Weirdhouse Cinema: Evil of Dracula

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

And this is Joe McCormick.

And we have a really fun film to talk about here today. We're going to be chatting about 1974's Evil of Dracula. This is a Japanese response to the popularity of Hammer Horror Films. Hammer Horror Films, of course, originated in England. They were extremely popular in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, especially that's the heyday of Hammer Horror. And of course, they were highly influential. They were very popular around the world, pretty vast international audience. And not only were they consumed internationally, but they inspired new films to pop up. Everybody loved Dracula and Frankenstein, and so you'd get localized takes on these. And Japan was no exception to this. And so today we're going to be talking

about one of three notable examples of, essentially, you could call it, I guess, J-Hammer. Japanese hammer-flavored horror. Lots of gothic features, you know, very much inspired by the hammer productions, but with Japanese settings, with Japanese cast, and with distinct Japanese touches.

Yeah, I can see exactly why people make this comparison. So I had never seen any of the trilogy of movies this belongs to. I guess we'll talk about that trilogy in a moment. But yeah, it's a trilogy of movies that are sometimes referred to as a Japanese take on the Hammer Horror aesthetic. And once you're like 10 minutes into the movie, you can absolutely see it. It has a huge aesthetic overlap. There are sets in this film, in Evil of Dracula... that feel like Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are about to wander on screen. It has that roaring fireplace, ancient tome, kind of dignified smoking jacket, gothic horror feeling, except with, like you say, a lot of these distinctive Japanese flourishes. And so I thought this

was a lot of fun. I'd never seen a movie like this before, and it was really cool. Yeah, yeah.

I don't want people to get the wrong impression and think that this is going to in some way be just like a pure knockoff of Hammer. Like this is, I think one of the things that makes this film so fun is that it's really like taking all of these aspects of a Hammer film and then breathing a certain new life into them. So like I said, these wonderful Japanese locations, like so, you know, very rural mountainous or near the mountains anyway, some wonderful performances, just very well done Toho production. Now, you mentioned the trilogy here.

This is, of course, the Bloodthirsty trilogy. We both watched it on the Arrow Blu-ray. And that featured a nice little featurette with Kim Newman, the film critic and vampire expert. And he chats a little about where this film and where this trilogy fits into Japanese vampire films. And he points out that there'd been vampire-like beings more in line with Japanese traditions of the supernatural. in Japanese cinema, of course.

And there had also been sci-fi concepts of vampire-like creatures, like 68's, what is it, Goki, Body Snatcher of Hell?

I haven't watched this yet, but this has been on the list to do for Weird House Cinema for a while. I feel like every time we're about to do it, one of us is about to go on an airplane. It's a movie where terrible things happen on an airplane, so we'll have to find a time.

Yeah, we got to look at our schedules and figure out the right time to go after it because it is notable for being like a sci-fi vampire take. Newman points out that there was a 1959 attempt at a Japanese Hammer-style gothic horror film with 1959's The Lady Vampire. And that apparently wasn't all that successful. But then we get the Bloodthirsty trilogy from Toho consisting of 1970's The Vampire Doll. Lake of Dracula in 71, and then today's film, Evil of Dracula in 74. And these are standalone pictures.

This is not like a narrative trilogy where you need to watch them in order. If you're interested at all, you can go straight to Evil of Dracula. That's essentially what I did. So don't feel like you have to watch these in order. And these were successful, but Still, these three films largely present their own sort of self-contained 1970s Jay Hammer universe. So again, blending the gothic European sensibilities of Hammer with a contemporary Japanese setting and at times like subtler Japanese touches as well. And just overall, I think some nice filmmaking excellence.

Now, one thing we should mention near the top because we don't want to mislead people is that despite the fact that this movie is called evil of Dracula in English, there's no Dracula and it's not about Dracula. Yeah. There is not a vampire, but right. Right.

There is no character named Dracula in this. Uh, there is a Dracula like character, so you won't be disappointed in that regard. Uh, but, but his name's not Dracula. The, and the film's actual title translates to the bloodthirsty Rose, uh, And it's a good title, and that definitely matches up with some of the visual elements that we see throughout the picture. But again, no actual Dracula. I think that the evil of Dracula is kind of like a take on the actual Hammer title, Evil of Frankenstein from 1964.

Yeah. I can get the sense that producers may have been worried that if you don't mention the word Dracula or vampire in the title, audiences might not really know what they were in for. And so even though it is explicitly false to call this a Dracula movie that that's more in the right direction that suggests to people the kind of thing they're getting. Yeah.

And so this, again, this is a, I thought a very entertaining film. I think the pacing's great, love the atmosphere and the, the, the actors are wonderful as well. And it takes the story very, very seriously. Uh, there may be some unintentional laughs at times, you know, sort of by virtue of, uh, its place in cinema history and its 1970s setting. But on the whole, very serious film that sets out to tell its tale without any unnecessary comedic flourishes. But so far, we've just been talking about the general vibe. I guess we should give a little idea what the story is about as well.

Sure. Well, so it's, of course, a vampire story, and it takes place at a school. So our hero is Shiraki, a very handsome professor of psychology who has just been hired to fill an open faculty position at a women's junior college out in the country. But upon arriving, he learns that some strange things are afoot at this school.

The principal's wife has just died right before he got there. and her body is being kept, he learns, in a coffin in the basement of the principal's house due to a local custom. He also learns that a young woman has recently vanished from the dormitories, and another group of students seems to be falling victim to a bizarre series of illnesses. Vampire movie fans will recognize these tropes. So Shiraki and a friend named Dr. Shinomura investigate to solve the mysteries and find the source of the evil of the principal or not Dracula, but something, something Dracula ish.

My, um, and my elevator pitch for this or my, my alternate title, if you will, is bloodthirsty three. Your principal is a Dracula, which I think is, is, is more or less accurate here.

It's either your sister is a werewolf. Yes. Yes.

Now, again, Evil of Dracula has been available on that Arrow Blu-ray of the Bloodthirsty trilogy, which you can still order at places. That's what we did. But it's becoming harder to find, I think. And I don't know if there's a good streaming option at the moment either, at least at the time of this recording. But if you're interested in Hammer Horror and you're interested in Japanese horror, then you should definitely seek this out. Maybe a reprint or a new edition is on the horizon.

We'll see.

Hmm.

Now, let's talk about the folks involved in this production. This is, again, a Toho film of the 1970s, so there are going to be a number of connections to Godzilla and samurai movies. With this film, I guess being, if you think about sort of the pecking order of these different productions, it's somewhere below Kurosawa, but maybe above some of the lesser kaiju movies. Hard to say, but it's got some fine actors in it. And again, the production values are excellent. So let's start at the top with the director. It is Michio Yamamoto, who lived 1933 through 2004. As an assistant director, he had been one of several on Kurosawa's 1957 classic, Throne of Blood. His first full directorial credit was the action drama Resurrection of

the Beast. And then the Bloodthirsty trilogy began with 1970's The Vampire Doll. originally released in the U.S. as The Night of the Vampire, which is a bit confusing because I think a number of films have essentially had that title.

