Dracula brought Universal back from the dead.

In 1931, Carl Laemmle Junior made a bet on the sickness and depravity of the American cinema-going public and made out like a goddamned bandit, turning his father’s ailing, indebted studio into a money-making powerhouse (for a while) and cementing Universal’s reputation as the natural home of American horror cinema.

It is a truth Universally (heh) acknowledged that a studio in possession of a hit must be in want of a franchise and Dracula’s Daughter debuted in 1936, five years after the original.

Likewise, plans for a sequel to James Whale’s classic Frankenstein were being laid even before the movie was released. After the rapturous response of early test screenings, the ending was re-shot to allow for the monster’s survival. Whale was tempted back to direct and proceeded to give as few fucks as an openly gay man in 1930s Hollywood might be expected to give; bupkiss, and by all accounts just decided to have fun with it. He had fun with it, and the result is widely regarded as even better than the original, one of the greatest films of Hollywood’s Golden Age and altogether quite good.

Dracula’s Daughter, by contrast, is primarily known (where it is known at all) as an obscure curio mostly of interest for its queer subtext.

Well, I am also an obscure curio mostly of interest for my queer subtext and I’m going to spoil something right now: this particularl bout of Bats versus Bolts might be a lot more closely fought than you’d expect.

The Adaptations

The Bride of Frankenstein begins with Mary Shelly, her husband Percy and His Situationship Lord George Byron in a gothic mansion in the middle of a storm. Byron compliments Mary on the wonderful story she came up with the last time they were together.

Mary reveals that she didn’t tell them the whole story and proceeds to fill them in on what happened next:

The Monster survived the fire at Frankenstein’s lab and wanders off into the woods. Meanwhile, Henry Frankenstein’s body is brought to the castle of his cousin/fiancée Elizabeth and it’s discovered that he’s still alive (ALIVE!). Henry promises to Elizabeth that he’s put all this “tampering in God’s domain” business behind him but is approached by his old mentor Doctor Pretorius, who is serving glorious super-villain energy.

Pretorius takes Frankenstein to his lab where he’s made a race of tiny homunculi. But tiny people can’t be used to take over the world, you see, so Pretorius wants Henry’s help to make BIG tiny people. Frankenstein hasn’t done anything crazy for like three hours and is visibly jonesing but he turns Pretorius down.

Meanwhile the monster has made friends with an old blind man in the forest and is actually enjoying a brief moment of happiness and freedom from fear and we can’t have that. Two hunters arrive and drive him away and the monster has to flee a mob by hiding in the catacombs under the cemetery where he happens to bump into Pretorius who’s doing a bit of grave robbing.

Pretorius plies the monster with alcohol and uses him to kidnap Elizabeth and force Henry to work on creating a second monster, the titular Bride of Frankenstein.

But, when the Bride sees the monster she recoils in terror and, realising that the dating scene really is that awful, the monster decides “we belong dead” and destroys the lab with him, the bride and Pretorius in it while letting Henry go free with Elizabeth which, to be frank, is letting him off pretty lightly.

MEANWHILE:

In Whitby, Abraham VON Helsing (no, I don’t know why they changed the name and no one else does neither) is arrested when he is found near the murdered body of Renfield and having just stuck a wooden stake into the heart of a nicely dressed man in a coffin. Von Helsing is charged with both murders.

However, the officer charged with guarding both corpses is hypnotised by a mysterious woman in black who shows up at the police station.

This woman takes Dracula’s body, ritually burning it while holding a crucifix over it to exorcise his evil spirit. She talks to her servant Sandor and expresses a hope that she will at last be free of her need to drink human blood now that Dracula is dead but alas, she soon feels the urge to kill again.

