story, premieres July 11 — and if you’re expecting a campy vampire romp, think again.

“Well, I didn’t read the story until I read the script, Natasha’s adaptation, first, which I was kind of blown away by,” Welliver told Collider. “That was not a hard decision to make. I felt like the characters were all really incredibly well realized and compelling. And then I read the short story by Joe Hill, and they mesh really perfectly.”

The story follows Welliver’s Abraham Van Helsing in 1915, raising his two sons (played by Judah Mackey and Brady Hepner) in a secluded hilltop home filled with fear, discipline, and unspoken horror. As the boys begin to question their father’s past, they uncover a darker truth — one that makes Dracula’s shadow feel very close to home.

“There’s some kind of malevolence that exists in the house,” Welliver said. “That it’s less what’s outside and more what’s inside. And you just don’t really know. […] You’re not sure if this is just him and his continuation and the kind of dog it pursued to destroy darkness, you know, this dark entity from the earth. Or if this is a descent into paranoia and madness.” That ambiguity is the core of the film’s tension — and part of what made the role so enticing for the actor.

“You don’t portray Van Helsing as a guy who’s in… You don’t play the paranoia or a descent into madness. You play that this is a guy who’s absolutely living by his convictions and has 100% knowledge that which he is doing is in the service of right.”

Is ‘Abraham’s Boys’ a Horror Movie?

Despite the gothic roots, Welliver doesn’t consider Abraham’s Boys a horror movie in the traditional sense. “Although I hate to say it, you can’t really place this necessarily in the horror genre. This is really… it’s an art film, you know? And it’s a Western, and it’s got the gothic horror undertones, but I think it’s a thinking person’s film, rather than just being, ‘Here it is, be scared, jump out of your seat, scream.’ It’s a much more seductive, quasi-hypnotic experience. You get pulled in.”

Director Natasha Kermani (V/H/S/85) was key in creating that tone, balancing the eerie domestic unease with grounded character work. “She’s an inordinately very, very, very smart director and writer, a human being — very, very bright,” Welliver said. “There’s no trophy bits in this… There’s a level of sophistication with this film. There’s not a lot of gore. It’s very spare in that regard. So it’s not a slasher, it’s not a hacker. But there are many moments in the film that are really, really deeply unnerving visually.”

At its heart, the film is a coming-of-age story wrapped in dread, seen through the eyes of Abraham’s sons. “That uneasiness, which is really, really well portrayed by Brady and Judah. That uncertainty, that feeling of, ‘Well, I feel safe, but now he’s telling me that we’re not safe. But what’s going on?’ They’re not necessarily seeing any kind of evidence there to sort of bolster what he’s saying.”

Welliver relished the chance to explore a character with such weight and ambiguity. “This character on the page was really intriguing to me, because villains are a lot of fun to play… But the thing about Van Helsing, particularly in this iteration, is that there’s a complexity to that character, but he doesn’t show you too much.”

He credits the script, the cast, and most of all Kermani for crafting a film that feels fresh and unnerving. “Told her, ‘You call me, whenever you’re doing something, call me up,’ because I thoroughly enjoyed working with her… This is a hell of a springboard film for her. So I’m very, very proud of the film and proud to be a part of it and this whole cast.”

Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story premieres in theatres July 11.