Movie Info
Movie Name: Blood of Dracula
Studio: Carmel Productions
Genre(s): Horror/B-Movie
Release Date(s): November 1957
MPAA Rating: Not Rated
Ms. Branding…you’re weird
After the death of her mother, Nancy Perkins (Sandra Harrison) finds her father remarried and herself shipped off to the Sherwood School for Girls boarding school. The science teacher Miss Branding (Louise Lewis) takes a special interest in Nancy and realizes that Nancy could be the key to her experiment. Nancy begins having blackout and strange visions of Branding…and people are dying. Nancy questions if she’s going out of her mind or if it is something much worse.
Directed by Herbert L. Strock, Blood of Dracula is a vampire horror B-Movie. The film was released as a double feature with I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and received moderate reviews.
I had a book with a picture of Sandra Harrison made up as a vampire. It was both creepy and also cheesy. The movie is a classic ’50s schlock horror movie, but it is also kind of fun.
No one is dead yet…good time for a musical number!
These types of horror movies are always short and sweet, and that is a great advantage to them. If Blood of Dracula had been a four hour epic with special effects, blood, and death, it would have no charm. Instead at just over an hour, you get teen romance, hypnosis, vampires, and a hip song being sung in the middle of a party. The “experiment” of Branding is pretty vague and seems to just serve to make Nancy a vampire for the sake of the movie. The even ends up with a very Shakespeare-esque statement by the school’s headmistress Mrs. Thorndyke (played by Mary Adams) about the ills of perverting knowledge.
Poor Sandra Harrison’s Nancy is pretty much screwed through the whole movie and doesn’t get a break. Her father is horrible to her and her stepmother is cruel, she’s taken away from her boyfriend to a school with an elite hierarchy where a fellow student “as a test” can burn you with acid, and the student Myra played by Gail Ganley seemingly gets away with co-conspiring with the evil Miss Branding. You keep thinking that things will turn around for Nancy…but nope, it does not end well.
What…do I have something stuck in my teeth?
The vampire takes its appearance more from a vampire like Nosferatu and is one of the first presentations of a pointed teeth vampire in English films. The movie was released by American International Pictures and is noted for having a similar structure and look as I Was a Teenage Werewolf that was also released in 1957 by AIP.
Watch Blood of Dracula. It is slightly longer than a TV show and more entertaining than many. Like many B-Movies, it feels like chunks of the plot are missing, but it doesn’t particularly matter…and no, there is no Dracula in the film. 1950s teen horror and science-fiction movies have their own place, and Blood of Dracula is a fun one within the genre.