Meanwhile, psychiatrist Doctor Jeffrey Garth is summoned from a hunting trip to give testimony on behalf of his mentor Abraham Von Helsing. Garth is initially very skeptical about Von Helsing’s claims about vampires but starts to suspect he may be onto something when he meets the mysterious Countess Marya Zaleska at a society do. As she talkes to him, Marya begins to hope that Garth could use therapy to break her need to drink blood but, after she feeds on a young woman in a scene with more fraught lesbian subtext than…well, a vampire movie, she decides to take drastic action and kidnaps Garth’s assistant Janet and brings her to Transylvania to force him to stay with her. However, Sandor, who’s grown impatient waiting for Marya to grant him eternal life, shoots her with a crossbow and is himself shot when the police arrive to rescue Garth and Janet.

Dracula’s Daughter claims to be an adaptation of Dracula’s Guest and that is why it is going to hell for lying. It is, if it is indeed based on anything in particular, a loose adaptation of Carmilla, another absolutely seminal vampire story written by an Irishman.

It’s also…an absolutely fantastic film and I love it. This one is up in the top echelons of Universal Horror for me and I can’t believe it’s not better known. Is it scary? No. But it is beautiful and funny and deeply sad. It’s also waaay the hell ahead of its time in its treatment of vampirism as a metaphor for addiction. And that’s not even getting into the queer subtext which I can only assume made it to screen because the Hayes Office couldn’t bring themselves to believe that lesbians actually existed.

It’s a very weird film, with lots of different elements thrown together seemingly haphazardly. It goes from horror to gothic melodrama to (seriously) screwball romantic comedy at the drop of a hat. But that refusal to play by the rules is also what it makes it so surprising and rich as a text. Something, now that I think of it, that it shares with Bride of Frankenstein.

The Bride of Frankenstein, weirdly, manages to actually be a more faithful adaptation of Shelly’s novel than the first film. But it also adds a whole heap of camp humour and it shouldn’t work but it really does. The movie is laugh out loud funny at times (pretty much anytime Pretorius is onscreen). But it also does the best job of any Frankenstein movie I’ve ever seen of balancing pity and compassion for the monster while also showing that, yes, he is genuinely dangerous and even (by the end) evil.

He’s not Elordi’s perfect little angel boy, nor Christopher Lee’s mindless killing machine.

He’s a man who was mistreated from birth and became selfish and cruel and violent because of it like millions before him and millions after.

As a monster he is truly, terribly human.

And for that reason, I have to give it to Bolts.

WINNER: BOLTS

The Monsters

So which monsters are we actually comparing? Because, despite her name being on the poster and being one of the most iconic figures in all of horror cinema, The Bride of Frankenstein is not actually about the bride of Frankenstein. She has less than five minutes of screen time and zero dialogue. The movie, even more than its predecessor, is a character study of Karloff’s monster and he is, once again, giving a performance for the ages.

But I feel that would be unfair to Team Bats to have to go two rounds with Karloff so let’s compare The Bride and Countess Marya.

Elsa Lancaster (who also plays Shelly in the opening scene) gives an all-timer One Scene Wonder performance as the bride, helped of course by the iconic makeup design and Whale’s flawless direction. Lancaster based the famous hiss off the swans in Regent’s Park and it works perfectly for the Bride who, like a swan, is beautiful, inhuman and hates you with every fibre of her being.

But, while the Bride is justifiably an icon; Gloria Holden’s Marya is an actual character and an incredibly compelling one. Holden famously did not want the role, having seen what typecasting did to Lugosi’s career and it’s been suggested that her disdain for the part is what makes Marya’s self-loathing so believable. She is, in her way, even more sympathetic than Karloff’s monster. While he merely wants to be left in peace she actively tries to be good but is forced to be a monster by a terrible compulsion. There’s a wonderful moment where she shows up at Doctor Garth’s clinic and asks to see him and Garth’s assistant Janet (who has the hots for him and is jealous of Marya) lies and says he’s gone out, only for Garth’s voice to be loudly heard from the next room. And Marya stares at Janet with hurt bemusement and whispers:

And that’s it. It’s that wonderful mixture of supernatural evil and pure innocence that makes her such an indelible creation.

WINNER: BATS

The Scientists

You know what? Much as Colin Clive’s Henry Frankenstein is considered the archetypal mad scientist, more of that trope’s DNA probably originated from Ernest Thesiger’s Doctor Pretorius.

