Monster March: Dracula's Daughter (1936)

On the surface, there is much that should be intriguing about Dracula’s Daughter. It represents the last Universal Monsters film before a hiatus and renewal, it follows closely on the narrative heels of Dracula, and it expands the Dracula mythos by introducing a daughter to the world of the vampire’s curse. Even better, Edward Van Sloan is back as Van Helsing (here, inexplicably, Von Helsing). Yet for a good amount of Dracula’s Daughter’s brief runtime, I found myself bored amid what sounding like a promising premise.

Immediately after driving a stake through Count Dracula’s heart, Professor Von Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) is arrested for murder. Scotland Yard scoffs at his tale of vampires, so his only hope for exoneration lies in proving his sanity. He calls on his friend Jeffrey Garth, a psychiatrist, to join his legal team, but Dr. Garth is slowly falling under the quite-literal spell of Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden), the secret daughter of Count Dracula himself.

 

Typing that synopsis out, Dracula’s Daughter sounds like a real winner. I was perhaps unreasonably excited to see Edward Van Sloan return, as he was my second favorite from Dracula (behind Bela Lugosi, naturally). Thanks to Van Sloan, the first reel of Dracula’s Daughter is dynamite, though I concede that I was half-expecting a courtroom drama in which Von Helsing defends his innocence by proving the existence of vampires – though I grant you, that probably isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I was therefore disappointed that Von Helsing’s significance to the plot dwindles as the film goes on, to the point where his arrest for murder is never actually resolved (though we hope and presume that Scotland Yard believes him after settling the strange case of Countess Zaleska). Sadly, the film reduces Von Helsing to an exposition machine, down to repeating a great deal of dialogue from the 1931 film. (What’s more, Dracula’s Daughter actually reuses a shot from 1931, the operating room when Lucy Weston passes, here subbed for one of the Countess’s victims.)

 

Unfortunately, then, Von Helsing is not the focus or even a primary concern of Dracula’s Daughter. In a classic case of wasted potential, Von Helsing never even meets Countess Zaleska. Perhaps that’s for the best, though; where Edward Van Sloan had crackling chemistry opposite Bela Lugosi, it’s hard to imagine him getting blood from the stony performance of Gloria Holden, who is, I’m sorry to say, a bit of a bore. At first, she seems promising, scheming to free herself of her father’s dreadful curse, yet as the film elapses and the poor Countess surrenders to the selfsame curse, Holden’s performance dries up, and she spends most of the rest of the runtime – pardon the pun – vamping. There’s very provocative subtext (especially for 1936), if terrifically clichéd, about the female vampire being coded as lesbian, which makes her budding relationship with Dr. Garth a real mystery. Is she planning to bite him, or does she hope he’ll hypnotize her out of her vampirism? The film leans more toward the second possibility, though I’m not sure that’s how vampires or hypnosis work.

 

Surprisingly, some of the best parts of the film have nothing to do with Countess Zaleska or with vampires in general. Equally if not more compelling are the sequences between Dr. Garth and his secretary Janet, played by Marguerite Churchill. The pair have a wonderful sense of interplay, reminiscent a bit of a discount William Powell and Myrna Loy. (Indeed, I’m certain I would have loved Dracula’s Daughter if Powell and Loy had played in it.) These scenes are light and breezy, and Churchill plays what could have been a thankless role with spunk and good humor.

 

Dracula’s Daughter does represent something of the end of an era. It’s the last Universal Monsters film for three years – the cinematic universe would be, appropriately enough, resurrected in 1939 with Son of Frankenstein – and it’s the last to bear the influence of studio bigwig Carl Laemmle and his son, Carl Laemmle, Jr. It certainly feels of a piece with its predecessors, stodgy and stagey for better and for worse. Its pace is deliberate, often slow, and the monstrosity of the story is largely restricted to the imagination. In a sense, the key is again Edward Van Sloan; though Dracula’s Daughter takes place moments after Dracula, Van Sloan certainly appears to have aged at least five years, with his hairline receding and his presence more sedate than before. So too perhaps did the studio feel the monster movies had run their course; Universal certainly felt that way about ousting the Laemmles.

 

But if we’ve learned one thing over the course of this Monster March, it’s that you can’t keep a good creature down for long. In the case of the vampire, it would only take seven years for the Son of Dracula to rear his head; fortunately for you creatures of the night, it’ll be a scant seven days.

 

Dracula’s Daughter is not rated. Directed by Lambert Hillyer. Written by Garrett Fort and Oliver Jeffries. Starring Otto Kruger, Gloria Holden, Marguerite Churchill, Irving Pichel, and Edward Van Sloan. 

Tune in tomorrow for Wolf Man Wednesday, with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi.

Next week for Transylvania Tuesday, if Dracula’s Daughter can’t git-r-dun, this looks like a job for the Son of Dracula (1943), starring Lon Chaney Jr.