Your Daily Dracula – Lon Chaney Jr as Count Alucard, Son of Dracula (1943)
‘Frank, isn’t eternity together better than a few years of ordinary life?’ ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’
Credit to the Siodmaks – director Robert, writer Curt – for finding a different story and giving Dracula an unfamiliar role. Fittingly for the 1940s, it’s a film noir set up about a woman who ensnares one man (Count Alucard, ie: Dracula) to get what she wants (being turned into a vampire) so she can dump him and move on to the guy she really wants (or, more credibly, the guy she wants next). Almost all other Dracula victims are versions of Lucy (weak, willing and disposable) or Mina (strong enough to resist). Louise Allbritton’s Kay Caldwell really deserves better than the ending she gets. Though the casting hasn’t been well-liked, Chaney Jr, a passive manipulable victim in most of his monster movies, is just right for this Dracula. The film might have stuck in Anne Rice’s memory, since it prefigures her vision of vampire relationships.
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