Welcome to the third installment of MONSTER SERIAL. During
the next few months I'm going to attack some of Universal's best known
franchises, starting with a look at the original DRACULA series.
SON OF DRACULA, 1943
Starring: Lon Chaney, Jr., Robert Paige, Louise Allbritton,
Evelyn Ankers, Frank Craven, J. Edward Bromberg
Directed by: Robert Siodmak
WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT, ALFIE? A woman with an interest in the occult invites the mysterious Count Alucard to visit her family's estate in New Orleans. The count begins a campaign to marry his hostess and steal away her family's land, but finds out too late that his new wife has manipulated him into granting her the immortal curse of the vampire.
WHAT'S IT REALLY ABOUT? I don't have a clue. Most of the plot revolves around a scheme to divide a family inheritance among siblings, so I'm tempted to suggest the movie is about how greed is such a powerful emotion that it can ever trump grief ... kind of like a gothic version of THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE. Even though sex is the primary motive for the male leads, SON OF DRACULA downplays the sexual innuendo of the first two films. As heiress "'Kay Caldwell," Louise Allbritton portrays a character straight out of a James M. Cain novel, a woman who uses her sexuality to manipulate both Dracula and her former fiancee into achieving her goals. he pits the two idiots against each other in the final act, but otherwise the screenplay really doesn't have much to say about sex.
WHY ARE WE STILL TALKING ABOUT THIS MOVIE? I'm not sure that anybody has much to say about SON OF DRACULA today. It's one of the least-loved films in the Universal Monsters series and is a frustrating bore. There a lot of things it gets right, but SON OF DRACULA has the misfortune of having created such a portable template for vampire films that you probably won't recognize its meager successes.
Something the film gets right is its approach the the Dracula story. The appeal of Bram Stoker's original novel upon its original release was that it was a "modern" tale: Stoker took a primitive legend and placed it in the middle of contemporary London, a world its readers recognized. Many film adaptions miss the importance of this idea and insist on setting the movie in Victorian England or some other location in the distant past.
SON OF DRACULA not only tries to create a modern vampire story, but one that is uniquely America. And by setting the story in New Orleans, it let Universal maintain its creepy, fog-soaked atmosphere, something that would have been almost impossible had the film been set in Los Angeles or New York City.
SON OF DRACULA has a little fun with the vampire myth and establishes a pattern for vampire stories that continues to this day. "Establishes" might not be the right word, because the film lifts the skeletal structure of of 1931's DRACULA and tinkers with the formula to create something that's both familiar and unique. We still have the mysterious "foreign" stranger, the secluded country estate, the coffins, bats and fog machines. We also have the obligatory statements of incredulity as a learned medical professional puts for the bullshit hypothesis that a vampire is on the loose, followed by the slow acceptance by the supporting cast that they're living in a monster movie. If you've ever seen a vampire movie before, you've pretty much seen SON OF DRACULA.
While DRACULA'S DAUGHTER might not have been the BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN of the Dracula series, at least it made an effort to do its own thing. SON OF DRACULA is most notable for cooking up a generic formula for vampire movies that could be recycled infinitely. It's the spiritual cousin of a slasher movie.
But the script isn't a complete pageant of cliche. The movie's twist, that Dracula has been manipulated by his victim into making her immortal, gives the story a dimension not see in the previous films. Louise Allbritton makes for an interesting femme fatale, one that both cast and audience will underestimate until its far too late. Dracula is just another victim in the film, and is reduced to begging for his life during the final scene as he watches his coffin go up in flames.
IS IT TIME TO STOP TALKING ABOUT IT? SON OF DRACULA doesn't make a lick of sense. He arrives in New Orleans under the assumed name of "Count Alucard," an alias that's cracked within seconds by the first person to see the name. Even though the movie is called SON OF DRACULA, it's revealed that Chaney is playing the actual Count Dracula. The villain is reduced to the role of gigolo in the movie, an a particularly stupid one, at that.
The casting of Lon Chaney Jr. in the title role is unforgivable, and one of the worst cases of miscasting this side of John Wayne in THE CONQUEROR. He's outrageously silly as Dracula. While revisiting the movie last week, I found myself actively hating him in the role. It's one of the laziest performances to ever appear in a Universal horror movie. Chaney is such a disaster that the rest of the movie could have been ROSHOMON and it wouldn't have mattered.
Universal did a piss-poor job of managing its Dracula franchise. What was briefly the crown jewel in the studio's horror line had become a B-movie cliche by the third film. Granted, the world had changed quite a bit since the debut of DRACULA, but that didn't stop Universal from squeezing a memorable series out of FRANKENSTEIN, technically the most limiting character in their roster. SON OF DRACULA jettisoned all narrative connections to the previous movies, and later Dracula movies would return the favor by pretending this movie didn't exist, either.
