Dracula's Daughter
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This is the first sequel to Dracula. It came out in 1936, and it's possible I saw it on TV sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, but if so, I didn't remember anything about it. I watched it on DVD in October 2024.

It starts where the first movie ends. Professor Van Helsing has just killed Dracula, and he gets arrested by a couple of police. He's brought before Sir Basil Humphrey at Scotland Yard, who doesn't believe a word of his story about vampires. But Van Helsing calls his former student, a psychiatrist named Dr. Jeffrey Garth, to defend him. Meanwhile, Dracula's body is stolen by a woman named Countess Marya Zaleska. (It's pretty obvious based on the movie's title that she's Dracula's daughter, but that fact isn't made explicit until much later in the movie.) She later meets Dr. Garth at a social gathering, and wants him to help her overcome her urges, though she refuses to tell him what those urges are. But of course what she wants is to stop killing people and drinking their blood. She believes her father is controlling her from beyond the grave, but personally I don't buy that. She couldn't fight her urges not because of him, but simply because she herself is a vampire. That's what I think.

Anyway, I should mention a couple other characters. Zaleska has a servant named Sandor, who wants her to turn him into a vampire. And Garth has an assistant named Janet Blake, who is prone to playfully irritating her boss. Eventually Garth realizes Zaleska is a vampire, and... I'm not sure what he intends to do. Have her arrested for murder, I guess. But she flees back to Transylvania, having kidnapped Janet to get Garth to follow her there. If he can't "cure" her, then she wants to make him a vampire like herself. I don't understand why she didn't just hypnotize him, as she had done to others, but whatever.

I don't want to spoil how it ends, I'll just say Sandor is a terrible shot with a bow and arrows. Anyway, for much of the movie, I felt it was kind of "meh", but eventually I started liking it a bit more. Writing this review the day after I watched it, I already don't remember why my opinion of it improved. I think there was some sort of mindset that occurred to me to view it through, but I've forgotten what that was. In any event, I never got to think it was a very good movie, but it was okay. I guess.