It is almost inevitable that sequels will fail to live up to the originals that spawned them, and though this is also the case when dealing with most of the follow-ups to Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula, the first of them, Dracula's Daughter, is for dedicated genre fans actually a superior film on many fronts. Despite being the first sequel to the film that set the trend for vampire movies for years to come, Dracula's Daughter plays with the formula in a variety of interesting ways, and is a faster paced and altogether more involving work.

A phenomenally important film in the development of the vampire genre, Dracula has nevertheless not stood the test of time as well as it's contemporary, James Whale's Frankenstein. Crucially, Whale's own sequel to Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, is now regarded as not only superior to the original, but the very greatest Universal horror film of them all, and a cinematic classic in its own right. A box office smash at the time, its success in some ways led to the second wave of Universal horror films, many of which were to be sequels to earlier successes. Dracula's Daughter was originally set to be a fully fledged sequel to Dracula, with Lugosi reprising his role as the Count and Whale, who was on a roll after Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein, scheduled to direct. But following a very adverse reaction to the violence and gleeful sadism of the previous year's The Raven in the UK and the increasingly restrictive nature of the Production Code, Universal chose to reduce their horror output. Dracula's Daughter was the first casualty of this policy change – the budget was cut, Whale and Lugosi departed and what was originally planned as a major production became a B-movie, a supporting feature. All of which sounds like a recipe for a cheapjack knock-off, but a combination of inventive writing, smart direction and some workmanlike performances lift this film way above its supposed second-feature status and mark it as a vital work in vampire movie history.

The narrative follows on directly from Dracula, picking up exactly where that film left off, though the great expanse of the dungeons of Carfax Abbey in Whitby have been reduced to the size of a roomy cellar. No matter, Van Helsing has dispatched Dracula via a stake through the heart, and for those familiar with the first film there are two plus points: Van Helsing is again played by Edward Van Sloan, and this time the results of his endeavours are visually evidenced – no off-screen groans here, we can plainly see that Dracula is dead, and how he was killed. Enter two local bobbies and – hooray – one of them is a British actor (Universal regular E.E. Clive) with a reasonably genuine accent, as opposed to Charles K. Gerrard's Dick Van Dyke-like cockney asylum guard in Dracula. But then bobby number 2 opens his mouth and – groan – he's the dim-witted comedy relief (see also 1940's The Mummy's Hand for a further example of the distractingly unfunny comedy foil). Fortunately he's not in the film that much. More surprisingly, nor is Van Helsing – arrested for the murder of the Count, he is absent for much of the screen time and restricted simply to offering warnings and advice when he does appear. In this film, he is a mere supporting player.

It is only a short while later that the title character enters the story, as do ten minutes later the somewhat inevitable hero and his girl. Familiar characters though they may be, they are considerably more lively than their equivalents in Dracula, where would-be leading man David Manners was given almost nothing to do as the virtually useless Jonathan Harker. In Dracula's Daughter, Dr. Jeffrey Garth and his assistant and would-be girlfriend Janet Blake are pushed much more to the fore, and are briskly performed by Otto Kruger and Margueritte Churchill, their sometimes sparky banter echoing the wisecracking lead characters of romantic comedy-dramas of the period, which had reached something of a peak in 1934 with W.S. Van Dyke's wonderful The Thin Man. This approach was not unknown for horror films of the time, either, perhaps the best example being Glenda Farrell's smart-talking reporter in Michael Curtiz's 1933 Mystery of the Wax Museum.

