Director: Lambert Hillyer
Year:  1936
Rating: 6.0

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I am slowly catching up on the Universal horror films of the 1930's and 40's. I missed them all growing up on TV afternoons because I was outside of the USA. But better late than never and I am quite enjoying them. Certainly there were horror films during the Silent period - but United really focused on them and created a number of iconic figures. Dracula of course being a major one. That film was produced in 1931 with Lugosi in this role and Universal had every intention of following up with a sequel. Which in theory was difficult since Dracula was dead at the end of the film, but certainly not impossible per Frankenstein and the Wolfman.


But they could not really get it together going through various ideas and scripts - initially trying to get Dracula and Lugosi back in it. But partly due to Universal's financial problems, legal ownership issues and the Movie Codes brought on by the Breen Office, it took five years. As Tom Weaver writes in his great book Universal Horrors, the initial draft was going to be rather extreme for those days full of torture and seduction with a prologue with Lugosi explaining how he came to be a vampire. But damn - Breen shot all this down and it was back to the drawing board.
What they eventually came up with was this film - moody, evocative but rarely scary - and I thought with a rushed ending that sucked the air out of the film. The studio had cut the budget a lot and so perhaps they just didn't have the funds for the big ending the film deserved. Still this film is held in very good stead by horror aficionados of that period. I needed a little more graphic blood and gore but the camera looks away at each of those opportunities - again perhaps the Breen Office.


The film begins where Dracula left off with Dracula dead from the stake in his heart from Professor Von Helsing played by Edward Van Sloan who was also Helsing in the first film (and who was also in Frankenstein and The Mummy). He is arrested by a few Bobbies and of course no one accepts his defense - you can't kill a man who has been dead for 500 years! To his aid comes his old pupil Garth performed with a welcome serious tone by Otto Kruger. A woman from Hungry shows up in the social circles with cheekbones that feel like Picasso had a go at them - this is Countess Zaleska (Gloria Holden). But she is in fact . . . the Daughter of Dracula! But she doesn't want to be - she just wants to have fun like all the other women adorned in black like The Girl Who Walks Alone at Night, She wants to give up the blood sucking life but it is sooo hard - all those delicious necks just waiting for a bite. Like all vampires she has a human servant, Sandor, looking as if Eddie Munster grew up. The actor is Irving Pichel who had a fine directing career.


There are some excellent scenes - the best and most famous being when Sandor picks up a homeless young girl (Nan Gray, who quit acting when she married the singer Frankie Laine (theme to Rawhide) for a midnight snack for his mistress. It is surprising that this got by Breen as it turns into a sort of seduction as the Countess has the dazed girl disrobe. But overall this is more drama than horror and it throws in some scenes that feel like stuffing such as the two Bobbies - but it is still an elemental building block of the horror genre.