Journal of Dracula Studies 14 (2012)
Mark Bernard holds a Ph.D. in American
Culture Studies, with emphasis in Film, Media, and Culture, from Bowling Green State
University in Bowling Green , Ohio
For several years, many film scholars have
invested in the idea of an “émigré narrative,” a genealogy that traces such
noted exiled German filmmakers as Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak as they fled
Hitler’s Germany and ended up in Hollywood where they were supposedly able,
through the films they made there, to express themselves, convey exilic
despair, tap into cultural anxieties, and critique the fascist state they had
left behind. Edward Dimendberg offers a succinct summary of the “émigré
narrative,” locating its roots in film scholarship that emerged in the late
1960s and early 1970s and claiming that this “underlying supposition of German
creative predominance still remains an article of faith among many film
historians and critics” (114). According to these proponents of the “émigré
narrative,” exiled German filmmakers were able, to paraphrase Lutz Koepnick, to
take German cultural material, put it in their pockets, carry it across the
Atlantic, and “simply plug into a different context” (“Doubling” 84), in this
case, Hollywood.
Even though the belief in the “German school of Hollywood Hollywood ,
claiming that the émigré narrative ignores “the complex decision-making process
of Hollywood Hollywood due to the multiple
agents –both industrial and cultural– at work during studio-era Hollywood
Lutz Koepnick acknowledges that films made
by émigré German directors were “not a product of German authorship in exile or
a belated offspring of Weimar cinema” (Dark 166),
but is hesitant to totally efface the notion of German authorship in Hollywood Hollywood
are not expressions of exiled German identities, nor are they merely
standardized Hollywood products; instead,
meaning in these films is produced from the complex interface between
the authorship of an exiled filmmaker and the standardized practices of the
studio system. Many exiled German filmmakers, Koepnick claims, were able “to
explore forms of authorship amid a film industry dedicated to standardized
genre products and escapist star vehicles” and that “the most fascinating
aspects of exile directorship . . . [emerged] . . . not in spite of studio
control but as a result of complex negotiations with the various forces that
defined the ‘genius’ of studio filmmaking” (“Doubling” 83, 85).
According to Koepnick, one of the émigré
German directors to interface most interestingly with the standardization of
studio-era Hollywood
Koepnick analyzes Siodmak’s celebrated work
in film noir, including canonical films such as Phantom Lady (1944) and The
Spiral Staircase (1945) and marginal fare like Cobra Woman (1943) to
bear out his claim that Siodmak’s Hollywood films, with their Modernist
emphasis on “lack, fragmentation, and nonidentity,” confront and critique Nazi
cinema’s “Wagnerian ideologies of embodiment” (Dark 168). Koepnick’s
work on Siodmak shows how this filmic critique is made possible through the
interface between exilic directorship and the mechanisms of the studio system
and offers a different, more necessarily complex framework for analyzing German
émigré authorship.
Son of Dracula: Siodmak
Picture or Vehicle for Lon Chaney Jr.?
It is unfortunate, then, that Koepnick
never devotes his attention to Son of Dracula, the third picture in
Universal’s Dracula series that Siodmak directed for the studio in 1943.
Koepnick is not exceptional in this regard, for the film has often been
undervalued by many, including Siodmak himself. According to Deborah Alpi,
Siodmak himself lamented while shooting the film that the original screenplay
for the movie, written by his equally legendary brother Curt Siodmak, was
“terrible” and sounded as if it “had been knocked together in a few days” (qtd.
in Alpi 113). Alpi’s own evaluations of the film range from equivocal praise –
at one point, she calls it a “more than acceptable entry in the Universal
horror canon” (113) – to dismissal as she ultimately considers the film a
“minor effort” for a director of Siodmak’s mettle (114).
Likewise, Michael Walker, in his extensive
survey of Siodmak’s 1940s film noir pictures,
does not even mention the film by name, instead referring to it merely as “a
vehicle for . . . B-picture [star] Lon Chaney Jr.” (“Robert” 110). Perhaps most
surprisingly, Curt Siodmak, in his autobiography, devotes only four paragraphs
to a discussion of Son of Dracula, a
film that would end up being the only American collaboration between himself
and his brother (277-78). Ultimately, the standing opinion of Son of Dracula,
according to Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas, is that the film “is
still regarded as a footnote, a stepping stone to [Siodmak’s] later, highly
regarded film noir works” (368-69).