Young mistress Dracula herself, or Countess Marya Zaleska as she chooses to be known, is played with cool austerity by Gloria Holden and given plenty of screen time, and rightly so. Her very introduction throws up some interesting questions regarding the whole vampire legend, as until very recently few genre films have even touched on the idea of vampires having offspring or families – they were always portrayed as lone figures who took on brides, usually against their will, in a relationship that is suggested to have more to do with blood and dominance than procreation. The idea that their undead loins could produce little vampires is in itself subject for an interesting text, but is not touched on here – Dracula had a daughter, and she's turned up to claim the body of her old, dead dad, and that's that. So the film scores a genre first with the introduction of a vampire offspring. But hold on a minute, we have another in the screen's first female vampire, at least the first independently minded one, as Dracula's brides were merely background characters under his control. When Marya takes a shine to Garth, we have a most interesting reversal of the Dracula tale, with the female vampire fixating on the male (potential) victim. A third feature that was to become something of a genre standard is Marya's moody, hulking manservant Sandor, not the laughing madman of Dwight Frye's Renfield, but a physically imposing and protective figure who accompanies Marya everywhere and removes any obstacles in her way, as well as procuring potential victims and cheerlessly reminding her just who she is when she is at her most optimistic. This was a character that was to re-occur in many later vampire tales, including Hammer's 1966 Dracula, Prince of Darkness and Robert Bob Kelljan's 1970 Count Yorga, Vampire, as well as being sent up nicely in Roman Polanski's 1967 Dance of the Vampires.

Marya differs from her father in that she is desperate to escape her fate as a vampire and become human, something she believes she can do by burning Dracula's body and purifying it with salt. Just to make sure he's sorted, she finishes the deal off with a crucifix, a familiar slice of vampire iconography, but genre enthusiasts will raise their eyebrows at this scene for two reasons. First up, Dracula and the films that followed established that the crucifix does not just prompt vampires to turn away in fear, but will actually cause physical harm if brought into contact with vampire flesh, and Marya is able to safely wield this one bare-handed simply by averting her eyes. Secondly, the cross is not the cast metal crucifix that prompted Dracula to dive under his cape in the earlier film, but a home-made one constructed from wood and twine. Aficionados will know that it was Hammer's 1958 version of Dracula that introduced the idea that improvised crucifixes could be as deadly as the real deal, yet here we are in 1936 and the lore is already being messed with in similar fashion. Except that when you put these two elements together you get an interesting generic dilemma – either the vampire is able to hold this cross because home-made (and thus unsanctified) crucifixes are ineffective against them, or Marya is not a real vampire, just someone who believes she is. Both explanations work for the narrative. Marya uses the cross as the final tool to free her of her father's curse, yet she is not free of it – is this because she used an ersatz tool instead of one that would have finished the job? Alternatively, if she is not a real vampire after all, then Dr. Garth's attempt to psychoanalyse her in order to understand and perhaps cure her condition makes perfect sense. This subtextual suggestion that Marya may just believe she is a vampire and that the condition can be cured through psychiatric means rather than via a stake through the heart prefigures George Romero's Martin – which explored similarly territory more directly – by forty years. And if she is a vampire, then she is the first film character in the genre to make her own crucifix, and one of the very few vampires to use it against her own kind.

But the most startling new element, given that the film was made during the censorious days of the Hays Code, is the twist given on the sexual subtext that is so central to the whole vampire genre. It's not that we have a female vampire seducing a male victim – though that alone would have been unusual for its day – but a female vampire seducing a female victim. And if the homo-erotic overtones of Orlock's attacks on Hutter in Nosferatu and the bedroom vistitations in Dracula are indistinct enough to be open to both interpretation and counter-attack, the seduction here is considerably more blatant – homeless Lili is invited to Marya's studio on the pretext of being paid to pose for a portrait that requires the removal of clothing, and once Lili has complied, Marya gazes at her with a look of hungry longing that leaves very little to the imagination. When she advances on her and the camera tilts rapidly upwards to the sound of the girl's screams, it's difficult to believe that all she had in mind was a quick nibble on the neck.

The lesbian vampire, of course, has its routes in Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla, which was written in 1872, twenty-five years before Stoker completed Dracula. But in 1936, even the suggestion that a screen character might be anything but wholesomely heterosexual was seemingly unthinkable, and the fact that this scene seems to have gone unmolested, so to speak, seems in retrospect extraordinary. It was to be another thirty-four years before Hammer were to really give the lesbian vampire story a serious (-ish) go with The Vampire Lovers (1970).

