There’s just something about old movies. After Universal discovered that Depression-Era people would still pay to see scary movies, they made a kind of industry of filming new monsters (for them) or spinning off of their successes. Several years ago, when Universal was selling collections of their famed monster line up on DVD, I bought a few. I realized recently that I had never watched Son of Dracula, included in the Dracula DVD set. While it’s not a great movie, it’s by no stretch a bad one. The story is complex and soulful, and even though Bela Lugosi’s not in it, the film participates in the ever-growing vampire lore. It also introduced the world to Alucard, a character that would take off in Japan as a vampiric character in video games and manga.
Katherine, a well-to-do southern belle, met a Count Aculard while traveling in Eastern Europe. He’s now visiting her in America, much to her fiancé’s chagrin. A local doctor and friend of the family comes to expect that Alucard, Dracula spelled backwards, of course, may be a vampire. He brings over a professor acquaintance from Hungary to test his hypothesis. Meanwhile, Alucard, Dracula’s son, marries Kay and in so doing inherits her estate. She becomes a vampire, which was her plan all along. She, however, plans to turn her fiancé into a vampire, after they kill Alucard, so they can spend eternal life together. The doctor and professor figure out what’s going on, but the local police don’t believe them and are ready to commit the doctor as insane. Frank, the fiancé, refuses to go along with Kay’s plan, so he kills the Count by destroying his coffin before daybreak, and then also immolates Katherine as well, ridding the New World of vampires.
This is definitely a period piece, but it manages to have a southern Gothic appeal. The black folk are all servants, and the Hungarian doctor sounds just like Peter Lorre, but the story is complex enough to retain interest. Lon Chaney, as Alucard, doesn’t have as much screen time as you might expect, but there’s a lot going on in various subplots. The movie was released in 1943, when there was still a ban on horror movies in war-time England. The concern about invading foreigners is pretty clearly spelled out but the story is fairly well-told, even with some small holes remaining in the plot. All of this makes me think I’d better check my other Universal monster DVDs. There may be some other good bits that I’ve been missing.