And the title of a Rocky Erickson film.

Yeah, yeah. And I can't remember which Night of the Vampire movie he was directly inspired by for that one, but it was one of them. Not this one. Or not the, not the, not a, film in the Bloodthirsty trilogy.

Is there any scene where it's raining, somebody's running, and they slip in the mud? I don't think so. No, not at all. This is actually not a very rainy movie. It's rather dry.

Yeah, it might happen in Vampire Doll. I started watching part of Vampire Doll... And it, I mean, not to say it was bad or anything, but I just quickly realized like, this is not the one I'm going to select. So I skipped from there to evil of Dracula. And that one quickly sucked me. And I was like, oh yeah, this is it all the way.

Cool.

So he followed vampire doll up with the 1970 mystery thriller terror in the streets. Then back to the bloodthirsty trilogy for 71s lake of Dracula, which also has no actual Dracula character. Uh, but it does have a Dracula light character. And then the actual title for that one translates to something like Cursed Mansion, Bloodthirsty Eyes. Then a couple of more action dramas before today's film, Evil of Dracula in 74, concluding what would become known as the Bloodthirsty Trilogy. And afterwards, due to changes in the film output of Toho and other major film studios at the time, he ends up moving into television production and eventually retiring.

But these Jay Hammer movies, if you will, remain his best remembered work. and are somewhat kind of three of a kind, you know, not one of a kind, but three of a kind. Like I say, they're kind of their own little self-contained universe. All right, let's talk about the writers here. We have Ai Ogawa, who lived 1930 through 1995, Toho screenwriter who worked on all three of the Bloodthirsty Trilogy films, and his other credits include 1970's Space Amoeba and 82's Ninja Wars.

I've optioned Space Amoeba for the show before.

It looks fun. I've never seen it, but I love the cover.

Yeah.

And then we have Masaru Tatsu, who lived 1936 through 2015. Also worked on the screenplay for Lake of Dracula in addition to Evil of Dracula. His other credits include Udamaro's World from 77. This is an historic biopic about the controversial and censored 18th century artist Udamaro. And that one starred Shinkashita in the title role, an actor we're going to be talking about here in a minute, who we've talked about on the show before, who plays the Dracula-like principal in this movie.

Nice.

All right, let's get into the cast then. We have Toshio Kurosawa playing Professor Shiraki, born 1944. This is our lead character. This is our protagonist. This is our man from the outside who has been assigned to this strange school in the north, where Sinister goings on or afoot.

I don't know if I have seen another movie with this guy in it, maybe, but he was very cool. He's got great screen charisma, just super handsome, kind of just swabs up every scene. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, he's great. I think he does a good job. You know, he's a solid, solid job here in the lead role. You know, he's suspicious, skeptical, You know, at times a little befuddled by the weird things that are happening, but good performance. Not surprising at all that he was also a singer. If you look him up on Discogs, you'll see these various 1970s and late 60s album covers where he's, again, just looking super cool. And then more recently, I think he's still putting out music. There's something like, I don't have the translation in front of me, but it's like something like Fun Grandpa or Cool Grandpa. So he's still out there. He's still creating music and still, at least until very recently, was still doing some form

of acting. But yeah, Japanese actor and singer who had a long stint with Toho Pictures. And his other credits include 69's Too Young to Die and also 1973's Lady Snowblood and also 1973's Horror of the Wolf.

This album cover on the left, you've got like a sailboat mask in the background and he's wearing a captain's hat. It looks like a Jimmy Buffett album.

Yeah, I didn't have a chance to look up his music and listen to it. But I don't want to spoil it. I would be disappointed if it didn't sound really cool. All right, so that's the good guy here. And then we also have, again, the principal played by Shin Kishida, who lived 1939 through 1982. We previously talked about him because he played the shades-wearing Interpol agent Nabara in 74's Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla.

Yeah, the Interpol agent. That movie posits that Interpol agents are like James Bond. They're running around doing assassinations and stuff.

Yeah, but I remember watching that film for the first time, and I remember thinking, who is this really cool dude in the shades? And early in the film, We don't know who he is. We don't know that he's Interpol. We think he might be an alien operative or something or a gangster. We don't know. But just effortlessly cool.

And when I saw that he played at least a Dracula-like character in both Lake of Dracula and Evil of Dracula, that's when I knew we had to get into the Bloodthirsty Trilogy business.

A good choice, sir. Yes.

So he was a very well-regarded actor whose ultimately short career, short life leaves us Wondering where else his work might have taken him, but still had a pretty solid short career here. Played one of the masters of death in 1980's Shogun Assassin, the one with the iron fist weapons. We talked about this movie on the show, this role being from 72's Lone Wolf and Cub, Baby Cart at the River Styx. Because, of course, that movie is an edit of a couple of Lone Wolf movies.

You mean Shogun Assassin is like an edit together of multiple of the Lone Wolf and Cubs. Yeah, yeah, that's it.

Uh, so, uh, so yeah, he's in there. Uh, and then he's, he's also in, let's see, uh, Lady Snowblood 2, Love Song of Vengeance from 74. Um, and then, uh, Zatoichi meets Yojimbo from 1970. And then I already mentioned the biopic that he was in. So I think Kushida rules in this. Uh, he's, he's kind of the Japanese Christopher Lee in, in all the best possible ways. And a shame that he lived less than half as long as Lee, because I like to imagine him continuing to play characters like of this stature, if not actual Dracula characters. Then, you know, having the sort of the longstanding villain.

Career that Christopher Lee did. Totally. Yes.

Yeah. I mean, the principal's eyes contain such dark depths when he strikes. You know, there's a there's this ferocity to him. Um, and, and Kashida is one of those actors who, uh, you know, I believe was not especially tall in real life. I think it was just like five, seven, but through a mix of staging and performance, he seems to just tower over everyone in this film. Uh, similar to how Karloff does like, uh, you know, we were talking about the mummy earlier in the month. Karloff is only, I think five was only five 11, but in the mummy appears to just tower over everyone. Uh, whilst on the other hand, Christopher Lee was legitimately like six, five. during, you know, at his tallest and certainly looks it on

the screen.

Well, certainly here, Shin Kishida is a huge presence. Yeah, they photograph him in a way, but he also fills the screen with an evil, malignant charisma. And he, I like his I like his Dracula face. He does a hissing like a snake thing. I guess that he's not the only Dracula performer to do that, or I guess vampire performer to do that, but he does it quite well.

