The influence of Hitchcock’s SHADOW OF A DOUBT is plain to see in this scene of Cousin Bellac’s (Francis Lederer) arrival in THE RETURN OF DRACULA.
it is) would have been much too unsavory for the time. Instead, Beecher—now able to transform without aid of the drug, like Dr. Jekyll—sets out after his unques- tionably adult nurse (THE LEECH WOMAN’s Coleen Gray), chasing her through woods to the JAWS- like pulsations of Gerald Fried’s nervous, Stravinsky-inspired score. The end is swift and bru- tal, with the tragic-hero shot down like a rabid dog by his best friend (1950s science-fiction icon Kenneth Tobey) and left for dead in a muddy ditch.
Of course, supernatural hor- ror came back into vogue—al- most immediately after the release of THE VAMPIRE, in fact, upon the overseas success of Terence Fisher’s landmark DRACULA (1958). Anticipating the new gothic trend, Landres’ THE RETURN OF DRACULA (1958) beat the American de- but of Fisher’s film (exploita- tively retitled THE HORROR OF DRACULA) by just one month, though the B&W low-budget
feature made a considerably feebler splash than the Brits’ blood-dripping color opus. Rather than adapt Bram Stoker’s Victorian novel as the British film had done, screen- writer Pat Fielder finds modern equivalents to some of Stoker’s characters and events, while turn- ing vampirism into a metaphor for the then-contemporaneous American dread of Communist infiltrators. Here we have Count Dracula sneaking through the Iron Curtain to find fresh hunt- ing grounds in Small Town USA, where he quickly sets about turn- ing the populace—converting them, if you will—into his undead slaves.
The film has won some curi- osity over the years for being a cut-rate retelling of Alfred Hitchcock’s SHADOW OF A DOUBT, substituting Joseph Cotten’s Merry Widow Killer with Francis Lederer’s comparably suave vampire count. Both fig- ures of cultivated evil arrive by train, announced by a screaming
whistle; both take up residence in the home of a stereotypically happy American family (in typi- cal Fielder fashion, the father is missing, though that character was pretty worthless in Hitch- cock’s film anyway); and both are worshipped by a precocious teenage girl (in this case Rachel, played by Norma Eberhardt), who yearns to break away from the dull conventions of small town life and seems to be on the verge of a sexual awakening more explosive than an atomic bomb. While Cotten’s Uncle Charlie was truly blood-related to his idolater, Dracula is less perversely an imposter, having assumed the identity of “Cousin” Bellac after killing him in transit. Luckily for Dracula, nobody remembers what Cousin Bellac looked like, so he’s able to keep the ruse go- ing for a good while, blasphe- mously sucking the blood of Rachel’s blind girlfriend Jennie (a surrogate for familiar Dracula vic- tim Lucy Westenra) down at the local parish house. Nightly, he
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