Daughter of Dracula

It’s not right of me to condescend to Jess Franco. In his decades-spanning career, he made dozens upon dozens of films that all seem to be exactly the kind of movie he wanted to make. Give or take some budget. He’s also been dead for over 10 years. Despite all these factors, I’m gonna condescend to him anyway. I watched Daughter of Dracula and was filled with a sense of almost paternal pride. All of his shots were in focus! It was visually coherent and competent! Good job, little buddy! Your movie is visually successful. Now we just have to deal with how dull it is.

Daughter of Dracula could maybe be considered an in-name only adaption of Carmilla. Except even the name is spelled wrong. Lead character Luisa goes to visit her dying mother. Her mother reveals that their family are the descendants of Count Karlstein, a vampire. The Count still lies buried beneath Karlstein Castle. Following this revelation, Luisa’s mother dies immediately. No followup questions at this time, thank you. So, off Luisa goes to the castle to solve a family mystery. And who woulda guessed, Count Karlstein is there and he is a vampire. Luisa’s pretty unbothered by this. That vampire shit is something the investigation subplot can deal with. She’s too busy reconnecting with cousin and childhood friend, Karine. And by reconnecting, I do mean having sex.

This is easily one of the visually strongest Jess Franco films I’ve seen. It very much feels like fellow surreal female vampire aficionado, Jean Rollin inspired Franco’s style here. And that’s overwhelmingly a positive. Franco still maintains a clear identity as a filmmaker in the film. But some of his traits I don’t care for such as poorly focused camera and discordant soundtrack are replaced with actual atmospheric establishing shots, soft focus and a standard piano-based score. It’s less messy than standard Franco fare. He even uses his own inherent voyeuristic nature to good effect in this film. There’s some really effective point of view shots. Again, the condescension. But I’m really proud of him! He really showed a grasp of how the camera can be used to bring the audience into a specific point of view.

Still, the film is pretty dull. Vampires aren’t scary to begin with. And there’s not a whole tonne of vampire-related scenes. And for a Franco film, there’s comparatively little sex. Which means there’s still at least three extended nude scenes and two scenes of lesbian sex. But all that and the occasional vampire murder still isn’t enough to fill a feature film. There’s a whole lotta nothing that happens in between the moments of sex and/or horror. The investigation subplot is incredibly boring but so is the main plot. Luisa is obviously pretty, but she’s bland and aimless as a protagonist. Stop kissing your cousin and go investigate the vampire family mystery, Luisa!

This is one of those WLW films and in particular, horror films where lesbianism is present or even prominent but doesn’t remotely affect the plot. The story just stops dead so women can have a parenthetical aside where they get it on a little bit. Karine’s really only there to be a sexual partner for Luisa. But even there, when they’re not directly having sex, their relationship is non-specific or non-existent. The first scene of theirs is memorable mostly for the music. It’s a perfectly pretty piano song. What’s notable is that the song is diegetic. Somewhere else in the castle, a man is playing the piano. Does he know he’s providing the soundtrack to lesbian sex elsewhere in the building? I don’t know. But that guy’s a lesbian ally anyway. Play on, good sir.

It’s a huge step up for a Jess Franco film to be boring. Usually, his films are incompetent. That makes this easily objectively one of his stronger films that I’ve seen. Though in a grass is always greener situation, I sort of wish Daughter Dracula was worse. I don’t watch Jess Franco films to be bored! I watch them to look through the eyes of a singularly weird and horny filmmaker who hasn’t figured out how to focus a camera and makes absolutely insane storytelling choices. Maybe I don’t wish it was worse, but I do wish it was weirder. And I’m saying this even with the fact that I’m still not entirely sure what happened in most of the movie.

Overall rating: 4.6/10

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