And he also does something kind of, I was trying to put my finger on what this is. He does a thing with his jaw. That's kind of weird. Like even in scenes where he's not overtly vamping out, he's, you know, where he's kind of appearing human, he kind of, you know, works his jaw in a strange way that makes you think it was like, what's going on in his mouth. And it kind of reminded me of the character, uh, jaws played by Richard Keel and the James Bond movies. Uh, yeah, that's just like, there's, there's something menacing happening inside his mouth, even in the scenes where he's not showing his fangs.

Yeah.

So I, I, I loved whatever he was on screen.

It's tremendous here.

And at some point I'm going to sit down and watch Lake of Dracula as well. which again is a different character, but played with like similar style.

Oh, and I just did want to make a note here about this character because I was getting confused about this in looking at different sources online. I think some sources call this character like the Dean of the school or the president or something, but my subtitles on the disc said principal. So that's just what I'm going with.

But I think it principal sounds a little weird because that makes it sound like a lower level school. And I think this is supposed to be like a two year college, but.

Plus, Principal has pal in it, and this guy is not your pal.

No, he's not your pal.

But if he's a dean, he's a bad dean. All right. Well, that's our Dracula character, our Dracula-like character for the film. Let's get into the supporting cast. We have Kuni Tanaka, who lived 1932 through 2021, playing Dr. Shimomura. We mentioned this character already. This is a guy who already works at the school, who's going to help in these vampiric investigations.

Acclaimed Japanese actor who was nominated for several Japanese Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor. And he won the award in 1994 for 93's A Class to Remember. He played a villain in what's apparently a 17-film comedy series They ran 61 through 81 of the Wakadesho films. I don't know much about these. I don't know if these have really circulated outside of Japan, but apparently it was a big hit and kind of helped establish him. And his other credits include, let's see, the Psychedelic Horror Anthology, Quiden from 64, And then there's also Kenji Fukasako's Battles Without Honor and Humanity, a series of these from 73 through 74.

And then just a very long and respected career in Japanese television and film. His other horror credits include 77's Village of Eight Gravestones, 79's Murder in the Dollhouse, 79's The Inferno, and then another one from the director Yamamoto, uh, the horror comedy ghost festival in Zinjin village in 79.

Well, I don't really understand the idea of a 17 film series, but, uh, but putting that aside, uh, Kunia Tanaka is great in this. I really love him. Powerful, positive energy. And he almost has a, a holy or vampire repelling, uh, character within his very body. Ultimately, it doesn't work because he gets got by a vampire. But as I was telling you off mic, I feel like his sideburns are more powerful than any crucifix.

Yeah, we lose this character too soon in the film, but he gets a lot of great screen time before that happens. So yeah, he's wonderful. The sort of well-rounded character performance that you need, I think, in a movie like this. You could very loosely think of him as the film's Van Helsing character. I mean, he's not quite to that level, but he is an expert who knows something about local history, knows something about supernatural lore, and is able to help our protagonist in understanding and ultimately solving the vampire curse.

Yeah, he is the Van Helsing character in that he is both a medical doctor and an expert in the supernatural and the occult. But he's not the Van Helsing in that he kind of takes over the story and commands the battle against the vampire. Really, I would say that Shiraki ultimately remains in kind of the leadership role of the good guys. Absolutely, yeah.

But Tanaka, again, is wonderful here. And beyond delivering on all of this, he just brings a nuanced believability to his performance. And in doing so, you know, helps ground the rest of the narrative in reality, I think.

Yeah.

All right. We have some other professors, though. There's Professor Yoshi, played by Katsuhiko Sasuke, born 1944. And everybody hates Yoshi.

The campus creep.

The campus creep. The faculty doesn't seem to like him. And the students think he's a creepy dude that just stares at all the students. Yeah. So Soski's credits include Godzilla vs. Megalon from 73, Carer of Mechagodzilla from 75. I haven't gotten to that one yet, but that I think is the next Godzilla film I'm going to watch, at least on my own time. I don't know if it'll be Weird House or not, but for my own purposes.

And then he also pops up in 89's Godzilla vs. Biollante. And then as a voice actor, he also has a number of credits, including The Boy and the Beast from 2015. I've seen that one. It's quite good. And his other horror credits include 78's Queen Bee.

Is that a bee monster movie?

I'm not sure. I just glanced at it. Just enough to see that it's horror, it has bees in it, and it might have bee women. I'm not sure. But I'll have to come back to that one. All right, we mentioned The Principal. The Principal's wife is also a character as well, played by Mika Katsuragi, born 1949. She did 50 episodes of Return of Ultraman, and she was also in 73's The Petrified Forest. This is a Japanese drama unrelated to the 1936 film of the same title, and she also had a small part in Lake of Dracula.

And then we have a trio of female students. We have Kumi, we have Yukiko, and then we have Kyoko. And let's run through them real quick. One of them is going to survive, the other two not so much. But all three seem to have been played by actresses who just had like a brief period of activity, really.

So we have, playing Kumi, we have Mariko Mochizuki. I don't know when she was born, but she apparently died in 2000. Her TV and film credits only cover the years 74 through 76, this being one of only three film roles.

So she's the main one of the student characters.

She's the main one, and Wink Wink might be the most likely to survive the film. We'll see how it goes. Then we also have, playing Yukiko, we have Mio Ota, who lived 1949 through 2019. And this is one of only four credits from the period of 74 through 77. And then we have Kiko Aramaki playing Kyoko. Dates, not public record. So I don't know. She may still be around. Also, just a very brief period of screen and TV activity, 72 through 75, including credits for 73's Terrifying Girls High School Animal Classmates. Don't know what that's about. Don't know if that's an appropriate film or not, but the title is pretty great. And then 1974's Demon Spies.

Demon Classmates?

I assume. Well, Demon Spies, I guess it's just spies that are demons. I don't know about the Terrifying Girls High School. There are animal classmates there. That's all I know from the title. All right. And then getting into, there are plenty of other supporting characters, but I do want to point out there is a detective that shows up pretty late in the picture. Detective Takakura. And he is played by Yonosuke Ito, who lived 1919 through 1980.

It is the Shogun from 1980's Shogun Assassins.

The boss of the bad guys.

Yeah, this very, very stern character who does a lot of staring directly into the camera and grinding his teeth as he delivers ominous statements about what's going to happen to our main character. And that main character, as we pointed out in our episode on Shogun Assassin, is originally in 72's Lone Wolf and Cub's Sword of Vengeance a non-Shogun character. The Shogun doesn't actually factor in to that film all that much. His character is actually Yagyu Retsudo, who is like the long-standing villain in the Wolf and Cub series.