However, Son of Dracula is much more
significant than these dismissals suggest. If, as Koepnick suggests, Siodmak’s
most interesting work emerges from his negotiations with the filmmaking
mechanisms of studio-era Hollywood Hollywood was off
to an inauspicious start: after having struck out on jobs at Paramount
Siodmak was forced to cast Lon Chaney Jr.
in the role of Count Dracula, a part for which the bulky American actor was,
putting it lightly, ill-suited. After his turn as the Wolf Man, however, Chaney
was Universal’s number one horror actor, and during the early 1940s, he claimed
that the studio “received more mail for [him] . . . than any other star” (qtd.
in Smith 42). His claims to popularity
are supported by Universal’s decision to cast him, whether he fit the role or
not, in as many of their monster pictures as possible. Weaver, Brunas, and
Brunas lament that Son of Dracula is a prime example of Chaney being
“cynically miscast” by Universal in hopes of guaranteeing profit (366).
However, Koepnick’s claims that Siodmak’s films are most complex and
interesting when the director must negotiate with Hollywood filmmaking
practices are certainly borne out in Son of Dracula, for the casting of
Chaney, coupled with visual and narrative aesthetic decisions made by Siodmak,
makes for a complex portrayal of the infamous Count, one that is predicated on
notions of lack, absence, fragmentation, and decentered forms of subjectivity –
the very notions that Koepnick cites as central to Siodmak’s work in
Hollywood.
In order to foreground these
characteristics of Siodmak’s Dracula, referred to as “Count Alucard” throughout
much of the film, it will be helpful to draw key comparisons between Chaney’s
performance as Dracula and Bela Lugosi’s iconic turn as the Count in the 1931
film Dracula, the first sound horror picture made by Universal, directed
by American Tod Browning. Discussing Son of Dracula, Curt Siodmak
complains that “Lon [Chaney] was wrongly cast.
Bela Lugosi should have played the part” (277), and indeed Lugosi, with
his performance in Browning’s film, set the standard for how an onscreen
Dracula should look, sound, and act. The ways in which Chaney’s performance in
Siodmak’s picture differs from – or fails to live up to – Lugosi’s performance
highlight issues of absence, fragmentation, and problematic subjectivity in
Siodmak’s film. First, it will be helpful to consider the differences between
the two actors’ onscreen personas and the trajectories of their careers in
relation to how they “perform” Dracula. A closer look at their performances
foregrounds issues of the embodiment in the two films. A consideration of how
the two Draculas act on or are acted upon by their respective female leads will
show how Siodmak’s Dracula, as played by Chaney, is a figure marked by
decentered subjectivity. Due to the ways in which he lacks embodiment and is
worked upon by forces outside of his control, Siodmak’s Count Alucard can
possibly be taken as a metaphor for the exile in Hollywood
Authenticity and Performance:
Lugosi and Chaney Play Count Dracula
It has been well-documented how the role of
Count Dracula was both a blessing and a curse to the career of Bela Lugosi and
how playing Dracula in Browning’s 1931 film afforded the Hungarian-born actor
an entryway into Hollywood
When the film was ready for release, the
publicity department at Universal further engendered the notion of Lugosi
literally as Count Dracula, selling Lugosi’s “authenticity” and seemingly
unnatural connection to the role. Robert Spadoni documents how “In its
promotion of Dracula, the studio fixed on Lugosi’s foreign birth and
accent to spin a story around the actor that was designed to make him seem
darkly mysterious” (118). According to Spadoni, “the marketers seemed intent on
playing up the man’s similarity to the vampire in Stoker’s novel” and went so far
as to tie “aspects of Lugosi’s personal history” to that of the fictional Count
Dracula (118), thus linking “the authenticity of the film’s horror” to the
authenticity of Lugosi’s performance (119). Universal’s ploy worked: Dracula
was a blockbuster hit, “earning more money than any other Universal film
released that year” (Spadoni 46), and Lugosi and Dracula were symbiotically
linked as one. Writing in 2006, Lyndon W. Joslin proclaims that “It’s a
testimonial to the popularity of [Dracula], and the hypnotic power of
[Lugosi’s] performance, that to this very day, despite the many other versions
of Dracula that have been filmed in the interim, Bela Lugosi still is
Dracula to the general public” (25). Ultimately, the confluence of Lugosi’s
anonymity prior to his performance in Dracula, his Eastern European
looks and accent, the endeavors of Universal’s marketing department, and the
reception of the film created an air of authenticity around Lugosi’s
performance of Dracula.
