The Universal Horror Experience - Dracula's Daughter

Man, Dracula's Daughter is something else.  For starters, it's one of the Universal Horror sequels that I - despite my love for all things monstrous - had never gotten around to seeing.  Until last night, that is.  And now that I have seen it, I'm pretty sure it's one of the more unique horror sequels ever made.

It was merely 1936 when Dracula's Daughter was released, as Universal was riding the wave of success from Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931 and 1935's Bride of Frankenstein had established just how profitable a sequel could be to the studio.  I guess the feminine side of Bride was an inspiration to the people behind Dracula's Daughter, but the tone of the two films couldn't be more different.  That's not a big surprise, because Dracula and Frankenstein were different in tone as well, but the gap between their sequels is gigantic.

Actually, Dracula's Daughter might be the darkest movie of its era that I've seen.  Gloria Holden - the grandmother of The Mist and The Walking Dead co-star Laurie Holden - seems to float around the screen as the title character. Holden also uses her distant stare and rounded eyebrows to make Countess Marya Zaleska a hypnotic femme fatale, and the power of her presence in the film can't be denied.  The performance has certainly been an influential one in the horror scene, and is referenced as an inspiration for future female vampires like the ones created by author Anne Rice.

But, if we want to get to the part of Dracula's Daughter that involves Ms. Holden, we need to start at the beginning and the film's kind of genius set up.  In the opening scene we see the aftermath of the unseen finale of Dracula, as Professor Von Helsing - played again by Edward Van Sloan - deals with the police after putting a stake through the heart of Count Dracula (played here by a wax version of Bela Lugosi).  Watching the two patrolmen try to fathom why this distinguished old man has just put a stake through someone's heart is actually a pretty humorous opening, but it also leads into a unique discussion of the vampire curse.  As Von Helsing (seriously, that Von sooooo bugs me) puts it, you can't be charged with murder when someone's been dead for 500 years.  I think he has a point

The old doctor's pleas lead to the involvement of a psychiatrist/former student played by Otto Kruger, but also leads Countess Zaleska to London, where she uses her hypno-skills to acquire her father's corpse.  She promptly burns the corpse, because she's convinced that doing so will end her vampire curse.  Unlike her Romanian ancestor, the younger Dracula doesn't feel very comfortable in her role as a child of the night.  She still avoids wine and she still craves blood, but the diabolical edge of her father is replaced with a sad indifference in her eyes.  It's like she knows that what she is simply can not exist peacefully in our world.

Speaking of "what she is", I'd be foolish not to mention the sexual implications of the film.  Despite the strict regulations on films of the era, Dracula's Daughter is filled to the brim with some shockingly obvious lesbian undertones.  The Countess primarily sets her sights on female victims, and her intimate gaze at these women had to be a bit risque for the era.  A mid-film scene in which she offers to paint a young girl from the shoulders up shows a shocking amount of skin for the era, and the studio was very hesitant to approve the scene due to its homosexual subtext.  By today's standards it's impossible to miss the gaga-eyes Holden gives these young women - after all, I am the guy who used to think Mac and Blaine in Predator might have been gay lovers - and it's interesting to me that many people of the era weren't taken aback at all by the Countess' interactions with her victims. Wikipedia even cites that one critic advised viewers to "Be sure to bring the kiddies"!  (And if it's on Wikipedia it MUST be true!

I'm not really sure how anyone of the era would assume this was family fare anyway, because Dracula's Daughter features a lot of dark and foggy scenes that create more tension than anything in the Dracula film that preceded it.  Holden's dark performance is also accentuated by her creepy henchman Sandor (played by Irving Pichel), who lurks in shadows like an imposing mixture of Boris Karloff and Humphrey Bogart.  His relationship with the Countess is also an interesting one, as he seems to understand both her disdain for her condition and her unstoppable need to feed upon the innocent. 

I'm talking up Dracula's Daughter pretty well, though I'm not sure I really felt I liked the film that much.  It suffers from pacing problems that are similar to Lugosi's Dracula, and the connecting scenes that don't involve Holden or Pichel often fall pretty flat.  But Dracula's Daughter is at least a thought-provoking sequel that is its own movie, and it earned my respect quickly by being so willing to take chances that buck what viewers would expect from it.  Though seventy-five years have passed since its release, Dracula's Daughter still feels like it's kind of a rebel in the Universal Horror scene - and I respect that greatly.