But portrayed in Shogun Assassin as this boss of the bad guys who has just gone mad and consumed with revenge.

Yeah, yeah. Very serious and grim character. So basically, as we discussed in our episode of Shogun Assassin, this is an actor who had pretty wide range and could often play hammy, I understand they're called radish roles in Japanese cinema, as well as serious characters as well. Here, he's easily duped.

He's a detective who has good intentions, but is really not on the ball enough to overcome an active vampire lord.

Yeah, he is well-meaning, but proves useless to our heroes. Yeah.

All right. And then, oh, special effects of note here. We have Teruyoshi Nakano, who lived 1935 through 2022. We previously mentioned him on Weird House Cinema because he's the guy who created the look of Mechagodzilla by taking a Godzilla toy made out of tin, beating it with a hammer, to deform the surfaces and then using that as sort of like the style guide for designing the look of Mechagodzilla.

Very nice. Yeah.

So he was a Japanese special effects director who helmed the special effects on the last six Showa era Godzilla films, as well as 84's The Return of Godzilla. You know, obviously those are big kaiju movies with kaiju special effects, but he also worked on all three of the Bloodthirsty trilogy films where special effects are, you know, going to be on a different sort of level. You know, these are largely, you know, vampire effects, vampire blood effects, as well as, you know, we also have some very interesting, uh, uh, subtler effects in this film in particular, but, uh, I'm thinking especially of the roses that we encounter and also some of the, so there's some animated sequences as well that are rather nice. Yeah. And then the music is, uh,

with Chiro Manabe who lived 1924 through 2015. Japanese film composer who worked on both of the other Bloodthirsty Trilogy films as well. And his other credits include Horror of the Wolf, 71's Godzilla vs. Hedera, which we covered on Weird House Cinema.

That's some notable music. It has a psychedelic hippie club freakout scene.

Yeah, that's kind of, you could think of Godzilla vs. Hedera as kind of the counterculture Godzilla movie, as we discussed. And it kind of has the score to back that up.

Yeah.

Yeah. And then he also did the score for 73's Godzilla vs. Megalon. I loved the score for Evil of Dracula. It's nice and brooding in a traditional manner in a number of stretches, capturing a sort of lonely beauty of the countryside. But with just a certainly a splash of that 70s night gallery jazz energy but without overdoing it.

I mean i i was really noticing some of the more uh i don't mean this in an insulting way but the elevator music e types of things like in the scene where they're driving down the highway and they see the car crash and it's playing that jazz it sounds kind of like girl from empanema.

Yeah yeah yeah Yeah. I dug it. I liked it. Uh, but then in the weirder moments, uh, it's like anytime anyone opens a casket, we get something rather different. We get this kind of reverberating synth sound. Uh, other times we get like the sinister minimalist percussion. So I thought it was a really good score.

Yeah. A very, a variety of textures.

Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know that it's ever been released on, on vinyl or if anyone's ever done any kind of proper release or if you can, you know, officially stream it anywhere, but I did find some score selections for this film on YouTube.

Okay. Well, are you ready to talk about the plot?

Let's do it.

So the opening shot is of a lonely rural train station with mountains in the background, no one on the platform. And slowly we see a train appear over the horizon and decelerate into the station. The title flashes up in blood red. And we get the translation, Evil of Dracula. But I wonder if that's what the Japanese on the screen actually says. You think maybe that on the screen says Bloodthirsty Rose?

Yeah, maybe. I was tempted to get my camera phone out and do the whole translation thing. But then I was like, I'm just going to sit back and watch it.

Whatever. Whatever. So only one passenger disembarks at this stop. It is a guy who looks very cool, dressed in a light gray suit with a burgundy tie, one of those wide 70s ties with a big knot, you know, that big boxy knot. Huge points on his shirt collar under a tan trench coat. Again, excellent look. This is Professor Shiraki. At the ticket office, Shiraki approaches the shifty, rather odd-looking cashier. This guy is peeking out from behind a curtain in his booth like he's spying on somebody and shiraki asks him how to get to the same school and the cashier just brusquely tells him there are no buses today and then he yanks the curtain shut it was very there ain't no monorail and there never was.

Yeah he's offering no solutions to the problem he's just like no buses today yeah.

So Professor Shiraki steps out of the station house onto the street and then a car arrives. It's a black sedan driven by another kind of strange looking man. A man with a boyish face, smooth skin and shaggy hair wearing a black suit and another wide tie, black and white tie. We will later find out that this is another professor at the school named Professor Yoshi or Yoshii.

And again, this guy we're going to learn is the campus pervert. His favorite hobby is like leering at the young women during tennis practice. But we don't know that yet. Yeah.

In my second viewing of the film, I really noticed that Yoshi is set up to be like the suspect, really, in many ways. But I don't know. I went into it knowing that it was going to be Kushida as the central vampire. So it didn't work on me.

Yeah, it's very obvious the principal is going to be the vampire. Yoshi, I mean, well, I think we can just tell from the beginning the way he is servile toward the guy who's obviously the big bad that this is going to be the Renfield character. Yeah.

Yeah. But instead of eating flies, he's leering at students.

Yeah. Yeah. So on the way to school, they drive down this long road through some desolate fields. And Shiraki comments on how it's very quiet out here. We know he's from the big city. He came from Tokyo. So obviously this is a change for him. And suddenly they pass the scene of a horrible car accident where there is one car still askew on the side of the road with the windshield smashed through. And Yoshii explains that the car was hit by a truck two days ago.

He says the driver was drunk. The driver was killed instantly. And the passenger also died. And the passenger was the school principal's wife. Whoa, that's intense news.

Yeah, the movie doesn't waste any time. We get a lot of intrigue early on. Like, there's no bus, the principal has a dead wife, there was a wreck, and we haven't even gotten to the vampires yet.

And this all just happened like one or two days ago. So Shiraki is driven through the campus as night begins to fall and the atmosphere is very gloomy. The school buildings are surrounded by this eerie forest with mountains in the distance. And eventually they arrive at the principal's residence, which is an old mansion on campus. And inside, this is one of these sets that looks like a place Peter Cushing would live in a classic Hammer movie from the 60s. So it's got old oil paintings, portraits of ancestors in these ornate gold painted frames, dark satin finished wood everywhere with elaborate carvings on everything from the chair backs to the banisters. Persian rugs on the floor, furniture upholstered with red velvet and brass rivets, stained glass windows

on the staircase. That's a cool thing to have in your house. And so it's just like a place to puff a pipe and examine an old tome by the fireplace. Eventually, so, well, first of all, Professor Shiraki wanders in and looks around. There's nobody to greet him, so he's just taking it all in. And he calls out to announce his arrival and He notices one of these decorative flourishes is a painting of a young woman displayed on the wall. And underneath it, there is a flower lying on the shelf.