Universal did not need to worry about
filling Lugosi’s shoes in their 1936 sequel, Dracula’s Daughter (Lambert Hillyer, 1936), because the
Production Code, made more stringent under the leadership of Joseph Breen,
dictated that Dracula could not even appear in the film if Universal wanted to
pass the Code’s standards (Skal 234). However, twelve years after the release
of Dracula, Chaney had his work cut out for him when he donned
the Count’s cape for Son of Dracula. Chaney’s rise to fame was a long
journey, and at times, it seemed as if the only way Chaney could become a
success would be to give up his own identity. Throughout his youth, Chaney, who
was born Creighton Chaney, was interested in acting, but his father, a
legendary superstar of the silent screen best known for his roles in horror
pictures, forbid Creighton to pursue an acting career (Smith 7-8). When Chaney
Sr. passed away in 1930, his son renewed his interest in acting and shortly
thereafter signed a contract with RKO in 1931 (Smith 11). Much to Chaney’s
chagrin, RKO immediately pressured him to change his name to Lon Chaney Jr. in
order to capitalize on his father’s immense success, but determined to make it
in the movie business on his own merit, Chaney resisted the name change (Smith
12). However, when his first several films were flops, he finally consented
(Smith 13).
After a decade of disappointing films,
Chaney finally attained success when he played Lenny in Of Mice and Men (Lewis Milestone, 1939) and found himself under
contract to Universal at a time when the studio was enjoying financial success
from a “Second Wave” of monster films, inaugurated by Rowland V. Lee’s Son
of Frankenstein in 1939. Universal’s only problem was that their iconic
stars (Karloff, Lugosi) of the “First Wave” of monster pictures from the early
1930s were either growing uninterested in playing monsters or were on shaky
ground with the studio (again, Karloff and Lugosi respectively). The studio was
looking for a replacement “horror icon,” and Chaney Jr., saddled as he was with
his father’s legacy as a big screen boogeyman, was the perfect choice.
Chaney’s status as Universal’s premier
monster was established by his performance as the title character in 1941’s The Wolf Man, and afterward, Universal
decided to cast him in as many of their monster pictures as possible, whether
he fit the role or not. In addition to reprising his Wolf Man role four more
times, Chaney, during his tenure at Universal, eventually portrayed the
Frankenstein monster, the Mummy, and Dracula. This wide variety of roles may suggest
that Chaney was an actor of considerable versatility, but such was not the
case. In fact, Chaney was often criticized for being “wooden” and “unnatural”
in his performances (Smith 13). Writing specifically about Chaney’s monster
film acting, Weaver, Brunas, and Brunas lament, “Lon Chaney believed that all
there was to playing a monster was to endure Jack Pierce’s torturous makeup
sessions” (290). Likewise, David Hogan describes Chaney’s performance in Son of Dracula as “flat and passionless”
and jokes that the most noteworthy feature of Chaney’s performance was his
decision to “[allow] Universal makeup artists to gray his temples and give him
a slick pencil mustache” (144).
