HOUSE OF DRACULA (1945)

The closing months of 1945 brought joyous relief to millions across the world with the end of World War Two. For fans of Universal horror movies, there was a less welcome silencing of their great guns of monsterdom with the final woeful attempt at serious franchise-milking with House of Dracula. Directed like the previous multi-pack creature feature House of Frankenstein by Erle C. Kenton, it was scripted by Edmund T. Lowe who had written Lon Chaney’s original The Hunchback of Notre Dame back in 1923. Here he would supply dialogue for the son now too as Lon Chaney (Jr) returned along with John Carradine and Lionel Atwill. This would be the only continuation of the lineage with any merit since House of Dracula plays out like a sad contractual obligation for all concerned.

Similar to its predecessor, Dracula is a game of two separate halves whereby the Prince of Darkness flaps and hypnotises for the first thirty minutes and is then eradicated, leaving the Wolf Man hamstrung with little to do and Frankenstein’s Monster merely getting in a couple of minutes of screen time before bringing the house down. The greater problem is the continual sabotaging of any promising ideas.

Lowe does try to make this last entry justify itself in the mythology by creating an over-riding concept of the search for a cure, not just for Chaney’s Lawrence Talbot but also for Carradine’s Dracula – a mystifying addition as he was vaporised in the sunlight half way through the last film. Carradine is presented so lamely here in fact that only the pay-check must have compensated for the campery he is forced to endure.

He introduces himself as a bat-on-a-string that morphs by animation into the Count right into the drawing room of Onslow Stevens’ Dr Edelmann in Vesaria. Their meeting immediately sets the bar for performance and direction as head-thuddingly low; Stevens waking from his nap with only the mildest surprise at this suave stranger appearing in his house. (This also begs the question – isn’t a vampire forbidden to enter a home unless invited?). Edelmann’s drowsy scientific curiosity still hasn’t woken up fully even when Dracula asks to go down to his basement to reveal that the coffin down there is his, thus revealing his identity. He does his best to engage the doctor with the exhortation to free him of his vampiric curse, yet it will be much later in the plot before Edelmann/Stevens is fully engaged or even present.

Another minor novelty in the film is equipping the doctor with a female hunchbacked assistant, Nina, played by ex-model Jane Adams who went on to appear in the Rondo Hatton vehicle The Brute Man (1946) as well as being Vicky Vale in 1949’s Batman and Robin. Although she avoids the mental enfeeblement cliché like J Carrol Naish’s Daniel in House of Frankenstein, Kenton handicaps her with a house-style of emoting her emotional peaks melodramatically with a far-away resolute look as if auditioning for Scarlett O’Hara. Most of the cast are directed to do the same which doesn’t help claw back any credibility.

Someone who needs no instruction to mine the searing depths of torment is Chaney, Universal’s Man of Constant Sorrow. The full moon waits for no Wolf Man as he vainly tries to impress upon the lovely Nurse Miliza (Martha O’Driscoll) that he in dire need of Edelmann’s treatment himself. “There isn’t time!” he whimpers at being told to wait, fearing the impending face fur.

The other type of fuzz arrives in the shape of Lionel Atwill whose tragic post-court scandal life (see my Atwill entry) had less than a year remaining. He has a little more to do than in the last sequel, as authoritative Inspector Holtz; it’s hard though to make the villagers feel the force in a uniform, cap and jodhpurs better suited to directing traffic. He at least has got Talbot in human form pre-emptively jailed for everyone’s benefit. Edelmann turns up in time for Talbot to become the Wolf Man behind bars. It’s the first of two chances to again see Jack Pierce’s excellent layered prosthetics in close-up dissolve shots – however Kenton scuppers any impact by cutting away twice mid-transformation to low-intensity reaction shots from the cast.

After a failed suicide bid to leave the movie by taking a header into the raging sea, Talbot is found in a sea cave by Edelmann and here we are asked to swallow two ludicrous contrivances in one. Not only does the tunnel network grow the Clavaria Formosa spores that Edelmann believes can reshape Talbot’s cranium instead of using surgery – okay, that’s kind of plausible - it also somehow contains the washed-up body of Frankenstein’s Monster and the skeleton of Dr Niemann who we last saw drowning inland in quicksand! Ironically, Boris Karloff pulled off the greatest escape act of all by refusing to come back from the dead for any more of this nonsense. Doctor and patient are even luckier in discovering a secret passage to Frankenstein’s perfectly-preserved laboratory.

Before Edelmann can get to work on Glenn Strange’s luckless hulk, he experiments with a blood transfusion between he and Dracula that has him instead falling victim to the influence of the double-crossing vampire’s own blood. On the one hand it certainly jacks up Stevens’ energy level, but it sends him to the other extreme of Expressionist pantomime ham, accentuated facially with angular mood lighting and baggy-eyed make-up. In a lucid Jekyll moment, he manages to save Miliza from having Dracula put the bite on her by exposing his slumbering body to the sun’s rays: “The evil I brought here – will never live again”.

Don’t speak too soon. His good deed for the day done. Edelmann commits fully to the Monster rejuvenation that he envisions in a fever-dream montage sequence. Meanwhile, there is one nicely-staged scene that matters in the chronology of Universal horror – that of Edelmann’s one success story Talbot facing the rising sun without becoming the Wolf Man at last. It is a touching moment to see him healed after five years, albeit bittersweet that it will not last (which audiences wouldn’t know till 1948).

This just leaves a rushed climax. The obligatory villagers march on the castle incited by the emerging pock-marked pixie of horror character actors Skelton Knaggs; Edelmann strangles Nina, fries Inspector Holtz clumsily on a circuit bank and electrically boosts Glenn Strange into a brief grimacing strut toward Talbot. Newly-humanised Chaney is given the refreshing chance to be a hero for once by shooting Edelmann and taking Miliza to safety just as the Monster goes down in flames yet again. He wasn’t to know that the saga for his wolfish alter ego was not so easily sealed off.

Ultimately the only successful cure for the degenerative disease of low quality that ravaged this body of work was to inject the terminal franchise with a fast-acting comedy serum beginning three years later with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). Leaving aside the unexplained resurgence of Talbot’s lycanthropy - another plot gap blithely skipped over - the extended lease of life did bring in a whole new (and controversially much younger) audience to the Universal Monster Hall of Fame.