It's a pale white rose. Eventually, the principal, this is Shin Kishida, descends the stairs. He welcomes Professor Shiraki. The principal is wearing a black jacket with a white turtleneck underneath. A lot of shaggy haircuts in this movie. And he's got another one more, you know, kind of longest shaggy hair.

Twas the style in those days, I imagine.

Well, I think it's not just in this movie. Shin Kishida, didn't he have the same hair in the Godzilla movie?

I believe he did. Yeah, pretty much the same haircut. I think he has a shorter haircut in Lake of Dracula. But again, I haven't watched it in full yet.

So Shiraki acknowledges that he just learned the principal's wife had died two days before and he offers his condolences. He asks if he can visit her grave to pay his respects. And the principal says, quote, I appreciate your sentiment, but she is at rest in the cellar for now. It's an old local custom. The corpse has to be left in a coffin for seven days. We also offer prayers for the body's revival. So Shiraki is trying to be respectful, but obviously this strikes him as weird. He's at a loss for words. After this, the principal says, okay, I know you're tired. You don't have to get moved into your apartment tonight. You can stay here at my house for the night. Oh, thanks. That sounds great. So

before Shiraki can reply, the principal launches into a history of the school. He starts explaining that Dr. Kimoto established the school 80 years ago. Quote, it has survived long in this bleak northern land.

I want to add one thing here. Well, two things, first of all. During my rewatch, I realized that the disc also had a dub of this film. So there is an English language dub available, but I highly recommend watching it with subtitles because the performances are so good. And even not understanding, not speaking Japanese, you can still pick up on all the nuances of their performance. One thing that I really like about Kurosawa's performance as Shiraki is that He's great at those moments where he clearly doesn't know either doesn't know what to say or cannot say the thing that they're talking about. We see that in a later scene when they're really discovering the vampirism in play. It's a very subtle thing in his performance,

but I thought it was very well done.

Yeah. Yeah. So after this, the. principal tries to get Shiraki drinking brandy. He says this stuff is, is as old as Dr. Komodo. So I guess that's 80 years or more. I guess Dr. Komodo was old when he started. So old liquor. And there, so they poured into some goblets and discuss things. Uh, like they talk about the man who drove Shiraki from the train station. Uh, the principal says, Oh, that's Yoshi. He's a professor of French literature at the school. and is also the principal's assistant.

So I guess he's a professor of French literature and driving.

Well, you know, he only had two classes this semester, so he had to pick up some additional duties.

Yeah. And then the principal springs something on Chiraki. He's like, by the way, you're my successor. You're going to be the next principal. Yeah.

I love it. Again, the screenplay just hits you with something new over and over again.

Shiraki is taken aback. He tries to decline this, explaining that he's not qualified for that kind of position. But the principal insists. He says, I'm ill. I can't stay in the job much longer. I need somebody to replace me, and it's going to be you. He says, I'm sure you'll be fine. He's also repeatedly insisting that Shiraki drink the brandy. I think maybe he's trying to get him sleepy. Uh, so later that night, Shiraki is sleeping in the guest room in his clothes, by the way. So he's still got his shirt tucked in and his tie on while he's sleeping. That's yeah.

They, by virtue of the brandy, uh, this is all of course, wonderful because of course we know in the original Dracula, um, that one of the whole things is you show up at Dracula's castle and Dracula has no servants working for him. It's just him in this big lonely house. And so we see that reflected here in the principal's house as well. In fact, he tells Shiraki when he first arrives, it's like, you know, there's no one else here to look after you, but it's fine.

You can stay here.

Yeah. So in the middle of the night, Shiraki hears a sound. He wakes up and he hears the sound of singing. high breathy ghostly voice that sort of blends in and out with the sound of the breeze outside the window shiraki goes to investigate he leaves his room he walks down the hall he goes into the room where the singing is loudest and just inside the door there is a shattered mirror where the cracks in the glass reflect shiraki's face back to him in this wheel of separated fragments so it's very creepy thing to react to.

He sees his own face, but broken.

Yeah, there are a number of scenes in the film that remind me a little bit of Mario Bava, in that there's an obsession with reflections and portals of one sort or another.

Yeah. So further into the room, Shiraki finds the balcony doors open to the night air, and then standing just inside them, there is a figure in the dark. It's a woman in a sheer blue nightgown, gazing out toward the moon. So is this the woman who was singing? She turns to face Shiraki. We see her skin is pale with a tinge of sickly blue-green, and her nightgown hangs open, and we can see on her chest there are two puncture wounds with a stream of blood running down from each. So we all know what this means, but Shiraki does not. One of those awkward things about vampire movies, not unique to this, of course, that the audience is always ahead of the characters. As we see the puncture wounds, we're like, oh, vampire fangs. But the

characters are like, what is this wound?

I mean, we know we're in a vampire movie and the characters don't.

Yeah. Though it's an interesting variation here because we're very used to seeing these fang punctures on the neck in the movies. In this movie, they are Always or pretty much always on the upper chest to just above the breast. They say it's like over the heart. And I was wondering, is that a preexisting alternate vampire tradition? I didn't have time to really research this, but I think maybe that I feel like I've read before that that is there.

There are vampire traditions for the vampire bites on the chest instead of the neck.

I didn't have a chance to look into actual non-cinematic vampire lore, but I know it shows up in the Hammer film from 1970, The Vampire Lovers. That's where Ingrid Pitt plays the vampire Carmilla, and she's always biting ladies on the breast to get the blood.

Well, I know Carmilla, I think, is based on an older work of literature. It is. So I wonder if it's that way. Yeah.

Oh, I mean, I don't know to what extent this is truly based on Carmilla, but the character is named after them at any rate. But, yeah, outside of this, whatever the decision-making involved here, you do see vampires occasionally biting people, other places besides the neck. Often things like the breast or the inner thigh. Yeah. Just to mix things up and also maybe to enhance the sort of erotic nature, the eroticism of vampirism that's always a part of the scenario on one level or another.

Certainly couldn't rule out that was part of the decision process here.

Yeah.

So anyway, the woman faces Shiraki expressionless as if in a trance and he approaches her with concern. He tells her that she's bleeding and she doesn't respond, but silently raises her arms toward him as if to embrace him. Then suddenly that's when the attack comes, not from the front, but from the side. And another previously hidden vampire woman comes.

lunges at shiraki from his left so it's like the raptors in jurassic park.

I think they're clever girls and i love how we have this nice gliding effect you know like you know obviously she's on sort of dolly or rollers uh but it creates that feeling you know like the feet are not touching the ground totally then the vampire ladies here you know obviously predominantly inspired by hammer har but there's a sense of more traditional japanese ghost forms here as well.

