Blood of Dracula: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 44

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
BLOOD OF DRACULA (1957)
After a decent writing session I kicked back and watched the glorious 1957 "Girls Gone Vampiric" movie Blood of Dracula AKA Blood of the Demon AKA Blood is My Heritage.

Mind you, this is not a Dracula movie and it probably would have done better had it gone out under a name similar to the earlier works of the same crew, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and I Was a Teenage Werewolf. But who cares? Halfway through this movie, when a Fabian-like "bad" boy interrupts a girls'-school pajama party to croon a mildly rock & roll number ("Puppy Love," but not the one you know) I turned to my wife and said, "this is officially the best 1950s girls' school vampire movie ever."

The plot? Teen Nancy is a girl with some behavioral issues and a nasty dislike for her new step-mom, so in true 1950s movie fashion, Nancy's Dad ships her off to the Sherwood School for girls, led by the well-meaning and long-suffering Mrs. Thorndyke.

No sooner does Nancy arrive at Sherwood but she is harassed and then recruited by the girl gang called "The Birds of Paradise," who are monstrous, monstrous girls engaged in such well-known gang activities as flirting, having sleepovers and going on scavenger hunts. Also, the gang leadership demands they clean up after themselves and is a respected teacher's assistant. Somewhere these rebels have missed the concept, but luckily Nancy is a genuine rebel with genuinely anti-social tendencies, so naturally Nancy is soon under the close study of Mrs. Branding, a psychiatrist who has some kind of theory about unleashing our inner demons, or something. Did I mention that Nancy becomes a vampire?

This movie is fantastic. Yes, it's full of leaden performances, a plot that makes no sense, and stupendously stupid dialogue. But I couldn't take my eyes off of it-- it's easy to make fun of movies like this, but it's impossible to make them boring.

Lost Sequel to Universal Dracula REVEALED: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 46

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
The Lost Sequel to Universal's Dracula


In a glass case on a shelf nearby sits a document I don't own but hold for the Polidori Society-- the document was procured by a member of the Society at auction.

The booklet is unassuming-- 9 typewritten pages with slightly thicker reddish pages forming a cover, the whole booklet staple-bound by hand. It was written in 1939.


It is a treatment for a sequel to Universal's 1931 Dracula-- a sequel never to be made. That's a picture of it to the left.

The treatment, titled "A Sequel to Dracula," is by none other than Manly P. Hall, famed lecturer on the occult, the kind of detail that sounds made up, but isn't. Even better: apparently Hall was a pal of Bela Lugosi, and the pair sat down together to pitch a sequel to Dracula that would actually, you know, have Dracula in it. (Dracula had died at the end of the 1931, Lugosi Dracula, so the next Universal sequel starred Gloria Holden was the 1936 Dracula's Daughter.) If Hall was typing these pages-- and it's odd to see the old-fashioned key marks-- in '39, he would have been hoping for a 1940 or 1941 Dracula sequel.

Just think of it: Lugosi, not the drug-addled, doddering Lugosi of the 50's, but the lithe, talented Lugosi whose most powerful performance-- Igor in Son of Frankenstein -- had been completed just the year before and released in January of 1939. Next to him Manly Hall, who ten years before had released a book called The Secret Teachings of All Ages, sitting down to pound out a movie that would get Lugosi back in the cape. Not inconceivable-- the monster mash-up Frankenstein Meets the Wolf-Man wouldn't come until 1943, signaling the beginning of the end of the Universal monster era.

Again, this treatment was never produced. I'm not even aware that Hall's agent got the treatment to Universal, and we can't ask him, because Manly Hall died in 1990.

But the story rocks. It's not much more expensive on the page than the 1931 film, but it feels more grand: instead of the drawing rooms and the castle in the first film, Hall's story moves between an ornate mansion in Buenos Aires and Dracula's massive Yacht, the Nemesis III. In brief, the story tells how Dracula outsmarted Van Helsing and survived the attack at the end of the first movie, then bided his time till age ended Van Helsing's life-- and now he has come for Mina, now in her 70s, who has crossed oceans to escape him. He offers her new life, but ends up locked in vampiric combat with a vampirized Mina for the love of a younger victim.

In Argentina, no less. Boy, what I wouldn't give to see a computer-generated Lugosi do this movie...

COOL, no?

Blood of Dracula

This weekend I came a few thousand words closer to completing a rough draft of Alex Van Helsing #1, so after a decent writing session I kicked back and watched the glorious 1957 "Girls Gone Vampiric" movie Blood of Dracula AKA Blood of the Demon AKA Blood is My Heritage.

Mind you, this is not a Dracula movie and it probably would have done better had it gone out under a name similar to the earlier works of the same crew, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and I Was a Teenage Werewolf. But who cares? Halfway through this movie, when a Fabian-like "bad" boy interrupts a girls'-school pajama party to croon a mildly rock & roll number ("Puppy Love," but not the one you know) I turned to my wife and said, "this is officially the best 1950s girls' school vampire movie ever."

The plot? Teen Nancy is a girl with some behavioral issues and a nasty dislike for her new step-mom, so in true 1950s movie fashion, Nancy's Dad ships her off to the Sherwood School for girls, led by the well-meaning and long-suffering Mrs. Thorndyke.

No sooner does Nancy arrive at Sherwood but she is harassed and then recruited by the girl gang called "The Birds of Paradise," who are monstrous, monstrous girls engaged in such well-known gang activities as flirting, having sleepovers and going on scavenger hunts. Also, the gang leadership demands they clean up after themselves and is a respected teacher's assistant. Somewhere these rebels have missed the concept, but luckily Nancy is a genuine rebel with genuinely anti-social tendencies, so naturally Nancy is soon under the close study of Mrs. Branding, a psychiatrist who has some kind of theory about unleashing our inner demons, or something. Did I mention that Nancy becomes a vampire?

This movie is fantastic. Yes, it's full of leaden performances, a plot that makes no sense, and stupendously stupid dialogue. But I couldn't take my eyes off of it-- it's easy to make fun of movies like this, but it's impossible to make them boring.

(Note-- the images in this entry are all from that amazing source for teenage horror movie information, the American International Pictures TEENAGE HORROR FACTORY. DO check it out.)