Vampires Read Free

Frye – Dracula’s Renfield – is mis-identified as the killer in this cash in on Atwill and Wray’s success, The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1932). The director, Frank Strayer, continued with Invincible picture’s Condemned To Live (1935). Ralph Morgan, brother of the Wizard of Oz, Frank, begins terrorizing a small European village when he turns into a vampire on the nights of the full moon. This film stands head and shoulders above most poverty row movies primarily for the performance of Morgan as the cursed scientist who is unaware of his malady. Gloria Holden cut a very memorable figure as the Countess Marya Zaleska, half-heartedly seeking a cure for her ills while attempting to indulge in lesbian shenanigans with young models in her art studio in the great Dracula’s Daughter (1936). Warner Brothers The Return of Dr X (1939), is a real anomaly. Humphrey Bogart starred as Marshall Quesne, a reanimated corpse. Despite the title, this is not a sequel to any of Warner’s earlier monster movies and remains of interest because it is Bogart’s only role in a horror movie. Director Vincent Sherman’s first film gives Bogart a great introductory sequence emerging from his laboratory with grinning white face and holding a syringe in one hand and a cuddly bunny in the other.
    Bela Lugosi starred in Tod Browning’s Mark of the Vampire (1935), as he found himself, thanks to Universal’s publicity machine, typecast very quickly. He had been paid off not to star in Dracula’s Daughter and was impersonated by a wax dummy. Similarly, he would be replaced by Lon Chaney Jr for Son of Dracula, and John Carradine for House of Frankenstein (1944) and its sequel, House of Dracula (1945).
    Mark of the Vampire and the later Return of the Vampire (1943) are Lugosi’s best vampire movies and should be discussed in more depth. The characters, Count Mora and Armand Tesla, released Lugosi and the film makers from the shackles of Bram Stoker’s novel and the movies fare better because of this. Neither was made at Universal. Mark of the Vampire was fashioned at MGM and was a remake of Browning’s earlier London After Midnight. Browning had given the script writing reins to Guy Endore, author of The Werewolf of Paris (1933), and he had invented one of the more interesting reasons that people become vampires after death. Lugosi’s Count Mora sports a bullet wound to his temple throughout the film. The censor had cut the explanation that he had abused his own daughter, Luna (Carroll Borland), forcing him to take her life and his. Both rise impressively from the grave as vampires to reveal shocks that had been bereft of in Browning’s Dracula . Unfortunately, this cover is also blown when it is revealed that the mute vampires are actually jobbing actors trying to force a murderer to confess. As Lugosi was already waning in the studio popularity stakes, this final revelation added a life-imitates-art irony to the bizarre façade of eeriness that Browning was never able to match in his masterpiece by proxy, Dracula.
    As Armand Tesla in Columbia’s Return of the Vampire, Lugosi is a black magician who has cursed himself with vampirism. He is destroyed at the beginning of the movie, only to be unearthed by the mortar bombings of World War One. Military Police of the comedy relief variety pull the spike from his heart, believing it to be a length of shrapnel. Tesla revives and is aided by Andreas (Matt Willis), whose cloak of servitude is yak hair, a rubber snout and fangs. Andreas is a werewolf. This film was Columbia’s attempt to cash in on Universal’s own movie; Frankenstein meets the Wolf man (1943), in which Lugosi played the blind Frankenstein monster.
    Columbia didn’t hold the patent to the name Dracula , but this doesn’t stop director Lew Landers from aping many scenes from Bela’s signature movie. Events take a turn when Andreas is taught to shuck off the hold of Armand Tesla and stand on his own two feet. At the end of the