Theoretically beginning about five minutes after the ending to Browning’s Dracula, this low budget sequel still suddenly seems to take place when it was shot instead of about the turn of the century as the first movie. It’s a Universal movie alright. Some change has also come over poor old Professor Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan, the only returning cast member from the first film, and certainly not one you’d want to return) – he is now Professor von Helsing. Arrested by two comic relief bobbies who will go on to annoy throughout the film’s first act, he finds out that Scotland Yard in form of one Sir Basil Humphrey (Gilbert Emery) does not put much stock into his chances of not being convicted for murder when his main defence is that his victim was a vampire. It certainly doesn’t help that Von (ugh) Helsing never mentions all those other characters from the first film who just might be helpful witnesses there. In any case, our man is convinced that the only one who can help him is an old student of his, the lawyer, no wait, the eminent psychiatrist Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger). Not surprisingly, Garth will turn out to be rather sceptical at first.
While this is happening, a woman with hypnotic powers and a striking dress sense we will soon learn to be Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden, who is the only element of the film that’s utterly, completely, right), whose actual relationship to Dracula the film never bothers to go into (of course), steals Dracula’s body, burning it to ensure his destruction. The Countess hopes that this will have cured her of her own vampiric desires, but a bit of nudging from her man-servant/enabler Sandor (Irving Pichel) on the next night gets her teeth right into someone’s jugular again. Eventually, she tries to get help from modern psychiatry, and yes, of course in the form of Jeffrey Garth.
Like many of Universal’s horror movies that are not the obvious classics, Lambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s Daughter is a deeply frustrating experience. As usual, it’s neither the actors (who mostly do as much as they can with what they are given), nor Hillyer’s direction, nor the technical aspects of the movie that are the problem, but the script by diverse hands. Oh, there are bits and pieces and hints and suggestions of great interest and attraction here (I’ll go into those a bit further on), but nobody involved with the final version of the script actually seemed to have understood those, leading to a film that doesn’t seem to know what it’s actually supposed to be about. It certainly isn’t making matters any better that much of what goes for a plot here is full of holes so big, even I couldn’t very well ignore them. Certainly, sometimes these holes could be taken as clever ambiguities, yet the shoddiness of their surroundings suggests otherwise.
Which is rather a shame, too, for there are several elements here that can make Dracula’s Daughter fascinating despite of itself. Take the aforementioned vague relationship between the Countess and Dracula in combination with her never showing any actual supernatural powers (apart from hypnotism, but the decidedly non-supernatural Garth can do that just as well as she, for in the pop culture of the 30s, hypnotism was scientific fact), suggesting the Countess may very well not be an actual, supernatural creature of the night but a woman only believing she is a vampire. Of course, the film does undercut this reading eventually via some dumb line by “von” Helsing, because it’s that kind of film.
Also interesting, and probably the film’s main claim to fame in circles interested in not terribly successful movies from the mid-30s of the last century, is the Countess’s status as something of the first movie lesbian vampire; though, really, given that only one of her victims is a woman, she’s probably more a bisexual vampire, and not the first one either, for Lugosi’s Dracula did some off-screen nibbling on Renfield. On the other hand, her same sex bloodsucking happens as nearly on-screen as the at the time particularly pesky Hayes code allowed (after several cuts made for the censors), so the film’s certainly pioneering in that. Plus, that scene is one of the most effectively shot of the film, suggesting the kind of deeply atmospheric film Hillyer could have made.
Then there’s the possibility to read at least parts of the film as being metaphorical about drug addiction, the Countess a junkie who already knows that her fix is destroying her, and doesn’t want to be destroyed, but of course still can’t resist. Even the dialectic between relapse and total acceptance of her role as a blood junkie is there later on. And of course, most of the film simply ignores this possible reading, as it does the lesbianism, Sandor’s role as enabler, and the ambiguity of the Countess’s mental state, because firstly, nobody involved in the final product cared about any of this, and secondly, there were scenes of bumbling bobbies and Edward Van Sloan talking with a Scotland Yard guy to shoot.
As I said, it’s an intensely frustrating film, because so much of great interest and weight is dangling just out of reach of the audience because the filmmakers didn’t seem to bother. Which is very much the problem of most of the lesser Universal horror films.