Dracula's Daughter 1936

Dracula's Daughter - 1936

Gloria Holden stars as the progeny of you-know-who and gives an interesting and sympathetic portrait of a very self-doubting vampire, giving us the grim haunted stoicism of Countess Marya Zaleska who has come to London to make sure her infamous father is truly dead as the story in Dracula's Daughter picks up immediately from the ending of the 1931 Dracula. She steals the body of the Count and then disposes of him in a thorough fashion that goes beyond even what Dr. Van Helsing (Edward van Sloan) might prescribe, he being inconveniently unavailable because the police have him locked up for Dracula's murder as he has happily confessed to putting a stake through the chest of Zaleska's pater familias ("I did humanity a service" he calmly tells the investigators who are not accepting any talk of Dracula's vampire activities).

What pulls this film more into the 20th century versus Todd Browning's earlier film which was bathed in an almost medieval atmosphere of dread is how daughter Zaleska becomes concerned about herself in a very 20th century way, seeking the help of London psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger) who she heard claim that any obsession can be defeated with the proper approach to dealing with it. Zaleska's self awareness goes in a dramatically different direction than Bela Lugosi's over-confident vampire king who we can not imagine seeking the help or sympathy of anyone other than a loyal coffin-lid lifter like Renfield, and in this way Dracula's Daughter is radically different with the vampire being both the victim and the monster at the same time.

Otto Kruger gives us an efficient and somewhat jocular Dr. Garth who meets Zaleska at a London cocktail party, and as he talks about his work with psychological problems, he provides the example of alcoholism as obsession, with his treatment method being one in which he puts the patient and a bottle of liquor together in a room and makes the patient overcome their compulsion in a direct test of willpower. Garth is confident of this method, but he little realizes that when Countess Zaleska puts her eyes (with perhaps a small seed of infatuation) upon him he has literally become the bottle. Though she makes a brittle pretense of certainty that she can fight the driving hunger of her vampirism, her manservant ("Sandor" played by Irving Pichel) coldly claims the effort can only fail, and in a kind of Iago-like whispering campaign he predicts the outcome of Zaleska trying to deny her "true" nature as only ending in a bloodbath.

Dracula's Daughter is early enough in the Universal monster movie cycle that it retains the flavor of those early films where the transition from silent film to "talkie" is still evident. The dramatic forms of the stage—and in this case, script writing—shape a story that is ostensibly a horror film but also remarkably contains both a basic melodramatic subplot and a prototypical screwball comedy undertone at the same time. Kruger's sharp-witted doctor is regularly battling a wise-cracking secretary (Marguerite Churchill) with the two firing funny dialogue back and forth in a style that was the bread and butter of comedy films like Bringing Up Baby just two years later.

Film historians typically congratulate producer Val Lewton for introducing a strong psychological presence within the horror film genre with 1942's Cat People, but in actual fact it was more or less there from the start if you consider the likes of 1920's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The psychological processes of madmen and monsters were already being explored in the early Universal horror movies, though usually in a cruder way compared to the sleight-of-hand that Lewton and his directors would use a decade later, but the template of a sympathetic but damned female "monster" is strongly outlined in Dracula's Daughter and has more than a little similarity to the outlines of the struggle Simone Simon portrayed as the "cat woman" in Lewton's later Cat People film.

Original Page January 16, 2025

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