Yeah, totally. I think, I think you can see those Japanese malevolent spirit, uh, aesthetics in like the, the pale face makeup makeup and the white robes and stuff and the gliding. Um, so, uh, anyway, uh, the second woman I would say is more unambiguously a vampire. We don't know exactly what was going on with the first lady, but this lady is, she's wearing a white kimono. It's she's got the same kind of pale white, green, blue skin, uh, Long fingernails like claws and fangs bared like a hissing viper.

And Shiraki runs out of the room in terror, but the two ghostly women chase him into the hall. And then the vampire woman in white seems to inflict a kind of magical attack on him and he falls unconscious. So we cut to the next morning. Shiraki wakes up in his room and he's like, did that really happen?

Or was that just a dream? I just had to note the wallpaper in his room looks like the Dolan red vermouth label.

Yeah, it does kind of, yeah.

These red fleur-de-lis kind of flourishes.

But I love that, yeah, he's trying to decide was this real or was it a dream? Very quickly, he's going to decide was a dream. And we were chatting about this back and forth elsewhere in the outline. But my read on this was he's a skeptical guy. He's a rational guy. And I think the more he analyzes what appeared to happen, like it, the most likely explanation to him is it had to be a dream because otherwise that's just not the rational world that he knows.

Yeah. I think that's basically correct as far as the characterization goes, but that'll get complicated by some things that happen in a moment. So Shiraki goes to investigate the room where the stuff happened the night before. And the room is just like we saw it. So there's a shattered mirror in the entryway, the balcony with the French doors hanging open. We can now see in the daylight that this room is intensely busy with flowers and floral decorations.

So there are these yellow flowers in a vase over the mantle, white roses in a metal cage on the tea table. And then in the background, there's a folding privacy screen with lively pink and red flower designs on it. Just a lot of flowers everywhere. And Shiraki says to himself, no, it must have been a dream. And the reason I was a little confused about this was not the impulse to say that couldn't have happened, you know, because I encountered two vampire women. It's that he goes into the room and he sees the details of the room that he has not entered before otherwise are exactly like he remembers from the night before. Mm-hmm. So the only way I can make sense of that is if he's saying, well,

maybe I really did wander into this room last night half awake, but then I dreamed the part about the women with fangs attacking me.

I mean, it must have been some pretty stout brandy one way or another.

Yeah. Anyway, Shiraki goes downstairs. Nobody seems to be around. And while he's staring at a picture of a creepy looking woman on the wall, suddenly a door thuds and then creaks open behind him. It is the door to the cellar. Uh, it is, uh, so, and it's one of those doors that's like, it has an angled top so that it fits under the staircase. I like that.

It's almost beckoning, right? You got to go down there. So of course the hero goes down the staircase to the cellar to have a look. Uh, now remember what the principal said that his dead wife was being kept in a coffin down there for seven days, part of an old custom. Uh, so Shiraki descends, the stairwell has stone walls. And then once he gets to the bottom, he goes through this kind of heavy dungeon door and the cellar seems to be full of wine bottles there are these shelves of tinctures and liquors and there's also a noisy crow there's a crow in there that squawks at him and then flies away where does it fly.

To it just must live in the basement i guess we'll see this crow again i will i mean i guess now i'm thinking about it for the first time maybe this is some sort of like a vampire's familiar or something um there is some suspicious activity from this crow later on. So we'll leave it at that.

So next he sees the coffin on top of the coffin lid lies a white rose. Shiraki is moved by curiosity. And so he goes to the coffin. He tosses the rose aside. He removes the cloth drapery that's hanging over the lid. And then he opens the coffin and, And inside, it is the vampire woman. It is the same woman who attacked him from the side like a raptor the night before. She is lying peacefully in the box with her hands folded like a typical corpse now. Shiraki reaches out to touch her. What? And then he recoils from the coldness of her flesh. And he says to himself, she's dead. It must have been a dream. And then he smiles to himself like, well, okay. Problem solved. But like, why does this. dead woman you've never seen before look

exactly like the vampire you dreamed about? And then suddenly somebody shouts at Shiraki. Somebody says, what are you doing? And it's the principal. He's standing behind Shiraki at the other end of the room. And I was thinking, yeah, what are you doing right here? The hero's behavior in this scene is way out of line.

Yeah, it seems like a pretty severe transgression here. And hard to maintain the moral high ground when you just threw open a casket and laid hands on the corpse.

Shiraki apologizes. He begs forgiveness. And The scene has a great detail. While his back is now turned to the coffin and he's talking to the principal, we see the body inside suddenly flexing her hands, like her hands come open. So she's not dead after all, but Shiraki remains oblivious because it's happening behind his back.

I can only imagine this eliciting some cries of fear when this was shown in the theater. And speaking of theater, I do want to mention one of the posters that you shared in our outline was advertising Evil of Dracula with English dubbing to be played at the Toho Theater. And then this combined with the English dub mission on the poster, I looked at the details and this is not something I was aware of, but apparently Toho Studios built and operated a theater in Hawaii from like 1964 through 1976, I think, or thereabouts. And they exclusively played Toho films. And yeah, I can only imagine how cool that must have been. I was reading about it on cinematreasures.org.

I really wish I could have gone to that. That's amazing.

Yeah. I had no idea that that existed until I saw that poster.

On the other hand, so this poster is cool to see, but it also has one of the weakest movie poster taglines I've ever seen. I'm going to read exactly what it says. Cries of death. scent of death are found in evil of Dracula. What? Yeah. I don't know.

I mean, I guess there are sounds of death and sense of death.

Yeah.

Kind of have to imagine the smell.

Is it presented in smell of vision?

I don't think it was. Yeah.

All right. Let's see. Where were we? Oh yeah. Yeah. So in this scene, the principal scolds Shiraki for touching his dead wife. Obviously he says it's, you know, a great sacrilege to, disturb the peace of the dead and he tells him don't come in here again.

Ever but this doesn't seem to otherwise mess up plans that the principal has like the secession still seems to be in place as we'll see.

Yeah I'm still going to make you the next principal no worries you can touch my dead wife and I'll still make you the principal next so that's the setup for the story and now we're going to meet some more characters there so there are three main students in the cast there is Yukiko Kyoko and Kumi and And we first encounter them at tennis practice where they're out playing with their coach and they meet Professor Shiraki when he retrieves a lost ball for them. We learn these three are roommates in the dormitory and they all end up running up to Shiraki. They run up to meet the professor. Kumi comes last. Kumi is the more modest and reserved of the three. And when they're speaking, Yukiko immediately offers to go on a date with Professor Shiraki

if he lets her stay out past curfew. Shiraki doesn't comment on this, but Kumi scolds Yukiko. It's like bad form. And then suddenly from this terrible exchange, everybody's attention turns across the way to Professor Yoshii. Remember, that's the man who drove Shiraki from the train station. Well, now this guy is standing just past the fence at the edge of the tennis courts, just leaning on a tree and creeping.

