To call Dracula’s Daughter (1936) campy would be an understatement. In many ways it felt like a ridiculous version of Cat People (1942). At one point, examining the body of a man who has just been vampirised, a doctor dramatically exclaims: “If we only knew what caused those two sharp punctures over the jugular vein!”
Screened at the Ultimate Picture Palace as part of their ‘Fright’s Out!’ classic season, Dracula’s Daughter follows Countess Marya Zaleska, daughter of Count Dracula. The Countess believes that the death of her father will free her from the urge to kill and allow her to live a normal life among humans. An important aspect of this desire is a longing for human connection – hence my comparison to Cat People – and yet any serious attempts at depicting Marya’s loneliness, despite an interesting performance from Gloria Holden, are overshadowed by the film’s overwhelming silliness.
Curiously, nowadays Dracula’s Daughter gets discussed mostly in relation to its queer subtext. Particularly in relation to the scene where a young girl, Lili, undresses in front of the Countess so that she can paint her. Originally Lili was meant to pose for Marya nude, but the scene was changed to have her only partially undress. This was the result of a suggestion of Joseph Breen – the American film censor – that the film “avoid any suggestion of perverse sexual desire on the part of Marya, or of an attempted sexual attack by her upon Lili”. The discussion of Marya as a version of the archetypal predatory homosexual dominated discussions of the film both then and now.
I find it very hard to believe that Dracula’s Daughter ever attempted to be a fully serious film, although to call it a comedy feels wrong too. It would be even harder to justify it as a horror picture, since it makes so few attempts at suspense, and when it does, seems to immediately undercut them. One example is Marya’s arrival at the police station to see her father’s body. There is an undeniable intensity and allure about Holden. Covering her face with a black shawl, only her beautiful dark eyes are visible – before she even uses her ring to hypnotise the policeman, she commands the screen with quasi-hypnotic power. This powerful moment is interrupted by the constant slapstick performance from the bumbling policeman. Throughout the film, Holden continues to give a dramatic performance, but the cast almost all seem stuck in different genres.
The audience at the Ultimate Picture Palace were constantly laughing, but for the most part not with the film. Dracula’s Daughter is unsure of what it wants to be and, ultimately, that is what makes it so entertaining. The film opens with physical comedy from these two policeman figures who make the audience laugh whenever they are on screen and seem to take up an inordinate amount of the film’s short runtime. A ridiculous number of characters from Bram Stoker’s Dracula are name-dropped in this opening – including Renfield, although he is entirely irrelevant to the rest of the film – and Van Helsing gets put under arrest for murdering Dracula. In another bizarre scene we meet our hero, Dr. Jeffrey Garth – pronounced as Goth in the film, as if everything else wasn’t enough – hunting with a strongly accented Scottish figure to whose accent Garth then imitates, presumably as a joke. Why, you may ask? That is a great question, and one that the film doesn’t know the answer to.
When it is not being weirdly comedic, the film is seemingly attempting a melodrama with elements of the psychological study. After meeting Dr. Garth, who is a psychiatrist, Marya becomes obsessed with the idea that he might be able to free her from her vampirism. This could have been an interesting way to explore themes of sexual repression or alienation, or even, as the film at one point seems to suggest, inter-generational trauma. What we get is what feels like a cartoon version of a psychiatrist’s job, including pearls of dialogue such as “more or less, and like any disease of the mind, it can be cured” and “we have to discover what brought about the obsession in order to effect mental release”. Otto Kruger – known for playing charismatic villains – gives a baffling performance as Dr. Garth. At times he acts like he’s in a silent film, at others he barely seems to react: every time he dramatically raised an eyebrow for a close-up during entirely serious moments, the audience cackled.
If only to be constantly surprised, I would give Dracula’s Daughter an hour and ten minutes of your time – it asks very little of its audience and has plenty of entertainment to give. UPP’s ‘Fright’s Out!’ classics season is definitely one to look out for if you want to get in the mood for Halloween.
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