One of the most interesting but under-appreciated of the classic Universal Horrors, largely because of its low budget and lack of overall gothic style, with only intermittently atmospheric direction (from Lambert Hillyer, a practised hand from quickie Westerns). Like Son of Kong, it’s intriguing to see cast and sets from an iconic predecessor – the kick of seeing the grand staircase set of Dracula’s castle reused, or the same carriage as in the original rolling into town – carried over in a film virtually unknown.
Edward Van Sloan repeats his performance as Dr Van Helsing with his characteristic canny aplomb, but doesn’t get much to do, as he contends with being prosecuted for killing the Count and Renfield, trying gamely to mount a defence whilst begging his one-time student, the psychiatrist Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger) to affirm his sanity. But Dracula’s corpse is stolen away by a mysterious woman calling herself Countess Zaleska (Gloria Holden), who commits his remains to a funeral pyre in the film’s most visually striking scene: she is of course his eponymous daughter, hoping now for release from the family curse. When Dracula’s destruction fails to lift this, she turns to Garth, hoping his scientific rationalism can conquer her obscene needs.
The treatment doesn’t prove of much worth, so the Countess, who suffers a major case of erotic transference in falling for Garth, tries to force him to become her undead lover by kidnapping his secretary (Marguerite Churchill) back to Transylvania.
Daughter is like a ‘30s Woman’s Picture in Horror drag, with the familiar figure of a rule-breaking woman looking for a way back into a more traditional identity. Other critics have noted its possible influence on Sunset Blvd., but it could also be, if one subtracts the Goth froufrou, a film with Barbara Stanwyck or Bette Davis – Dark Victory with fangs. This is laid atop the more suggestive reflexes of the genre, allowing darker, euphemised but still definable sexual metaphors. There’s the familiar Byronic quality of Zaleska, longing for death that is a release. And also, if the classic Dracula myth exploited anxieties over sexual frustration, foreign invasion, and social xenophobia, Daughter spins a clever, if not exactly progressive, expansion on these. Zaleska is presented as a bisexual boho-aesthete, verging on a caricature of a type, redolent of a black-draped beatnik art teacher who’s an on-the-quiet member of the Daughters of Sappho.
Tied to an alternative existence, she searches desperately for normal fulfilments. But she also knows her essential nature is to consume and destroy, as confirmed in the most (relatively) famous scene, when she cannot keep herself from assaulting a young suicidal girl (Nan Grey) hired to model for her, a scene electric with perverse undercurrents – the girl’s fragile mood, the hints of prostituion and rape, the use of the poor for the satisfaction of the rich, and sickly sense of forbidden sexuality.
Zaleska can’t help but be exultant when she blackmails Garth into becoming her lover any more than she can help consuming the unfortunate girl. Garth himself is hardly a standard-issue hero, being a brilliant but prickly, pushy, no-nonsense chap who maintains a running argument-cum-flirtation with Churchill, who constantly pricks his puffed-up ego. Kruger, underused by Hollywood except in bad-guy roles, nonetheless has a brusque, vivid charisma. Armed with a literate script, Holden and Kruger lend proceedings an unusually adult sensibility. Irving Pichel has a somnolent presence as Holden’s creepy manservant; the traditional bad comic relief policemen are at least dispensed with early. The film builds to a finale that isn’t exactly pulse-pounding, but at least cranks the peculiar roundelay of passion to a fitting end: Holden, threatening to vampirise Churchill, to snare Kruger, and enraging the jealous Pichel to the point where he conquers her with an arrow – never before has the stake through the heart looked so much like a phallic symbol.
