The film

For Universal Studios, House of Dracula was the end of an era. Not only was it the last of their Dracula films, it also featured the final appearance of two of their other favourites, the Frankenstein Monster and The Wolf Man. Most crucially, it effective marked the end of what has become known as the studio's Classic Horror period. The times they were a-changin', and the end of the war in Europe found an audience no longer interested in the artificial horrors being offered up by Hollywood. What's more, monsters that once terrified were now too familiar to carry the same dramatic weight. Universal had one last trick up their sleeve: throw three of their favourite monsters into one picture - three times the monsters, three times the thrills, right? Oh, if only.

This was actually Universal's third stab at multiple monster stories after 1943's Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and 1944's House of Frankenstein (the poor Wolf Man came late to the monster cycle and so only got one film to himself). Certainly this "the more, the merrier" approach was reflected in the film's publicity: "The super-shock sensation of all time..." screamed the posters, "All together...All terrific...Bringing all NEW thrills!."At the time this three-for-the-price-of-one approach may well have seemed a viable move, but one thing time has taught us is this: if your movie features monsters from two or more different franchises that team up, fight each other or make collective trouble for a third party, then you have completely run out of ideas and are desperate. On top of that, the movie is likely to be bollocks. Freddie v. Jason? Bollocks. Alien vs. Predator? Do me a favour. Van Helsing? An absolute, complete bloody shambles. Every screen monster not only has its own specific identity, but also exists within its own universe and in some cases has its own sub-genre with its own set of rules. As soon as you put two or more movie monsters from different film series together then you are violating genre rules before you even start. At best it's a compromise, and at worst ridiculous. And saying it was based on a comic book or a computer game is not a viable excuse. This sort of teaming is best left to MTV's hilarious Celebrity Death Match, where at least the very point is to get a laugh.

House of Dracula actually has more going for it than the above mentioned, in part because this was relatively new territory then and there is a kind of innocence about the film that is almost charming. Almost. Elements of the plot have plenty of subtextual potential, too, but in the end this is simply not explored, mainly because of the film's determination to cram as many familiar elements in as possible, pausing only to allow characters to woodenly muse on their fate, their destiny, or man's place in the universe. Despite all this, the film does boast a couple of interesting twists on the generic norm, resulting in something of a genre rarity: a film that actually advances the vampire genre thematically, but is otherwise not all that good. And this is 42 years before Joel Schumacher did likewise with The Lost Boys.

It kicks off with an intriguing notion: Count Dracula turns up at the office of the renowned Dr. Edelman, explains who he is and informs the doctor that he is weary of life as a vampire and wishes to be cured of the condition. This would make House of Dracula the first film that proposed the idea of vampirism as a communicable, and possibly curable, disease, as opposed to the purely supernatural state suggested by Son of Dracula. All very interesting, but while Dracula is consulting the good doctor on his second appointment, who should turn up to see him but Lawrence Talbot, aka The Wolf Man, also looking for a cure. But he can't wait and runs off before the full moon turns him into a beast, and a short while later tries to kill himself by leaping off a cliff into the waters below. In an attempt to save him, Edelman is attacked by Talbot in Wolf Man mode in a cave at the cliff's base - he survives, and the two of them discover not just a whole crop of the mould the doctor needs to effect cures for both Talbot and Nina, Edelman's beautiful but hunch-backed assistant, but also - surely not - the seemingly lifeless body of Frankenstein's monster. I'm surprised they missed the opportunity to bring The Invisible Man in and run the old joke about the doctor not being able to see him. But let's be honest, we knew these three were going to be in the same film, the publicity told us so. That's not the issue - it's how the three come to be together that makes it so hard to swallow. The coincidence factor smacks of lazy or perhaps hurried writing, and it seems strange that both Dracula and Talbot have, at the very same moment, both chosen a doctor who does not believe in the supernatural to beg help from. Mind you, they have little trouble persuading him - Talbot is good enough to transform just after Edelman has explained away his notions of lycanthropy, and Dracula provides a blood sample unusual enough to convince him there must be something in this vampire stuff after all.