These comments seem to posit Chaney as an
absence, an actor who, beyond the make-up and wardrobe, is not “really there”
and designates lack by “standing in” for someone – his father, for example – or
something else. Similarly, Ken Gelder observes that “The titles of Universal’s
vampire films – Dracula (1931), Dracula’s Daughter (1936), Son of Dracula (1943) and so on –
indicate just how self-referential they were: a stable of films were created
around Lugosi’s ‘original’ (and family-oriented) Count” (91). Thus, in addition
to acting as a substitute for his father, the American Chaney, in Siodmak’s
film, is also standing in for the Hungarian-born Lugosi, a double displacement
that foregrounds Chaney both as an inauthentic Hungarian and a figure of
absence. The incongruous and inauthentic nature of Chaney’s performance as the
Count makes it clear how the extra-filmic politics of studio-era Hollywood
(like Universal’s instance on casting the clunky Chaney in as many of their
horror pictures as possible) interface with the authorship and aesthetic
decisions of an émigré filmmaker like Siodmak to create films that exhibit the
qualities of lack and fragmentation that Koepnick claims are central to
Siodmak’s work in Hollywood. The ways in which Siodmak’s direction (along with
his brother’s storyline) corroborates with Chaney’s status as a figure of
absence and lack are apparent from the opening scenes of Son of Dracula,
an opening that differs significantly from the one in Browning’s Dracula.
Dracula and His Son:
Embodiment/Presence and Disembodiment/Absence
Joslin and Spadoni both note how Browning’s
screen version of Dracula differs from the stage version from which it
was adapted, a divergence that takes place during the film’s opening. Joslin
observes that the stage adaptation of Dracula “unfolds as a whodunit,
with Renfield a suspect in the vampire attacks, and the Count initially
dismissed” as unlikely suspect (25). However, the film jettisons the whodunit
plot in favor of making it clear who the film’s eponymous monster will be. The
opening scene depicts Renfield (Dwight Frye) making his journey, via horse and
carriage, to a real estate transaction with Count Dracula, and the
sensationalistic scene is filled with the wide-eyed faces and voices of the
Transylvanian locals warning Renfield to go no further. The next, quite famous,
scene is made up of a sequence of shots at Castle Dracula that depict the Count
and his wives rising from their coffins. As Spadoni notes, “Viewers need only
hear the warnings of the frightened villagers and see Dracula rise from his
coffin (both in the opening minutes of the film) . . . to know who the murderer
is” (50). Unlike in the state adaptation, there is no mystery as to who will
determine and drive the narrative in Dracula, for Lugosi’s Count
commandingly stands before the camera. As Karl Freund’s camera tracks directly
toward Lugosi’s face and mesmerizing eyes, it is almost as if the camera and
the audience, like Dracula’s wives who rise to surround him, are both drawn
toward Dracula’s face and body, unable to resist, in this famous shot.
Lugosi’s Dracula’s revelation of himself
early on in the course of the film foreshadows his overwhelming bodily presence
in Dracula. Spadoni argues that the ways in which Lugosi performs
Dracula and the ways in which the camera depicts him in Browning’s film give his
Count a “persistent corporeality” (62). Adding to this, Spadoni suggests, is
how the filmmakers decide not to show Lugosi’s Count changing forms – for
instance, the camera never shows him transforming into bats, wolves, etc. – nor
do they show him getting younger or older depending on his feeding habits, as
he does in Stoker’s novel (62). All of these factors result in Lugosi’s Dracula
appearing, according to Spadoni, “thickly materialized at all times” (62). The
seemingly materialized nature of Lugosi’s body (which, Spadoni argues, was
further accentuated by the still relatively new emergence of sound in film)
couples with the presumed “authenticity” of Lugosi’s performance to create a
very “real” Count in Browning’s Dracula whose body drives the narrative.
Siodmak takes a drastically different
approach to the revelation of the Count’s body in the opening scenes of Son
of Dracula. The film, which takes place in the American South, opens up in
a train station as Frank Stanley (Robert Paige) and Dr. Brewster (Frank Craven)
wait for the arrival by train of a visitor whom they refer to as Count
Alucard. When the train pulls into the
station, Frank and Dr. Brewster are informed that Alucard himself is not on the
train, and the two men confusedly resign themselves to transporting Alucard’s
luggage to the Dark Oaks plantation, home of the Caldwells, the family who is
to host Alucard during his visit. As they look over the Count’s luggage,
Brewster notes Alucard’s name printed on a sideways stacked piece of luggage
and begins spelling the name backward to himself aloud, as if he already
suspects that the name is phony and is merely “Dracula” spelled in reverse.
However, Frank interrupts Brewster before he can complete the spelling, and any
suspicions that Brewster may have about Alucard are temporarily put aside.
