Daughter of Dracula

In the early 1970s, cult filmmaker Jess Franco—inspired by the Hammer horror films being made in the UK—revisited the iconic monsters of yesteryear, placing them in the castles and crypts of the Spanish countryside, and bracketing the thrills with scenes of frank eroticism. Daughter of Dracula was inspired by Sheridan LeFanu’s “Carmilla” (which was also the source of Hammer’s lesbian vampire trilogy), but as one might expect, Franco’s version was unlike any treatment the story had yet received. When the nude body of a murdered woman washes onto the beach, a police inspector (Alberto Dalbés) and a reporter (Fernando Bilbao) focus their attention on the castle of Count Max Karlstein (composer Daniel White) and his niece (Britt Nichols, The Demons), a beautiful woman who appears to be wrestling with an ancestral curse.