Even given these disparate elements, the plot bumps along in less than thrilling fashion, hampered by the over-familiarity or sometimes dopey behaviour of the characters. Dracula is so sedately polite, especially on recognising an old female acquaintance (it is never certain whether he has used the desire for a cure as a ruse to get near her, or has by chance found her when visiting Edelman for treatment - the opening scene does suggest the former), that when it does come time for him to be threatening it's something of a no sale, and Talbot's anguished victim-of-this-curse routine is pretty much all that character was doing by this stage. Frankenstein's monster gets precious little screen time, and when he is finally revived just does bumbles around, knocking people and things out of his way.

Of course, part of the problem of cramming three monsters into one tale is that in order for them to do their stuff there have to be secondary characters to aid, fall victim to and even destroy them, and presumably to avoid confusing the audience with multiple stories, most of these duties fall to the redoubtable Dr. Edelman. Struggling through some lumpy dialogue and a number of dull scientific explanations, he effectively fills the roles of skeptical scientist, faith-driven man of God, werewolf victim, vampire victim, hunted monster, Van Helsing-like vampire hunter and even Dr. Frankenstein himself, all in the extraordinarily short running time of 67 minutes. Not that he sticks at things for very long: having prepared the monster for revival and presumably rewired up all of the old equipment needed to effect this process (he's moved into Frankenstein's old castle, you see), he disregards the advice of his nurse and Talbot's doomy warnings and starts the electricity flowing, only to have nursey remind him that "Man's responsibility is to his fellow man," prompting him to respond with, "Perhaps you're right," and switch off the machine. His judgment must also be called into question sometimes - having identified Dracula's condition as a possibly unknown blood infection, he attempts to cure it by transfusing his own blood to the Count's body, and by an almost direct link, seemingly unaware or uninterested in the likelihood of cross-infection. When it inevitably happens, you can't help thinking he had it coming.

With so much very familiar plot to cover in such a brief running time, shortcuts are inevitably taken, but lead to some seriously clunky moments. Having just met Dracula in his guise of Baron Latos, Dr. Edelman is asked for his view on the immortality of the body and, quite unprompted by Latos, goes on something of a ramble about vampirism and his lack of belief in it, ending the outpouring with, "What has this discussion got to do with us?" Well it was you who brought the whole vampire thing up, mister. Elsewhere "what could happen if..." plot development is discussed in sometimes achingly po-faced fashion, such as when Nina and Miliza sit on a moonlit rock formation, gazing disconnectedly in opposite directions like extras in a low-rent Bergman movie, and deliver ponderous one-liners on the perils facing Dr. Edelman, a laborious recap for dimmer audience members.

Mind you, if the script and direction do this sort of thing no favours, then the performances hardly set the screen alight. John Carradine's stately Dracula and Chaney's noble but angst-ridden Lawrence Talbot are functional if lacking in spark, but as Edelman, Onslow Stevens is called to drift from calmly authoritative to wildly out-of-control and back, sometimes in the space of a few seconds. That he manages this well enough is a plus, but he is still given to moments of spectacular melodrama - "It's impossible to know what the future holds!" he proclaims at one point, and immediately buries his head despairingly in the fold of his arm. But it's the supporting cast that really put the boot in, with Martha O'Driscoll and Jane Adams both spectacularly wooden as Miliza and Nina respectively, given as they to staring off at a point in space and delivering lines in monotone, but with the sense that every word they utter is the stuff of meaningful prophecy. Lionel Atwill easily walks away with the acting honours in a nicely understated turn as Inspector Holtz, but to balance this out we have an eye-rollingly hammy turn from the excellently named Skelton Knaggs as trouble-stirring villager Steinmuhl, who delivers every one of his thankfully few lines as a whispered warning of biblical doom, and has dialogue like "Straaaaaange business if you ask me!" to chew the scenery with.