There are several significant differences
between the beginnings of the two films. First, while both films begin with
scenes centered upon transportation, the beginning of Browning’s Dracula
features a horse and carriage, giving the film, even in 1931, an antediluvian,
out of date feel. Conversely, Son of Dracula begins at a train station,
featuring a more modernized form of transportation, which is significant
considering that Koepnick claims that the more fragmented, decentered
subjectivities present in Siodmak’s Hollywood films are often the result of
modernization and are more “modern senses of meaning” (Dark 168).
Additionally, the confused characters of Frank and Dr. Brewster, who have no
idea whom they are really waiting for at the train station, are opposite from
the wide-eyed, frightened villagers of Browning’s Dracula, who
know exactly what kind of menace lurks within the walls of Castle Dracula.
However, perhaps the most significant difference between the opening of the two
films is how Siodmak’s Dracula is absent
from these opening moments, as opposed to the Count’s striking, commanding,
early embodied presence in Browning’s film, and how the failure of “Count
Alucard” to arrive when expected creates an early rupture in the film’s
narrative and seems to predicate the film on a character that lacks true
embodiment. Even as the film moves back to the Caldwell’s home at Dark Oaks and
introduces Kay Caldwell (Louise Allbritton), a woman who has grown obsessed
with the occult and who has invited Count Alucard to her family’s home, these
issues of the Count’s lack of embodiment are not resolved, but are complicated
further.
Count Alucard first “appears” in the film
as a bat, when Kay goes to consult with Queen Zimba (Adeline DeWalt Reynolds),
a gypsy fortuneteller whom Kay brought back to Dark Oaks from her “travels
abroad.” Zimba warns Kay that Alucard will eventually arrive and bring bad
tidings when he does, and sure enough, a bat, accompanied by an ominous blare
of brass instruments on the soundtrack, appears in the doorway of Zimba’s hut,
causing the aged gypsy to fall over dead from shock. Lugosi’s Count, in
Browning’s film, does not appear as a bat until after his iconic first
appearance, a fact that adds to the Count’s “persistent corporeality.” However, Siodmak’s Count first appears as a
fake rubber bat, a reveal that, coupled with his absence from the beginning of
the film, seems to give Alucard a persistent in-corporeality.
When Count Alucard finally appears “in the
flesh” in the film’s next scene, it is in a manner far different from Lugosi’s
striking first appearance. Whereas Lugosi stares at the camera full-on and
seemingly commands and pulls in the tracking camera with his mesmerizing gaze
and presence, the first shot that features Count Alucard begins as a shot
peeking into the window of a reception that Kay is having for Alucard’s
(delayed) arrival. The camera cranes back from the window – the
frame-within-the-frame filled with blissfully unaware party-goers – to the
dark, wooded terrain outside where it eventually finds Count Alucard lurking in
the darkness. The craning camera moves over Alucard’s shoulder, locating him in
the bottom left-hand side of the frame. Alucard faces away from the camera,
only turning around and facing the camera, with a wide-eyed, almost confused
expression on his face (perhaps Chaney attempting to look frightening without
the aid of Jack Pierce’s Wolf Man or Mummy make-up), when the camera locks him
within the center of the frame.
Unlike Lugosi’s Count, who commands the
camera, Chaney’s Count is commanded by the camera, reacting to, rather than
guiding, its movements. By introducing Chaney’s Count in this fashion, a manner
that emphasizes his absence, disembodiment, and lack of control, Siodmak is
perhaps playing off of the notion that Chaney is simply inauthentic in the role
or is merely “standing in” for Lugosi’s “authentic” Count. At this point, it
becomes more apparent that meaning in Son of Dracula is created, as
Koepnick suggests about Siodmak’s other Hollywood pictures, by Siodmak’s
authorship interfacing with the machinery of studio-era Hollywood
Distressed Damsels or Fatal
Femmes: The Women of Dracula and Son of Dracula
To say the two female leads of Dracula and
Son of Dracula differ from each other would be a dramatic
understatement. In fact, noting the difference between the two films’ depiction
of their female leads is an excellent way to explore the differences between
Lugosi’s Dracula and Chaney’s Count Alucard. In Browning’s Dracula, Mina
Harker (Helen Chandler) is little more than a victim, the precious prey of the
villainous Count, who must be protected by the men in her life, including the
wise and paternal Dr. Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan), at all costs. There is
little for Chandler to do with her role as Mina besides to alternatively fall
under Dracula’s spell or be horrified by the Count. Chandler was so
disappointed by her role that she complained to an interviewer one year later,
“In Dracula, I played one of those bewildered little girls who go around
pale, hollow-eyed and anguished, wondering about things” (qtd. in Skal 179).
