SON OF DRACULA (1943)

Old World vampire gothic meets New World Southern Gothic in SON OF DRACULA. It's an interesting idea, right? Transplant the Germanic expressionism of the Carpathian foothills to the Dark Oaks plantation in the Deep South and let's see what happens...

For me, a lot of it works: the cellar under the Caldwell mansion is a great place to stash coffins, as is the old playroom in the disused attic and the swamp drainage flumes. And then there's the great ambiance of the family graveyard on the estate and the old shack of the hoodoo conjure-woman Queen Zimba. Kay Caldwell (Louise Allbritton)-- all jet-black bangs and diaphanous gowns and a "morbid" (as we're told a bunch of times by different characters) obsession with the occult-- is some sort of character that you might find threatening the heroine in one of those pre-Anne Rice gothic romance potboilers. In general, I think the Southern setting works a helluva lot better in SON OF DRACULA than it does in THE MUMMY'S CURSE (1944).

Southern Illinoisan, Carbondale, IL, July 1, 1960

The relocation of the vampire from Europe to the USA may have had something to do with the motion picture being a wartime production. There are a couple times in SON OF DRACULA when the comment is made that the vampire has left the Old Country because the land and its people are barren, weak and exhausted; America, by contrast, is a "younger country, stronger, more virile" (in the words of Dr. Brewster). Alucard materializes and confirms this theory in his conversation with Professor Lazlo: "I am here because this is a young and virile race, not dry and decaying like ours," he tells the Hungarian. "They have what I want...what I need...what I must have." For a bit of historical context, recall that the Kingdom of Hungary was run by a right-wing, pro-fascist Axis government when SON OF DRACULA was in production; when the movie first appeared on TV as part of SHOCK!, Hungary had been very recently invaded and occupied by the USSR after a failed attempt by its people to overthrow the Soviet-backed regime there. I don't want to make too much of this, but it seems like an interesting way to re-imagine the vampiric threat: America's youthful vigor, vitality, and virility menaced by a symbol of fascism during WWII and then later by a symbol of Stalinism during the Cold War. (This latter connection for SHOCK!-era viewers of SON OF DRACULA also makes me think of that other vampire-from-behind-the-Iron-Curtain movie from the same time, THE RETURN OF DRACULA [1958] from Gramercy Pictures and United Artists.)

"Hey, wait a minute... I wonder if...?"

"Nah, it just couldn't be..."

"But that's what the TV guide in the El Paso Herald-Post for June 28, 1958 says! It must be!"

I can't help but think what this film would have been like if someone other than Lon Chaney, Jr. played Count Alucard (or, as Frank Stanley [Robert Paige] sometimes sounds like he's pronouncing it in this movie, "Count À La Carte"). This is another instance of Chaney being painfully miscast. At "six foot, three and one-half inches tall and weighing 220 pounds" (according to the SHOCK! promotional book's news release on Chaney), this doesn't look like the starving, desperate vampire refugee from a weak, dry, decaying race. Chaney goes for the mysterious, dangerous European vampire look by sporting that suave John Waters mustache from the "Inner Sanctum" pictures and spouting contraction-less English (as opposed to the article-free pidgin English he used to play a Native American in the 1957 series "Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans"), neither which are very effective in making anyone think that he's someone other than Lon Chaney, Jr. One positive thing that I will say about Chaney's Alucard, though, is that his hysterical outburst at the end of the movie (bellowing at Frank : "Put it out! Put it out, do you hear me?!") makes me think of the ways that Christopher Lee would play a more ferocious, feral Dracula in the Hammer films starting in 1958.

I need to say a little something here about director Robert Siodmak. Just as his brother Curt has his fingerprints all over the development of the classic American horror film, Robert Siodmak was a key figure in film noir, directing important movies in that highly-stylized manner like PHANTOM LADY (1944), THE KILLERS (1946), THE DARK MIRROR (1946), CRISS CROSS (1949), and THE FILE ON THELMA JORDAN (1950). In each of these movies (and in his other quasi-noir melodramas, like THE SUSPECT [1944], THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF UNCLE HARRY [1945], and THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE [1945]), Siodmak includes a scene or two where he goes all-out to craft an almost haunted, symbol-laden mise-en-scène of space and shadow that says a lot about the interior world of the characters on the screen, and you can see some of this skill in parts of SON OF DRACULA.

This movie was Siodmak's first after signing a long-term contract with Universal in 1943 (within a year, he would direct Chaney in Technicolor in COBRA WOMAN) and just a few months prior to his exquisite work with cinematographer Woody Bredell on PHANTOM LADY. With this mind, I like to watch SON OF DRACULA with an eye to its film noir elements: as we learn in the jailhouse scene, Kay is the femme fatale who has been deceiving Alucard in order to gain immortality; she confesses that she really has loved Frank all along, despite her whirlwind romance with and wedding to Alucard. Frank, the typical masochist noir protagonist who is ruined by guilt, teetering on the edge of insanity, and in jail for murder, is love-sick and isn't turned off at all by this revelation. Kay convinces Frank to destroy Alucard so that they can be together forever. Frank does away with Alucard, but then double-crosses Kay and destroys her as well, but not before he lovingly slips a wedding ring on her finger. What a sap. It's not hard for me to imagine Louise Allbritton's Kay as Yvonne De Carlo, Robert Paige as Burt Lancaster, and Lon Chaney, Jr. as Dan Duryea in some alternate-universe version of Siodmak's CRISS CROSS, or as Barbara Stanwyck, Wendell Corey, and Richard Rober in THE FILE ON THELMA JORDAN. SON OF DRACULA lacks the claustrophobic sexual tension and overdetermined Freudian mumbo-jumbo of Siodmak's later work, but I still think it's an interesting near-crossover of horror and noir sensibilities.

NEXT: "Behind the Frisco fog lurk treachery and death. See the exciting thrill of the underworld battling the CHINATOWN SQUAD on Shock over this channel. It's an action-filled feature film premiere that will keep you gripping your seat with excitement."