He's just staring at the students. And Kyoko and Yukiko comment on how he does this all the time and he gives them the creeps. And then Shiraki chooses one of the worst answers I could possibly imagine to this. He says, first of all, you shouldn't talk about teachers like that. And then second, he says, he's only staring because you're all so pretty.

Yeah, forgive his creepiness. It's because you're beautiful.

But in the way the scene is written, the three young women take this as a compliment and they run away laughing. So once the students are gone, Shiraki walks suspiciously over to Yoshii, who's still standing there. And then with a dreamy tone, Yoshii begins to quote Baudelaire at him. He says, as if a poignant dagger stabbed my moaning heart, kiss to retrieve the devil's corpse whose blood you sucked.

And then he says, wonderful. Baudelaire truly is a wonder. He calmly walks away while these oboes play on the soundtrack. And Shiraki says to himself, they're right. He is weird. It's like, he didn't take their word for it until the guy quoted Baudelaire. Now, now he knows.

Walked over there. I gave him a chance to redeem himself and just instantly proved how weird he is.

Yeah.

Anyway, later we get a scene at the dormitory Dean's office where Shiraki meets yet another character, Dr. Shinomura played by Kunie Tanaka. And again, I love this guy's energy. So he is, the character is a medical doctor. In addition to being a Dean at the dorms here, he wears a tweed jacket. He has these long bushy sideburns and his personality is kind hearted and ironic. He's got a sense of humor. And we're presented back to back here with a kind of faculty duality, aren't we? So we get Yoshii, the cold, ethereal, predatory creep, and Shinomura, the warm, earthy ally and friend. So Shiraki and Shinomura hit it off immediately. Shinomura fills Shiraki in on recent events in the dormitory. He tells him that five days ago,

a student named Keiko disappeared and no one knows where she went. Uh-oh. Why didn't the principal mention that to Shiraki when they met the other night? That would be a strange thing to leave out. Shinomura says the principal likes secrets but hates rumors. Well, that's a problem. And Shinomura then says it's normal for one or two students to disappear every year, but he implies that this is not like a case where foul play is suspected. It's generally understood as students running away because they get bored, because campus life is very quiet. There's not a lot of excitement going on. So because of this boredom, every year, one or two of the students, they flee.

Well, I mean, it seems like a lot to me because it doesn't look like the school is that big. So I would think either way you cut it, like two student disappearances a year Like, not just like they go back home or even like student deaths of one sort or another, but just students straight.

Up vanishing, never to be seen again.

Not a great sign, but hey, maybe it's just that's the quality of education you get at this school. It's worth putting up with a few disappearances.

But again, well, yeah, okay. So Shinomura, after this, he mentions that he has a personal interest in ancient legends and folklore. Here's the Van Helsing aspect. And he says that the old folks around town say that when people disappear from the school, it's because, quote, the devil's having his fun. So Shinomura promises to tell Shiraki some cool stories he's heard about vampires next time they get together.

And then there are more scenes with Kyoko, Yukiko, and Kumi. They discuss the disappearance of their friend from the dormitories, their friend Keiko. They say maybe Professor Yoshii kidnapped her. And Yukiko asserts that Professor Shiraki would protect her from Yoshii. And then they're frightened when they see a shadow at their dorm window. Who is that? They go to look, but the person has disappeared before they can see who it was.

Oh, yeah. Then we get a great line here from Yukiko, right? Because she's not concerned about the peeping Tom. She's like, take it as a compliment. That just means you're pretty.

Oh, yeah. She picked this up from Shiraki earlier. What a terrible meme to inject. Horrible idea. So then later that night, Shiraki investigates the empty room of Keiko. This is the student who disappeared and he finds her ID card and realizes that Keiko was the other woman he saw the night of his dream. She was the one standing at the window with the bite marks. He's disturbed by this, and he ends up meeting Kumi in the hallway, and they sit down in this lounge area and discuss these strange facts, like how could he have seen this girl in his dream? Meanwhile, Kyoko and Yukiko are in their room, and they begin to wonder where Kumi is.

Kyoko goes out into the hall looking for her, and finds instead a single blooming white rose on the floor of the corridor. She accidentally nicks her ankle with one of the thorns on the rose stem when she picks it up. And we see blood run down from her leg onto her slipper. Now, Rob, question here, because the students who are attacked by the vampires later will die.

be will go through transformations they will start to become these half vampire type creatures like we see in a lot of these stories like it's a progressive kind of disease um And I noticed that all the characters who go through this get pricked by the rose. So it made me wonder, wait, is it the bite or is it the rose actually that does this to them?

Yeah, I guess I mostly interpreted the rose as being kind of a surreal visual element that's added here. I mean, we do see the rose pricking their skin.

Yeah.

And then later on, of course, we'll see the white rose bloom into a red rose when a character is not just ensorcelled by the vampire, but fully turned or consumed. So, yeah, it's hard to, but it's hard to figure out what, if we were to give a rational explanation for what's happening, it kind of defies rational explanation. Like, it's not a situation where you can say, oh, the vampires have both a crow familiar and also rose familiar. It's like, that doesn't make sense. But in a non-rational sense, in a dreamlike quality, it does work that way. I don't know.

And I guess also maybe a vampire is like a cut rose, especially the white one. Pale, cut off from organic life, but kind of sustained in a lifelike death. but then one that must be sustained in some sort of artificial means. I don't know.

Put in the face with the water.

Yeah. So it's kind of like an out-of-control visual metaphor that breaks free and starts physically injuring characters in the film.

Well, I mean, one reason I asked is that there's a later scene where we see Yukiko, she seems to start being influenced by the vampires even before she's bitten. The only thing that's happened to her is she's been nicked by the rose.

Hmm.

Yeah. So I don't know. Yeah.

I've watched it twice and I don't have an answer.

But anyway, yeah. So Yoko goes out, she cuts herself on the rose thorn and then eerie music begins to play. Oh, so she wanders down the hall into an empty room. The window is open. The breeze is blowing the curtains and suddenly she turns and the principal is behind her. So he has fangs out and he attacks. She's frozen in place and he bites her over the heart.

Now, is this the first scene in the film where we get to see the principal in full vampire mode wearing a snazzy white scarf instead of a Dracula cape?

I don't know if this is the first time, but it would make sense.

Yeah, it's certainly a part of his style and it works very well. I love the idea of this Dracula-like character having his own distinct style. And it matches up to earlier he had the white turtleneck on. Now he has the white scarf. matches up with the white rose. I like the way the film's putting all these visual elements together.