Chandler certainly had grounds for complaint, for the material given to her and
David Manners to work with as the film’s central romantic couple is so weak and
marginal that, according to Spadoni, Universal’s marketing department fretted
over encouraging female audiences to come to the film for its romantic
elements: “the relationship between Mina . . . and John Harker . . . was deemed
too insubstantial to rate as a satisfying secondary romantic plot line” (51).
The driving force of Browning’s film is unquestionably Lugosi’s fully-embodied
and “authentic” Dracula, so much so that Lugosi’s career-making performance
pushes the rest of the film to the margins.
At first, it seems as if Son of Dracula is
going to proceed along similar lines. When Alucard invades the Caldwell’s home
(in the form of a bat, again accentuating his incorporality), he murders Kay’s
father (George Irving) in an upstairs bedroom, usurping the Father and
seemingly inserting himself as the phallic center of the home. Alucard then
seduces Kay, much to the chagrin of her family and Frank, her fiancé.
Predictably, Kay casts aside Frank and marries to Alucard, transforming into a
vampire herself, and Frank becomes hysterical when he believes he has murdered
Kay in an attempt to kill Alucard and is thrown into jail. However, it becomes
clear, later into the film as it approaches the third act, that Kay is a far
different character from the terrorized Mina, helpless against Dracula’s
charms. A vampiric Kay visits Frank in his cell and reveals to him that luring
Alucard to Dark Oaks and becoming a vampire herself has always been her plan.
Further, she wants Frank to become a vampire along with her and destroy Alucard
so that they can live with each other forever as immortals.
At this point in the film, Kay Caldwell
transforms from the lady-in-peril character type so familiar to the horror
genre into a femme fatale, a
character type most synonymous with
film noir, and her transformation ruptures, disjoints, and reshapes the
narrative of the film itself. Alpi notes how Kay’s transformation into a femme fatale makes Son of Dracula bear “a closer
resemblance to [Siodmak’s later noir films]
than to Tod Browning’s Dracula . .
. particularly in the story line of the
cuckolded central character plotted against by a femme fatale and her lover” (114). This reshaping of the narrative
pushes Count Alucard, whose presence in and grasp upon the film’s milieu was
already tenuous, to the margins. After all, as Michael Walker notes, it is the femme fatale who “gets the plot
moving” in a film noir
(“Introduction” 12). Thus, Kay is no mere bride of Dracula like the women
commanded by Lugosi in Browning’s film. Rather, she is the central character
who enacts her subjectivity and power upon the film’s narrative, and fittingly,
as Joslin notes, it is she, not Alucard, who is shown putting the vampiric bite
on victims (164), in specific, her lover, Frank. At this point, Alucard is less
the full-bodied monster of the Hollywood horror film and more like the
cuckolded husband of film noir.
Accordingly, the climax of the film seems
to be more concerned with the containment of this release of feminine power, as
embodied by Kay, the fusion of vampire and femme fatale, than it is with the
destruction of the duped Count. Frank escapes from the jail and flees to Dark
Oaks in order to carry out Kay’s wishes and destroy the Count, doing so rather
easily by burning the Count’s coffin that he must return to before sunrise.
When the Count, who now seems relatively harmless after Kay’s confession that
she has masterminded everything, realizes what Frank has done, he stumbles
around, pours sweat, ineffectually attempts to smother the flames, and rather
pathetically implores Frank to “Put it out!” The “portly and ill-tempered”
behavior, as Joslin describes it (166), of Count Alucard in danger is in stark
contrast to the “balletic precision and fluidity” that Spadoni notes in
Lugosi’s body when the Count is threatened in Browning’s film (67), another
point of comparison that highlights Alucard’s lack of bodily and corporal
control. As the sun rises, the Count evaporates, leaving only his cape and a
ring on a skeletal finger floating in a pool of water, which is fitting,
considering how Chaney’s performance, according to his critics, overly-relies
on wardrobe and is marked by absence.