The character and plot compression process has a noticeable effect on the drama, with the chase to fight off and ultimately destroy Dracula dealt with in just a few brief, unexciting minutes. Though not climactic in any way, the film still attempts to play it as such, with Dracula dissolving in the sunlight, and the rescued Miliza, the spell broken, smiling happily at Talbot, for whom she has fallen. The scene can't help but remind genre fans of the later Hammer Dracula, whose thrilling climax and normality-restoration ending this scenes definitely anticipates, but at this point House of Dracula still has over twenty minutes to run. The remainder of the film plays with similar disregard for audience involvement, as Edelman falls under Dracula's spell, goes nuts, kills a local, is chased back to the castle by an angry mob (moving with an agility and energy that recalls the mob-hunted Knock from F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu), suddenly regains his composure, goes nuts again and for no real reason decides to complete his revival of the Frankenstein monster, who stumbles about briefly until the castle burns down and kills him, providing a familiar but thoroughly unsatisfying and ultimately pointless finale.

So is it all bad news? Well, no. Like all of Universal's vampire movies, House of Dracula does attempt to advance the genre, and in an interesting and forward-looking way. As previously mentioned, this is the first genre film to openly propose the idea of vampirism as a blood disease, and one that can be transferred from person to person through the exchange of bodily fluid, something that would be taken up by later genre works, but rarely as directly as this - we even get to see a microscope slide of the parasite that Edelman believes is responsible for Dracula's condition. Once the disease is caught, its development is rapid but uneven - Edelman appears to be able to fight it and at times control it, but at others is very much its slave. Most intriguingly, having established that the generic rule of vampires not casting reflections is in play here, Edelman is horrified to watch his own reflected form slowly vanish before his eyes. Once again, the film is anticipating a similar scene in The Lost Boys some years later.

Stylistically too, the film has its moments. The introduction of Nina behind a row of scientific apparatus appears to establish her as Edelman's beautiful assistant in familiar style - only when she emerges into full view is her hunched back revealed, which both drives Edelman's desire to find a cure for her and sets her up as a female Igor substitute for the Frankenstein bits. Dracula transforms on-screen into a bat and vice versa, as in the earlier Son of Dracula, but here the bat is rather good, having the size and grace of a large sea bird. The use of shadow as an expressionistic representation of Edelman's darker side once he is possessed is sometimes very impressive and even a little creepy when advancing on the terrified Nina, and Dracula's demise, though undramatic, is rather nicely done, as we briefly glimpse his muscle structure and blood vessels before he is reduced to skeletal form.

With its allegiance split between three monster franchises, though, vampire lore becomes entangled with that of other Universal horrors. Thus when Edelman becomes infected with the blood of Dracula he initially appears to be developing vampire characteristics, but when he makes his first kill he tears out the man's throat, a werewolf-like attack that prompts blame to fall squarely on Talbot's recently operated-on head (typical of the film's quantity-over-depth approach sees this resolved in little more than a minute). Later the possessed Edelman is killed with a couple of shots from a bog-standard revolver - no stake through the heart or sunlight for this vampire, and no silver bullet for his werewolf tendencies, suggesting that all Dracula's blood really did was to remove his reflection and drive him bonkers, taking the edge of the thematic invention of the film's vampirism by infection proposal.

In the end House of Dracula tries to cram too much surface detail into too short a running time, often doing precious little but briefly recycling too many overly familiar ideas and situations from earlier films. There are some nice moments nestling in here, but are largely lost in the scrabble to deal with three monsters instead of just one, sometimes clunkily and never in any real depth. It still has undeniable appeal for genre fans, though, despite some poor dialogue and wooden performances, and remains an interesting pointer to where the vampire movie sub-genre was later to head.

Sound and Vision

Extras

Included as part of Universal's Dracula: The Legacy Collection, House of Dracula, like most of the films included, is itself listed as a bonus feature. Otherwise there are no features specific to this film included in this box set, not even a trailer.

Summary

In retrospect this very much feels like what it is - the end of the line for Universal's classic monsters. Dracula is killed off unfussily, Talbot finally gets his cure (and the girl) and the poor Frankenstein monster is persecuted and killed just a couple of minutes after he is revived, and for no other crime than rampant clumsiness. Fans of Universal's vampire movies will still find a small place in their heart for the film, and as part of Universal's region 1 Dracula: The Legacy Collection it is an essential component. That the region 2 release includes only the first film and this one, and thus omits the three most interesting works of the series, makes it a no-brainer as to which one to go for. Get the region 1 release - as a package it offers excellent value for money, and for vampire movie fans it is a virtually complete catalogue of the vampire genre's development in the early days of Universal studios.