Dracula's Daughter

Like Frankenstein, Dracula was a huge hit for Universal and eventually they made several sequels, some of them crossing over and featuring Frankenstein's monster as well as their other creature, the Wolf Man. However Dracula's Daughter was the first sequel, and it does not even have Dracula in it, except as a corpse. The film, released in 1936, instead has some not-so-subtle eroticism in the form of lesbian overtones.

Dracula's Daughter starts where Dracula left off, with Van Helsing (now, for some reason, called Von Helsing, and still played by Edward Van Sloan) having dispatched the count with a stake through the heart (of course, in the book that happens in Transylvania, not Whitby). Van Sloan is arrested, and the head of Scotland Yard, Gilbert Emery, does not believe his wild tale. Van Sloan enlists the help of his old student, Otto Krueger.

Krueger is a psychiatrist and something of a man about town, as he always seems to be in black tie. His assistant is some kind of socialite, Marguerite Churchill. He meets, at a party, Countess Zaleska, whom earlier we saw stealing and burning Dracula's body, in the hope she would be released from the curse. It turns out she was one of his victims, and is a vampire herself.

The film is campy good fun, with more psychological horror than anything else. It's a slim 71 minutes, but much of it is taken up with comedy, especially between two bumbling policeman at the beginning. In fact, much of the enjoyment of this film is a broad array of English "types," such as Emery (who was American) as the constantly annoyed police chief, who is interrupted in bed as he works on his stamp collection, or the poncey Sir Aubrey (Claud Allister) or the classic British butler (Edgar Norton).

What makes Dracula's Daughter historically interesting is the lesbian motif. Gloria Holden is the vampire, and there's a scene that is kind of amazing considering it was a post-code film. Her manservant (creepily played by Irving Pichel) finds a young woman ready to jump into the Thames. He entices her to come to Holden's studio, to presumably pose for a painting. The young woman is played by Nan Grey, who removes her blouse to bare her shoulders, and then Holden moves in on her. The scene is pretty erotic for a 1936 film, and later, Holden will kidnap Churchill and linger over her comatose body as she waits for Krueger to come save her.

The lesbian stuff wasn't really noticed at the time (the New York Times review said, "bring the kiddies") and the film was a middling success. More films would come though, as monster pictures would become Universal's cash cow.