Dracula's Daughter lacks Lugosi's presence, makes surprisingly little use of Van Sloan, and does not have Dracula's primal battle of good against evil, but elsewhere this sprightly sequel scores some serious points off its predecessor. Niftily shot and edited, including an almost manic montage sequence towards the end, and with generally robust performances, the dialogue is at the very least serviceable and often much better than that, boasting several memorable moments: "Possibly there are more things in heaven and earth than are thought of in your psychiatry," Marya tells Garth at a dinner party when he dismisses vampires as superstition, and when Police Commissioner Sir Basil Humphrey, all of a fluster for having been dragged from cataloguing his stamp collection, informs his manservant that he needs his gun because his is to go out hunting for vampires, the man's dry response is that suggest that one usually goes after them with cheque books. Marya also gets to repeat one of Dracula's most famous lines – "I never drink...wine" – with almost disarming off-handedness, and the audience is reminded of a key piece of genre iconography when Garth, irritated at Janet for crookedly fixing his bow tie, claims that Marya's abode is "the first woman's flat I've been in that didn't have at least twenty mirrors in it."

The final ten minutes may be familiar in plot terms – the chase to rescue the kidnapped girl – but screenwriter Garret Fort and director Lambert Hillyer add a thematic freshness by making the whole scene not about confrontation or the triumph of good over evil, but about love and sacrifice. Jeffrey flies to Transylvania and risks his own life in an attempt to rescue Janet, whom Marya, aware that she can never be freed from the curse of her father, has kidnapped her in order to persuade Jeffrey to spend eternity with her, something Jeffrey is willing to do if it will spare Janet's life. Sandor meanwhile, who has presumably for some years dreamed of such a fate for himself, would rather kill the woman he loves than let her be joined to another. That he uses an arrow to pierce her heart and kill her is both a new twist on the concept of the vampire-killing stake and a dark inversion of the image of Cupid and his bow. It is to the writer and director's credit that that Marya remains a sympathetic figure up to the end, and a testament to Gloria Holden's performance and austere beauty that the prospect of spending eternity with her most definitely has its up side.

The film does show its age in some ways – there are a fair number of dust spots and some (generally minor) flickering, plus the occasional scene in which faint frame jitter is evident. Minor damage to the print is evident throughout, but only on close inspection – a rather good job has been done of cleaning this up. Otherwise contrast is first rate and sharpness is often impressive. Daylight exterior scenes – and there are some – in particular look very good. Grain is detectable, but not a problem at all.

The mono soundtrack is on the whole very clean, with little in the way of hiss and no disarming pops or crackles. Obviously it lacks the fidelity and range of modern films, but for its age is fine.

As part of Universal's Dracula: The Legacy Collection release, the menus actually suggest that this very film is an extra feature in itself, but I regard this as a five film collection, of which this is a key one. As such, there is only one extra feature specific to this film.

The Theatrical Trailer is presented 4:3 with mono sound, and though in far from perfect shape (I'm surprised it even exists at all after all this time) it is still very watchable, though the sort of black blobs that would interest Bill Morrison tend to dominate towards the end. It does give an interesting insight into how the film was marketed at the time – opening with terrified peasants exclaiming: "The castle!" and "Dracula! He's come back!" it most definitely sets itself up as a direct sequel, if a little misleadingly, as Dracula has most definitely not come back. The battle between Garth and Marya is also shown as a straight good vs. evil battle. The caption that claims that the film is "More exciting than 'Dracula'" is actually on the nose, though.

This first sequel to Dracula is a fascinating and important genre work, shaking off the good vs. evil battle between vampire and hunter in order to suggest a more complex reading of the vampire tale, where eternal life is a curse that might just be tolerable if spent with someone you love. It tinkers with the then still-new vampire legend in fascinating ways, and offers up a number of interesting subtextual readings for genre fans. Perhaps most importantly, it succeeds as entertainment, boasting interesting characters and a pace and running time that simply does not allow a sympathetic audience to lose interest for a second.

Like George Melford's Spanish language Drácula, this film is not included on the recent UK region 2 release, and is another compelling reason to go for the region 1 box set. Highly recommended.