Mad, wild-eyed, wilder-haired and gleefully, gloriously evil, he is a riot from start to finish.

Dracula’s Daughter‘s only real argument for being a sequel to the original is the returning presence of Edward Van Sloane as Abraham Von Helsing as the calm, rational scientist fighting the occult, a role he probably could have played in his sleep by that point. I do really love his take, this calm, quiet, avuncular figure patiently waiting for everyone to catch up to the truth that there are vampires in this vampire movie.

But this one’s not close.

WINNER: BOLTS

The Dashing Young Men

With Pretorius taking the role of mad scientist it falls to the slightly less mad Henry Frankenstein to run around trying to save his lady love from the consequence of his own actions. Colin Clive is back and still excellent although Whales’ has clearly decided that the main focus is now on Pretorius and the Karloff’s now-verbal monster.

But good as Colin Clive is I am actually to give this one to Otto Krueger’s Doctor Jeffrey Garth.

When compared to David Manners’ milquetoast Johnathan Harker in the original Dracula, Krueger is just on another level. For starters, he feels like a real character. He’s pompous and ascerbic and irritable but he’s also brilliant and courageous. You absolutely believe this guy as Von Helsing’s hand-picked protege. He’s a rare hero in a Universal horror who not only isn’t completely overshadowed by the monster but actively makes the film better with his presence.

WINNER: BATS

The Perpetually Imperilled Ladies

Speaking of vast improvements on the original, oh my God but did we trade up with Marguerite Churchill as Janet Blake.

She’s Doctor Garth’s aristocratic secretary who’s secretly in love with him and has decided to deal with that by mercilessly trolling him at every opportunity until he notices her. And it’s great! It’s really funny and charming and when she gets kidnapped by Maryam it works because she’s not just a screaming prop, she’s a character that we and Garth have come to really care about.

For leading lady Team Bolts has Valerie Hobson playing the often thankless role of Elizabeth Frankenstein, replacing Mae Clarke from the first film.

It’s kind of a nothing part (hell, this movie doesn’t really care about Henry, you think Elizabeth’s going to get a look in?) but she does well with what she’s given. There’s a great scene where Henry’s been brought back to the castle after almost dying but gets that glint in his eyes and starts muttering about creating more monsters. So Elizabeth starts screaming about how she can see the spirit of death moving towards Henry and he has to become all rational and calm her down, which is certainly one way to manage his bullshit.

In fact, you know what? That’s a solid relationship right there. Find someone who not only matches your crazy but calls your bluff and goes all in.

WINNER: BATS

Do ladies love playing vampires?

No. No they do not. Gloria Holden is not enjoying this role. She is not vamping it up or hissing or having a good time.

She is deconstructing the entire paradigm over here.

Are either of these movies actually, y’know, scary?

No, but Bride of Frankenstein has an undeniable eeriness, particularly in its final scene.

The only thing scary about Dracula’s Daughter is that Marya’s servant Sandor is clearly played by Benecio Del Toro.

So Bencio Del Toro is apparently a vampire. Which is terrifying because apparently vampires are real and everything I thought I knew about the world is a beautiful lie told to children to protect us form the horrors that lurk in the shadows waiting to feast upon on us until we join them in damned, eternal unlife.

But the movie’s not really scary, no.

WINNER: BOLTS

Best Dialogue:

Bride of Frankenstein is absolutely chock full of famous lines; “We belong dead”, “She’s alive! Alive!” but I’m going to give it to Pretorius’ famous toast:

“To a new world of gods and monsters!”

Dracula’s Daughter has this little exchange between Von Helsing and the police:

Hawkins: [comes out of Dracula’s castle] Some man is in there with a stake through his heart. You know anything about this?

Prof. Von Helsing: Yes, I did it.

Hawkins: Who is he in there?

Prof. Von Helsing: His name’s Count Dracula.

Hawkins: How long has he been dead?

Prof. Von Helsing: About 500 years.

WINNER: BOLTS

FINAL SCORE: Bats 3, Bolts 4

NEXT UPDATE: November 12th 2026

NEXT TIME: What superhero fatigue?