Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.

Today’s theme: Unsung Horrors Rule (under 1,000 views on Letterboxd)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Connelly is a lifelong genre film fan living in New Jersey. His Letterboxd profile is https://letterboxd.com/johnconn/

Count Dracula has an extensive cinematic family. There are the many illegitimate kin: the Orloks, the Yorbas, Bela Lugosi as both Count Mora and Count Tesla. Five years following the debut of Browning’s adaptation of the Count’s tale, Universal introduced audiences to Dracula’s Daughter, in which Gloria Holden plays a queer-coded offspring. In 1943, Lon Chaney Jr. would play Alucard, the not-so-cleverly-disguised titular scion in Son of Dracula. Even the family dog got his due in Zoltan… Hound of Dracula. Dracula’s bride(s) show up in many retellings of the story of bad ol’ Vlad, of course. Few stories bother asking what happens to his widows once the ashes have cooled. 

One of the few films to try is Dracula’s Widow (1988). Directed by Christopher Coppola, who was at the time 25 years old and a recent art school graduate. Coppola is, of course, from a family that is very acquainted with both filmmaking and with stories about Dracula. His uncle Francis Ford Coppola would, a few years later, give the screen a lavish interpretation of the Count’s tale. The same year Christopher made Dracula’s Widow, his brother starred in the much more meme-able Vampire’s Kiss. In the time since, Nicholas Cage has produced Shadow of the Vampire, a quite good horror comedy about the making of Nosferatu and starred as the Count in Renfield, a movie that fails as both horror film and comedy but does benefit from his presence.  

Coppola made this film for Dino de Laurentiis, an Italian producer with a colorful history and a career in genre filmmaking spanning decades. According to a social media post by the director, Luarentiis’ main concerns for the film were less than artistic. “(Dino) really wanted as many “Watermelons” (big Russ Meyer-esque breasts) as I could give him.” 

The movie is fairly short on nudity, given that directive. What Coppola gave audiences instead was a strange ode to both classic gothic cinema and film noir featuring plentiful amounts of camp and gore to keep ‘80s horror fans satiated. Dracula’s Widow begins with narration by hard-boiled police Lieutenant Lannon, played by character actor Josef Sommer. Sommer had, a few years earlier, narrated a slightly more critically well-regarded film, Sophie’s Choice. The genre shifts from noir to horror when we are introduced to Raymond Everett, the proprietor of a wax museum. Wax museums as a setting for horror films has a rich history, but to underscore Everett’s devotion to the genre, we see him watching classic silent fright films on a projector after hours. Everett has just imported material for one of his displays from Transylvania. Unbeknownst to him –and, I assume, to Customs—among those items are the remains of the widow Dracula. Those remains do not remain remains long. 

The reanimated Widow, who we learn is named Vanessa, is played by Emmanuelle herself, Sylvia Kristel. And what does Vanessa do when she’s new in town? Why, of course, she goes to a bar where she picks up and devours a generic ‘80s creep (played by yet another Coppola, Marc). Then she returns to the wax museum where she encounters a pair of Wet Bandits-esque burglars, dispatching one. The plot continues to evolve from there, including an ‘80s Satanic cult, the heir to Van Helsing, and a love triangle between vampiric Vanessa, Raymond, and Raymond’s girlfriend Jenny Harker. All of the talent on screen are game, giving at times over the top but never boring performances. The gore effects are provided by Todd Masters. Masters is still working today, having worked recently on Final Destinations: Bloodlines and the less interesting to this readership, Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie. His other genre credits include zombie comedy Fido, Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, and the original film version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

I first encountered Dracula’s Widow on cable in the late ‘Oughts, and was happy to find it on Tubi recently. As of this writing,  it has 821 logs on Letterboxd. The good news is that I encountered the social media post I quoted above while searching to see if a physical release existed. Apparently, a Blu-ray is in the works.