The film then moves to its climax, a moment
that had been reserved for the destruction of the title character in previous
Universal vampire films. Frank discovers a sleeping Kay in an upstairs bedroom
of the Dark Oaks estate and, denying his own desire and love for Kay, sets her
and her bed aflame. Only as Kay burns on her bed does the film’s crisis seem
resolved: romantic string music swells on the soundtrack, and the camera tracks
in on Frank’s mournful face. This concluding scene contains elements of horror,
film noir, and gothic romance and bears out Koepnick’s claims that Siodmak’s Hollywood films “[articulate] diverse styles, cultural
codes, and experiences into a performative and pluralistic hybrid” (166).
Elsaesser argues that films made by German émigrés in Hollywood usually
exhibited these darker qualities of modern gothic genres such as horror and
film noir, not as a result of some form of tortured expression on the part of
the exiled directors, but rather because these were the types of films that
German directors were most proficient at producing and that Hollywood producers
expected them to make (376, 431). Siodmak, as has already been mentioned, was
offered the option of a contract at Universal if he delivered on Son of
Dracula, so perhaps he wanted to include as many bankable modes and styles
into this hybridized film as possible to show his technical proficiency. If so,
the same mechanisms of studio-era Hollywood that forced Siodmak to cast Lon
Chaney Jr. in a part the actor was ill-suited for – the type of negotiations
with Hollywood that are key to meaning-making in Siodmak’s films – are
responsible for causing Chaney’s Alucard to get lost in the pluralistic shuffle
of Son of Dracula.
“A
Foreign Man in a Fog”: Siodmak in Hollywood
While Siodmak’s Son of Dracula clearly
demonstrates how the authorship of an exiled filmmaker such as Siodmak
interfaces with Hollywood industry policy to create meaning, it is still
tempting to read the beleaguered, displaced, in transit, almost incorporeal
Count Alucard as a figure evocative of the émigrés who were fleeing to America
before and during the outbreak of World War II. The ways in which Alucard is
depicted as displaced in America, arriving (or not) by means of modern
transportation, and changing his name in order to sound “less suspicious” and
to circulate with less difficulty seem to echo the experiences that German
émigrés surely underwent as they traveled from Europe to America.
This reading, as enticing as it may be,
risks returning to the “émigré narrative” that has been necessarily challenged,
complicated, and revised by recent scholarship. However, it may not be
untenable to argue that, rather than being a figure who expresses émigré angst,
perhaps Count Alucard is emblematic of a more general émigré uneasiness about
being displaced, worked upon by forces outside of one’s control, and losing
one’s name, identity, and body. In this respect, Lon Chaney, Jr., an actor
hoisted upon a newly arrived foreign director who had to prove himself in Hollywood
At one point in the film, Count Alucard is
described as “a foreign man in a fog,” so perhaps one can consider the “foreign
man” as Siodmak and “the fog” that wraps around and envelops the figure as the
complex mechanism of studio-era Hollywood
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Deborah Lazaroff. Robert Siodmak: A
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Auerbach,
Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago : U
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Cobra Woman. Dir. Robert Siodmak. Universal, 1943. Film.
Dimendberg,
Edward. “Down These Streets a Man Must Go: Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Hollywood
Terror Films,’ and the Spatiality of
Film Noir.” New German Critique 89 (2003): 113-
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Dracula. Dir. Tod Browning. Perf. Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, and Dwight
Frye. Universal, 1931. Film.
Dracula’s Daughter. Dir. Lambert Hillyer.
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Curt. Wolf Man’s Maker: Memoir of a
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Son of Dracula. Dir. Robert Siodmak. Perf. Lon Chaney Jr., Louise
Allbritton, and Robert
Paige. Universal, 1943. Film.
Son of Frankenstein. Dir. Rowland V. Lee. Universal, 1939. Film.
Walker,
Michael. “Introduction.” The Book of Film
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Tom, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas. Universal Horrors: The Studio’s
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