PR in the Philippines

(SeaPRwire) –   Back in 1936, Dracula’s Daughter was just another B-movie in Universal’s now iconic horror lineup, the same collection that spawned classics like The Mummy, Frankenstein, and of course, the original Dracula. Dracula’s Daughter has always been lesser-known, and it had a fraught production process: shifts in studio leadership, plus widespread hurdles across writing, casting, and filming tied to its female lead and queer themes, made production far from easy. Some things really never change.

What resulted from its tight, relatively brief 71-minute runtime is Countess Marya Zaleska, who still stands as one of cinema’s greatest tragic villains. Due to the subtext of her desires, the Production Code of the era not only required her to die by the end, but also demanded she be framed as some form of predatory monster. But thanks to Gloria Holden’s hypnotic gaze and graceful, nuanced performance, Marya Zaleska is treated with dignity, and even genuine sympathy. And because of that, cinema got its first ever queer vampire.

Many of the film’s writers, both credited and uncredited, were already deeply familiar with the horror genre, having written dozens of horror screenplays before, and would go on to pen many more projects after, working in both horror and darker women-focused films like Ladies in Retirement and Gaslight. When compared to the wildly popular western and gangster films of the time — which were overwhelmingly centered on male stories and perspectives — horror and melodrama often elevated women’s concerns, and even more impressively, introduced complex anti-heroines that were rarely seen on screen at that point.

So it comes as no surprise that we meet the Countess before we are introduced to the story’s comparatively dull hero, and that audiences become invested in her struggle and layered personality. Picking up where 1931’s Dracula left off, Marya first seeks to confirm her vampiric father is truly dead; this act also becomes the catalyst for her entire story’s tragedy. Unlike her father, Marya is deeply desperate to be good, and to live the kind of normal life that society accepts.

After Dracula’s body is turned to ash, she exults, “Free to live as a woman! Free to take my place in the bright world of the living, instead of in the shadows of the dead.” That resolve does not last, though: later that same night, she discovers her bloodthirst has not left her. She ventures out and encounters a handsome young man, before returning home to tell her manservant Sandor (a sinister, amoral turn from Irving Pichel) that there is blood on her cloak once again.

Villains often make or break a story, and the film’s so-called good guy Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger) never stands a chance to outshine the Countess. Garth is cold and withdrawn, fitting for a respected scientist of the era, but his harshness and lack of compassion read far more like a villain’s traits — a niche that became common for him later in his career. If he often feels like he belongs in an entirely different genre, that is mostly thanks to his secretary Janet (Marguerite Churchill), who comes off like a screwball comedy heroine teasing her absurdly uptight, straitlaced love interest. It is just a shame the film is forced to take him seriously, unlike the treatment of Cary Grant’s character in Bringing Up Baby, or more accurately, His Girl Friday.

But the Countess, still holding out hope for a normal life, believes Garth can cure her of her dark desires, and she follows his truly terrible advice: to confront her obsession head-on and use sheer willpower to fight and defeat temptation. Audiences then see that this temptation takes the form of a beautiful young woman with a bared neck and shoulders. The scene quickly becomes erotically charged, and the subsequent fade out makes clear that Marya Zaleska has given in to her urges.

She is truly desperate to be human, and consistently fails to achieve this partly due to an innate nature she cannot fight. The underlying implications are so clear it is a wonder the film slipped past censors, who banned any mention of lesbianism (among other topics deemed taboo at the time). Even as she moves toward the preordained tragic end we know the film has to give her, the Countess remains the driving force of the plot, with even the original film’s hero Professor Von Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) taking a backseat.

Zaleska remains so mesmerizing, in fact, that she is not killed by the supposedly upstanding men of society — she is killed by Sandor, who has lost all hope that his dark mistress will grant him immortality. And Garth, who rushed to the scene to try to save Janet, does not even get a closing kiss with her at the end of the film. It is Countess Marya Zaleska who gets the final focus, as the camera lingers on her beauty in the last frame, and she would go on to inspire countless vampire tales that came after.

Dracula’s Daughter is available to rent on Prime Video and other digital platforms.