When a train pulls into a New Orleans station, all anyone can talk about is who’s not aboard – Count Alucard (Lon Chaney Jr.), late of Hungary. Plantation heiress and voodoo dabbler Katherine Caldwell (Louise Allbritton) awaits the arrival of her foreign beau, spurning her American sweetheart Frank Stanley (Robert Paige). Once Alucard arrives, he and Katherine are swiftly married, but Frank protests; a scuffle breaks out, and Frank opens fire on Alucard, only for the bullets to pass through the count and strike Katherine. But is Katherine actually dying? Or is she already among the undead?
Let me set the stage a bit. I prefer to watch these movies late at night, with all the lights out – it really sets a spooky mood. I try to imagine what it must have been like to see these movies in their initial releases, as the horror genre and the very notion of a shared cinematic universe were evolving before the audience’s eyes. (And unlike our themed sequence of Monster March, I’ve been watching them in release order.) Usually these films have surprised me in one way or another, be it in establishing genre canon or in entertaining me more than I anticipated. With Son of Dracula, we have a first – it’s the first time I very nearly fell asleep during a Universal Monster movie. It was a genuine struggle to jolt myself out of a stupor even as the credits rolled. Son of Dracula is boring, boring, boring.
In terms of plot, Son of Dracula is largely confounding, and the parts that make sense don’t entertain in the slightest. For one, I’m still unsure if Count Alucard is the son of Dracula or if he’s Dracula himself. Unlike many Universal Monster movies, there’s no nods to continuity with previous films, nary a mention of Lugosi’s vampire or of Countess Zaleska, Dracula’s daughter. Just about the only thing we know is that Alucard is Dracula spelled backwards – and we know this because it’s explicitly explained on screen twice, almost as though writers Curtis Siodmak and Eric Taylor wanted us to know just how clever they are. It’s also unclear why Alucard has chosen Louisiana as his next stomping grounds; it’s implied that his Hungarian neighborhood has gone to pot, suggesting that this film might as well have been Dracula Moves to the Suburbs. Or it could be that he just happens to have found the dumbest woman in the world, who just happens to be set to inherit a plantation of her own. (Though why Dracula would trade a castle for a swampland plantation, I’ve no idea.) Then again, Katherine Caldwell is merely using Alucard to gain immortality for herself – which is in itself heroically unwise.
It would be unfair for me to single out Lon Chaney Jr.’s performance as terrible, because in truth nearly every performance is lamentable. As the headliner, though, Chaney leaves much to be desired. He was so terrific as Lawrence “Wolf Man” Talbot, but every ounce of charisma in that performance is entirely absent from Count Alucard. If Chaney is attempting to do a Transylvanian accent, it isn’t working; instead, his dialogue comes off as stilted, stiff, and unnatural (and not in a good way, like Lugosi managed). It’s as though he’s trying to read cue cards phonetically for an audience that doesn’t quite understand English. Moreover, his presence lacks any semblance of menace; he is, in short, terrifically dull.
As I said, though, the rest of the cast fails to rise above Chaney’s soporific turn. Louise Allbritton is practically sleepwalking through the film as Katherine Caldwell; you’d think a southern belle with a voodoo fetish might be a cause for some intrigue, but her delivery is lackluster and her motivations are frankly ludicrous. As her sister, Evelyn Ankers is equally disappointing. She had such fine chemistry with Chaney in The Wolf Man, but here she’s largely forgettable; indeed, I’m struggling to remember why she’s in the plot at all. Meanwhile, Robert Paige plays Frank like a Dollar Tree Gomer Pyle, again without the kooky voice, and he becomes unhinged so quickly in the film that you can’t help but wonder if he’d been mad the whole time. The only performance that’s mildly engaging is J. Edward Bromberg as Professor Lazlo, though only because he’s playing a watered-down Van Helsing – and Bromberg is no Edward Van Sloan.
Very little about Son of Dracula rises above the level of a B-movie, which actually makes it a perfect fit for Svengoolie. The acting is hammy, the script is ramshackle, and the whole film is borderline unwatchable because of the nonstop pipe organ soundtrack that seems to be straight out of a Firesign Theater parody of itself. But you’ve got to hand it to Son of Dracula, if only for being the first film to depict Dracula/Alucard transforming into a bat on screen. The effects are more clever than a bad 1943 movie has any right to possess, and so I won’t spoil how the effect is done (though you’ll know right away when you see it done).
It was Thumper’s father who wisely instructed the little rabbit in Bambi that “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all,” and so it may surprise you that I do have something nice to say about Son of Dracula: the ending is so well-constructed that I wish the rest of the film lived up to it. In the moment when Alucard discovers that Frank has set fire to his coffin, Chaney really comes alive, and his portrayal of the desperate and furious Count is handily the best acting in the film. The purely visual storytelling that follows – with no expository dialogue to hold the audience’s hand – ends up giving us easily the most downbeat ending of the Universal Monsters canon. Maybe there’s a bit of schadenfreude at play, because it’s darkly gratifying to see things end so horribly for every character in the film, but I also have to admit that director Robert Siodmak stages a truly compelling conclusion to a film that neither earns nor deserves it.
Next week for Transylvania Tuesday, enter freely and of your own will into the House of Dracula (1945), starring John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., Onslow Stevens, and Glenn Strange. If you need your vampire fix sooner, though, join us tomorrow for House of Frankenstein (1944).
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