The Universal Horror Experience - The Wolf Man

(Note from The Mike: Y'all love Universal's Monster flicks, right?  Well, The Mike does.  And it seems like it's about time to do something about it.  So welcome to a new feature at FMWL - The Universal Horror Experience.  Now I know that most of these films have been talked to death, so I hope to do something fresher than just saying "OMG YOU GUYS, these movies are like important".  In said feature, I hope to discuss my experience with these monsters, to review some of the sequels I've yet to see, and to talk about some films that follow up on Universal's original scarers.  For example, we're gonna start the Universal Horror Experience with....)

My love affair with Universal's monsters started with them existing as more of an idea than an actual entity.   I first really learned about them by reading those orange backed books about the monsters at the library - if you grew up in the '80s, you probably know those books. I read front to back about Dracula, Frankenstein, King Kong, Godzilla, etc....but for some reason I don't remember caring much about the Wolf Man.  Frankenstein's monster was always the big brute, Dracula's always been the suave devil....but then there was The Wolf Man, who I always kind of wrote off as a side character in my youth. (Except I knew that he had gnards.  Thanks, The Monster Squad.)

But when I started to get into the movies during my teen years, The Wolf Man quickly jumped out at me as a favorite.  Where Frankenstein and Dracula were paring down their source materials to film lengths, The Wolf Man was taking something that hadn't been done too often - though Werewolf of London did precede it by six years - and using it to create a third icon to keep the money flowing in for Universal Studios.  In doing so, many of the things we've come to believe about werewolves - like their struggles with silver and humanoid appearance - were unleashed upon audiences for the first time.  I don't mean to slight The Mummy, The Invisible Man, or The Creature from the Black Lagoon (who was still 15 years away from existence) when I say The Wolf Man is above them as a top dog in the horror 'verse - but it's since become a special favorite to me.

The Wolf Man won me in part through its monster, but there was a whole lot more going on in the film.  Lon Chaney Jr. stars as both the furry beast and the seemingly harmless - aside from a bit of peeping - Larry Talbot, who returns home to his father after the tragic death of his brother in a hunting accident.  The Talbots are obviously a big deal in the small town they inhabit, which makes Larry a high profile individual - particularly when he's caught up in a love triangle with a local girl (the fetching Evelyn Ankers) and the accidental murder of a gypsy named Bela (aptly played by Bela Lugosi).  Larry is wounded badly by the beast that Bela appears to be, and we all know what that means these days.  (If you don't, check out An American Werewolf in London - which cites the film as a reference on screen - and get back to me.  Or, y'know, just watch the movie.)

Chaney's performance is certainly raw by Hollywood standards, but the younger Mister Chaney would make a career out of harnessing that off-kilter persona.  Though Chaney got his first big break two years earlier as Lennie in the first film adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (opposite a young Burgess Meredith), the mixture of his size and stature with his ability to play meek and scared - plus a dose of his famous father's legacy - made Chaney a favorite with Universal after his initial turn as The Wolf Man.  Chaney would go on to portray Frankenstein's monster, The Mummy, and the Son of Dracula in following Universal horrors.  Though those roles would establish him as a horror 'verse fixture, but his original turn as Larry Talbot catches Chaney at his most human - at least until his swan song performance in former MMOTW Spider Baby.

The problem with Chaney, according to many horror fans, is that he most certainly is not an iconic presence like Karloff and Lugosi before him.  I won't argue that point, but I think he gets a lot of help in making The Wolf Man work.  The supporting cast includes Lugosi and Ankers but also big names Claude Rains and Ralph Bellamy, and each actor works well within Curt Siodmak's tragic script.  The biggest assist in creating the legend of The Wolf Man probably goes to makeup specialist Jack Pierce, who designed the look of the beast and supervised the exhausting process of creating the film's transformation from man to wolf.  

With this convergence of talents supporting the star, The Wolf Man jumps off the screen as a tale of horror with a Shakespearean bit of tragedy and more human drama than many horrors of its era.  While the film adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula can be mistaken for one-man shows thanks to their iconic leads, the superior cast and script behind The Wolf Man push it to the top of my go-to list of classic horrors.  I'm glad I shook the near-sightedness of little The Mike, because he remembered The Wolf Man primarily as the thing that scared Stephanie Tanner that one time on Full House.