Dracula's Daughter

A vampire countess (Gloria Holden) believes a physician (Otto Kruger) may be able to cure her blood lust.

Dracula’s Daughter is an ill-conceived sequel to >Dracula that’s chock full of plot holes.

Supposedly picking up right where Dracula left off Van Helsing (still played by Edward Sloan, although his character is now credited as Von Helsing) finds himself under arrest for Dracula’s murder. The first hole pops up right here, as neither John Harker nor Jack Seward are mentioned, let alone present, as Harker was at the end of the original film.

The next large plot hole pops up shortly after. The original Dracula was set in turn-of-the-century England, yet this film features cars, radios and telephones, all indicative of a more modern setting. Apparently, it took Van Helsing 30 years to walk out of Carfax Abbey.

Plot holes aside, the film totally wastes Sloan, as he spends most of the film sitting around a police station. Instead, Dracula’s Daughter delivers a trite, predictable melodrama with lots of close-ups of Gloria Holden’s eyes.

Granted, the film does a descent job generating atmosphere, but the script’s just not up to it. Based on a suggestion by David O. Selznick and an excised chapter from Stoker’s Dracula, the screenplay had no less than six writers, and it shows. Dracula’s Daughter lacks focus and feels like patchwork of several scripts rather than a single vision. The resulting amalgam lacks just about everything that made the original so special.