EDITOR’S NOTE: Blood of Dracula was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 14, 1964 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, June 5, 1965 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, January 28, 1967 at 1:00 a.m.
American-International Pictures had a good thing going with I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (which this played double features with), so why not have a teenage vampire?
If you are wondering why AIP didn’t just call this I Was a Teenage Vampire, well, it’s the same story as when Michael Landon’s puberty led to him being all wolfed out, except that this time, it has a mousy boarding school student named Nancy (Sandra Harrison) as its heroine. Man, Nancy is dealing with a lot. Her mom died six weeks ago, her dad already remarried to a wicked stepmother, and she’s been shipped off to the Sherwood School for Girls, a facility where the hazing is vicious, and the chemistry teacher is a ticking ideological time bomb.
Why do dads always do this? Witness our bug-loving pal Jennifer having to stay at the Richard Wagner Academy for Girls, for one. Nothing ever works out well when you put one twentysomething teenage girl (Harrison was 22 when this was made) into a school of other decades-past-puberty mean girls.
Enter Miss Branding (Louise Lewis), a rogue educator who is thoroughly convinced that the best way to protest the atomic bomb and smash the patriarchal scientific community is to hypnotize a grieving teenager into becoming a rampaging monster using a necklace from the Carpthaians.
Despite the title, Nancy doesn’t turn into a sleek, cape-wearing creature of the night. She transforms into something that looks suspiciously like a werewolf with a blowout, complete with oversized Halloween fangs and fuzzy eyebrows. Or maybe the kind of over-the-top goth girl I always get in trouble for, like a proto Kembra Pfahler let loose on the sockhop set. Also: Miss Branding — hmm, that name — also keeps telling Nancy that this is all their secret and yes, I’m a pervert, but a nice one, and I kind of adore that they have this older dom/younger sub sapphic relationship, which is only reinforced by the William Moulton Marston moments of a polygraph machine being used. If this was made today, it would be all elevated horror and not shy about being totally for the girls, but it’s even more filthy here because either the creators don’t know what they’re playing with or they do and they’re keeping it in the closet and man, I walked away from this loving it so much more than any other review I’ve read.
I mean, this dialogue!
Miss Branding: Remember, the deed or the responsibility are mine.
Nancy Perkins: Your responsibility? Like master and slave?
Miss Branding: Like brain and arm. Put it out of your mind. Go on, Nancy. Go back to class.
There is zero blood-drinking, a whole lot of heavy-breathing aggression and a bizarrely placed mid-movie rock ‘n’ roll number called “Puppy Love” because 1950s drive-ins demanded teen dancing.
It’s seventy minutes, the perfect running time, and it has mean girls being mean to one another until one has so much of it that she goes full-on darkwave and starts killing their boyfriends. I never get tired of tough girls like Myra (Gail Ganley, who went on to be a foley artist for movies like Commando and Earth Girls Are Easy).
You can watch this on Tubi.
