Discovering The Return of the Vampire (1943) before seeing The Return of the Vampire

Thursday 10/16/25

As we're in October, I thought I'd try and touch upon various eldritch matters in these pages--not that we need the calendar to provide a reason for that.

I recently wrote a piece on 1943's The Return of the Vampire, which stars Bela Lugosi in a kind of unofficial reprise of his Dracula role from the 1931 film of the same name, which I think is the most influential horror film ever made.

The 1931 film was made for Universal, of course, whereas this early 1940s film was done at Columbia. But here's the thing: The Return of the Vampire looks more like a Universal horror film than most Universal horror films of the 1940s, exceptions being 1941's The Wolf Man and 1943's Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (the latter of which I also just wrote a piece about, with one on the former hopefully to be completed later today).

The Return of the Vampire was Lugosi's final starring role on a major studio picture. Most of the action takes place during WWII. German air raids shake things up, you could say, at a London cemetery. Coffins are disgorged from the earth, bodies displaced and needing to be re-interred.

I think this is a clever idea. You have a mix of modern warfare and the Gothic. Where else do you see that? Often, when horror movies are updated--brought forward in years--they lose their atmosphere, but The Return of the Vampire is as heavy on atmosphere as, say, 1960's City of the Dead. An all-timer for atmosphere, and atmosphere is a huge part of horror films. Half the scary battle, you might say. I can't think of an outstanding horror film lacking for atmosphere, and that isn't drenched in the stuff.

Lugosi took the role of Dracula--and quasi-Dracula--very seriously. Some might say too seriously--like he believed that he was the Count. Or during shooting hours, anyway.

Lugosi was my first love as a horror film star. Seeing him in Dracula--by accident, as it were, one Saturday morning at my grandmother's on Creature Double Feature--was a life-changing experience for me, much as a disgruntled Music Lab teacher popping a copy of A Hard Day's Night into the VCR for my eighth grade class would later be.

I understand the skill and elan of Boris Karloff, but I'm not sure anyone hooks the nascent--or unsuspecting--horror fan better than Lugosi, and I'm sure many other people have had their version of my experience with him.

My niece Amelia doesn't understand the idea of a phone that won't allow you to see the person you're speaking to. Later, she'll be baffled by the idea of a world with landlines, and then baffled further were you to bring up a world without cordless phones. And so on.

I think about that kind of example with something like not being able to watch whatever you want to watch, or listen to whatever you want to listen, with those today who aren't smart enough--and that's usually what it is--to be able to conceive of anything different than what they've always known. And they're usually too self-obsessed, too, to even try.

As I've said many times before, it ought to be easier to be smarter, to know more, learn about a greater number of things, than at any time in history, and yet people know less than they ever have. When I was learning about many things--books, films, records, works of art--effort was required. I had to go out to somewhere else often. Find a way of getting there. If I didn't know a word, I had get the dictionary and look it up. Which I did without fail, as one would expect me to do.

I'm the same now. At the end of each day, I know more than I did the day before. But when you were someone who read a lot--as I did--and spent a lot of time in libraries--as I did--and you loved older films--as I did, and which, really, for the sake of this discussion, were any films not playing at the time in the theater, and thus not in any books at all--you often learned about a film long before you had a chance to see it. Years before. Maybe decades.

You would think about what seeing that film would be like, if it'd live up to whatever you expected or hoped it to be. This was good for the imagination and for stoking passions about movies. Very organic passions. A certain devotion to the experiences that might be provided by cinema. There was a magic in this anticipation that can't be replicated with firing up whatever hackneyed wankery "everyone" is "binging" on whatever streaming service because it "dropped" that day.

If you loved film--and horror films especially--you needed to be a reader of books about film. Or else you'd be very limited, reliant on what played on TV. And if this was in a time before cable, we're talking a handful of stations. For a long time with cable, too. Wasn't remotely like it is now, when I learn what station a given football game is on and then need to do some digging to learn that that translated to station 1325.

Magazines were big with horror. More so than any other kind of film. Okay, fine, if you were in Paris in 1952 and could pick up a copy of Cahiers du Cinéma, but it was sci-fi and horror that you were much likelier to find on American newsstands and in convenience stores and the mom and pop places, with the sci-fi mags eventually going away--by the early 1960s--and the horror magazines sticking around.

They had real staying power. A result, in my view, of people actually using their imaginations unlike now, when hardly anyone does. Very few writers ever even do. Which is an absurd irony, but it's like everyone is too much of a zombie--speaking of horror--to even notice or care, because people don't do much of either. They bitch, but that's more like being a dog who barks for the sake of barking.

The thing about horror is that it's adept at jump starting the imagination. That ca be for selfish reasons, but they're harmless enough--that idea of, "What if that were me?" Horror pulls you in that way.

The town library was next door to my grammar school in classic New England town, right off of the village green. A cemetery was across the street on the side, full of headstones from bygone centuries. The school is now town hall. I'm not sure what the library is, but it's a library. I should take the train back there and walk the town, but that could be hard for me right now, because that was the last time I was happy. We moved away when I was in fifth grade. If I was happy now, I'd love to go back there. That'd be different.

I spent a lot of time in that library. My mom would bring me. The adults books were upstairs, the kids books downstairs, so we'd separate and rendezvous later with what we'd be taking home. In this far back corner of that kids section, in the basement, were these books on horror films. They weren't hidden, but it was kind of like they were. Vaguely verboten.

They got my imagination going about those films. Movies I hadn't seen usually, and wouldn't seen until I got lucky. As I write this, I could watch any of them at any time. But like I said, this was different. One of those books was a round-up of Dracula and vampire films. You got these summaries and many stills.

One of the stills was for the death scene of Lugosi as unofficial Dracula in The Return of the Vampire. And it was so grisly! Looking at that still, it was hard to believe they actually got away with doing that in a movie. And a movie from the "olden days" at that. But I didn't think of those days as old. I never thought in terms of old and recent, past and present. I thought in terms of what was interesting and what wasn't. A great story is never old, for instance.

I carried that illicit image--what felt like an illicit image--around with me in my head for years. You'd scan TV Guide, hoping to see a listing for one of these films you were dying--the word feels especially apt here--to see, but then there were other challenges as well. Horror films usually played late at night. Creature Double Feature was very different in this regard, and I can only wonder how many Boston area kids fell in love with movie ghosts and ghoulies this way.

The funny thing was, when I finally did see The Return of the Vampire, I screwed up...my attitude was off. I was playing at being something, rather than actually being something, and at the age I was, I went in with this attitude of superiority. After all, it wouldn't be Jean Vigo now, would it?

I outgrew that, of course. You have to, if you're really going to know what's going on. That's part of the problem with publishing people--it's all airs and assumed superiority, which is part of the reason you have an industry full of unlikable, class-obsessed frauds bunkered away from reality, striking poses for each other. That's not where the truth lies. Or anything worthwhile or of value.

Watching the film again a few weeks ago, I saw it for what it is: One of the finest horror films of its decade, and the 1940s might be the best decade ever for horror films. And when that final scene came, I was, if anything, even more shocked that something like that was done at the time, or just plain done. And it's really well done. Hard to imagine it not staying with someone after they see it. Part of me was back in that forbidden--but not really--corner of the library next to my school, my seven or eight-year-old self all agog. And the really cool thing was that the movie completely delivered on its promise, on what it came to be in my imagination before I saw it, and what I see it for now when I watch it again.