Your Daily Dracula – Ken Ogaka, Dorakiyura Yore Ai-O (My Soul is Slashed) (1991)
An unusual Japanese vampire variant, with a melancholy comic tinge and a few feelgood rom-com aspects.
It opens rather sweetly with some Dracula-themed dioramas which take visual cues from Hammer films and paperback gothic romance covers – accompanied by a lush orchestral score by Kô Ohtani which is a consistent shivery delight. After the fall of Ceausescu, it is discovered that the Romanian dictator has had his mad scientists experiment with the preserved blood of Dracula. A packet of the blood is sent to Japan, where vampire-obsessive haematologist Yuzuko (Narumi Yasuda) has a use for it. Salaryman Ishikawa (Ken Ogaka), so dedicated to work for a pharmaceutical company he has neglected his wife and daughter, is suspiciously knocked down by a car and accidentally given a transfusion of the Dracula blood before he dies. His employers take the opportunity to pin a medical/financial scandal on him.
At the funeral, Yuzuko tells Ishikawa’s daughter Saeko (Hikari Ishida) to drip some of her virgin blood on her father’s ashes. He returns to life as a bewildered half-vampire upon whom the doctor experiments, in the hope of turning him into a ‘Dracula’. Though he forges a new relationship with Saeko and is drawn to vampire-fan Yuzuko, Ishikawa opts for a process which will either render him normal or return him to ashes — until it develops that his death was a murder designed to cover up his firm’s corruption and Yusuko is kidnapped by the assassin and his cadre of thugs.
With the heroine in danger, Ishikawa completes metamorphosis into ‘a Japanese version of a full-fledged Dracula’, with black cloak, Andy Warhol wig and fangs. Reasoning ‘there are a lot of evil people in this world, Dracula is almost a saint by comparison’, the vampire hybrid rescues the doctor and, empowered by her willingly-given blood, exposes the corporate villains. Finally, Ishikawa and his newly-turned lover strike a balance and make their blood-drinking lifestyle work.
Director Shusuke Kaneko (who would later work with Gamera and Godzilla) gives it an odd tone, emphasisising family ties discovered in extremis (‘Papa I don’t care if you’re Dracula, you’re a great person’) and playing vampirism for mild comedy (experiments with flying and shape-shifting) or low-key romance (cued by a mournful goth wail end credits song from Mylene Farmer). It follows Blood for Dracula and Love at First Bite by depicting a Dracula as an anachronistic, charming, tender figure whose values are more substantial than those of the petty or blinkered humans who oppose him.
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