Also, the movie is aggressively racist, which doesn't have much to do with the plot, but certainly affects the viewing experience.
Up next: House of Frankenstein, 1944
SON OF DRACULA, 1943
Starring: Lon Chaney, Jr., Robert Paige, Louise Allbritton,
Evelyn Ankers, Frank Craven, J. Edward Bromberg
Directed by: Robert Siodmak
WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT, ALFIE? A woman with an interest in the occult invites the mysterious Count Alucard to visit her family's estate in New Orleans. The count begins a campaign to marry his hostess and steal away her family's land, but finds out too late that his new wife has manipulated him into granting her the immortal curse of the vampire.
WHAT'S IT REALLY ABOUT? I don't have a clue. Most of the plot revolves around a scheme to divide a family inheritance among siblings, so I'm tempted to suggest the movie is about how greed is such a powerful emotion that it can ever trump grief ... kind of like a gothic version of THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE. Even though sex is the primary motive for the male leads, SON OF DRACULA downplays the sexual innuendo of the first two films. As heiress "'Kay Caldwell," Louise Allbritton portrays a character straight out of a James M. Cain novel, a woman who uses her sexuality to manipulate both Dracula and her former fiancee into achieving her goals. he pits the two idiots against each other in the final act, but otherwise the screenplay really doesn't have much to say about sex.
WHY ARE WE STILL TALKING ABOUT THIS MOVIE? I'm not sure that anybody has much to say about SON OF DRACULA today. It's one of the least-loved films in the Universal Monsters series and is a frustrating bore. There a lot of things it gets right, but SON OF DRACULA has the misfortune of having created such a portable template for vampire films that you probably won't recognize its meager successes.
Something the film gets right is its approach the the Dracula story. The appeal of Bram Stoker's original novel upon its original release was that it was a "modern" tale: Stoker took a primitive legend and placed it in the middle of contemporary London, a world its readers recognized. Many film adaptions miss the importance of this idea and insist on setting the movie in Victorian England or some other location in the distant past.
SON OF DRACULA not only tries to create a modern vampire story, but one that is uniquely America. And by setting the story in New Orleans, it let Universal maintain its creepy, fog-soaked atmosphere, something that would have been almost impossible had the film been set in Los Angeles or New York City.
SON OF DRACULA has a little fun with the vampire myth and establishes a pattern for vampire stories that continues to this day. "Establishes" might not be the right word, because the film lifts the skeletal structure of of 1931's DRACULA and tinkers with the formula to create something that's both familiar and unique. We still have the mysterious "foreign" stranger, the secluded country estate, the coffins, bats and fog machines. We also have the obligatory statements of incredulity as a learned medical professional puts for the bullshit hypothesis that a vampire is on the loose, followed by the slow acceptance by the supporting cast that they're living in a monster movie. If you've ever seen a vampire movie before, you've pretty much seen SON OF DRACULA.
While DRACULA'S DAUGHTER might not have been the BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN of the Dracula series, at least it made an effort to do its own thing. SON OF DRACULA is most notable for cooking up a generic formula for vampire movies that could be recycled infinitely. It's the spiritual cousin of a slasher movie.
IS IT TIME TO STOP TALKING ABOUT IT? SON OF DRACULA doesn't make a lick of sense. He arrives in New Orleans under the assumed name of "Count Alucard," an alias that's cracked within seconds by the first person to see the name. Even though the movie is called SON OF DRACULA, it's revealed that Chaney is playing the actual Count Dracula. The villain is reduced to the role of gigolo in the movie, an a particularly stupid one, at that.
The casting of Lon Chaney Jr. in the title role is unforgivable, and one of the worst cases of miscasting this side of John Wayne in THE CONQUEROR. He's outrageously silly as Dracula. While revisiting the movie last week, I found myself actively hating him in the role. It's one of the laziest performances to ever appear in a Universal horror movie. Chaney is such a disaster that the rest of the movie could have been ROSHOMON and it wouldn't have mattered.
Universal did a piss-poor job of managing its Dracula franchise. What was briefly the crown jewel in the studio's horror line had become a B-movie cliche by the third film. Granted, the world had changed quite a bit since the debut of DRACULA, but that didn't stop Universal from squeezing a memorable series out of FRANKENSTEIN, technically the most limiting character in their roster. SON OF DRACULA jettisoned all narrative connections to the previous movies, and later Dracula movies would return the favor by pretending this movie didn't exist, either.
Also, the movie is aggressively racist, which doesn't have much to do with the plot, but certainly affects the viewing experience.
Up next: House of Frankenstein, 1944
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