They do have a lot of garments that cover the neck. Yeah, the turtlenecks, the high collars, the scarves, even though, I don't know why these vampires, they wouldn't have, they're the vampires, so they wouldn't have the wounds on the neck. And also, they're not biting on the neck in this movie. They're biting on the chest.

Well, maybe we'll come back to that question later when more things are revealed.

Okay. Oh, wait a minute. Yes, I think I know what you're talking about. Okay, we'll save that for later. Anyway, Kumi finally comes back to her room later after the conversation with Shiraki, and she finds her two roommates in bed. Kyoko is already asleep. Apparently she came back to the room without saying anything and went straight to bed, and Kumi observes that this is weird because Kyoko normally stays up late. They also notice something new in the room.

There is a white rose and a glass of water on the shelf above Kyoko's bed. Anyway, time for psychology class. So this is our first classroom scene with Professor Shiraki, and he is explaining the concept of a Rorschach test. So he is putting up slides on the blackboard in front of the room to demonstrate, you know, ink blots and asking the students to write down what they see.

Now we get some more hot for teacher antics in this scene, right? Is it Yukiko again?

Yeah, she stands up and they've got one of the ink blots up. She says, what if I said it revealed I was in love with you?

Because he's teaching about the Rorschach test. So he's having them all take it. He's showing these different ink blots up on the overhead projector. And they're all writing down what they see. And it's a great sequence with these haunting blots resembling bats and blood and the, The students are writing down these sorts of answers. And then Kyoko is watching and we see this. She sees and we see this, too, as the viewer, a red stain spread across the screen. And then she she cries out and she faints right there on the classroom floor.

When they're all writing down what they see, somebody I think it's Kyoko writes the devil. She sees the devil in the inkblots. But anyway, so she, did you mention, so she gets up and screams and faints. And then the next scene is a checkup with Dr. Shinomura. So Kyoko is unconscious in her bed. Shinomura says she probably just pushed herself too hard studying for exams. And then he notices something, or at least Shiraki notices the puncture wounds again on her chest. And so they say, well, Kyoko needs to recover in bed for a few days and it's about to be a school vacation. So everybody is going to go home or travel to somewhere. But Kumi and Yukiko offer to stay at school to take care of their roommate while she recovers. Very nice of them.

So the next day, Shiraki goes to visit Shinomura at his office off campus in town and they talk about Kyoko's wound. They say, what could it mean? Shinomura says doctors often tend to wounds they don't understand. However, when, uh, Shiraki tells his friend about his experiences the first night in the principal's house, uh, and the connection to the missing student, things seem to change. And then Shinomura, uh, takes Shiraki out to a graveyard on a hilltop and fills him in on a local legend. So here we get the, the backstory scene. Yeah.

And I, I loved this. Again, we get the, these beautiful haunting shots of this, uh, It's supposed to be a northern Japan countryside. And it takes him out to where we have this old busted casket, like some sort of, like some sort of, the remains of like some sort of iron casket or something, partially buried in the earth.

And this is where we get the telling of the vampire's origin story. And I loved all of this because we have a vision of vampirism here where we have Western vampirism that is described as kind of an invasive infection brought on by a Christian outsider. And it's fitting because remember in Dracula, in Bram Stoker's Dracula, the vampire is inherently a foreigner. That's part of it. He is a foreigner who has arrived in England. And so here we get a kind of interesting twist on all of that.

And then we get this idea too of vampirism as a curse for blasphemy, even blasphemy under torture. which I thought was a pretty dark and riveting origin story here.

Yeah. Similar to the kind of thing we get in that backstory of Coppola's Dracula, which we talked about recently on the show, that also has a blasphemy, brings the curse of the devil upon Dracula, and he becomes a vampire. I actually transcribed this backstory. Should we just read it here? Okay, so the way Shinomura tells it is, it was about 200 years ago. A foreign ship was wrecked and a white man swam to shore. His name and nationality were unknown.

All we know was that he was a Christian. Christianity was banned and he was badly tortured. He betrayed his faith and spat on the cross. Then he became a demon. He sucked human blood. According to the legend, the white man lost his God, then lost his mind. He went into the wilderness to flee from his persecutors. And here we see these shots of him wandering out in this desert just over these sand dunes and this totally dry, parched landscape.

Yeah, and I looked this guy up. We have a Caucasian actor playing the role here. I don't think he was in anything else. But we're to presume this might be a Portuguese seaman or an English clergy member. We're not entirely sure, and neither is anyone that's telling the story.

I mean, I guess it could be Dracula. Oh, no. Could be the Count. No.

Because he's not a vampire yet. He's just a dude.

He's not a vampire yet. That's true. He becomes a vampire later. That's true. Yeah. So the Dracula theory doesn't work. Anyway, so it says, yeah, he went into the wilderness. Quote, he suffered from hunger, thirst, and despair. He wandered seeking salvation, but nowhere could he find peace. Nowhere. In order to survive, he had to suck his own blood. The legend says his first victim was a 15-year-old girl. He held the dead girl tightly in his arms and wept. Then, by the immortal hand of the devil, she was revived. As soon as the villagers realized, they killed them both. They locked their bodies in a huge stout coffin. They buried it here. And then he shows him right here at this grave and brings him to a place where the

ground has been dug up. And there is an old coffin on the earth right in front of them. And Shiraki opens it and there's nothing inside. It's empty. Not a single bone. Shinomura says, according to the villagers, this proves they came back to life. And then after this, Shiraki and Shinomura go out to dinner and they go out for dinner and sake to further strategize. And I really like the scene at the restaurant. It's so cozy.

It makes me want to like take down a vampire with a friend.

Yeah, it is. Yeah, it feels very authentic. And it's well acted, too, because they're clearly hitting the sake a bit hard because they are finding themselves in a very unusual and terrifying circumstance here. But at one point, there's like, OK, slow down. Let's not drink anymore. Let's get serious about this.

We've got to act.

So they decide that the vampires previously targeted Keiko, and now they're attacking Kyoko, and that these two professors are going to have to intervene to save the students. So there is some discussion here of what it meant that Shiraki was told he would be the next principal. Shinomura remembers something. He says there was another teacher who was told he'd be the next principal. Now he's in a mental hospital on the other side of the mountains.

Oh, not a good sign.

Yeah. So they set up an ambush for vampires. Shiraki and Shinemura collect a bunch of gear and they plan to keep watch in the dormitory all night to make sure nothing happens to Kumi, Yukiko and Kyoko, who again are the three that are remaining behind at the school while everybody else has gone home. Shinomura brings a clue.

So they're sitting around having tea, talking, and he brings out the diary of the previous professor who went mad, the one who was going to be the new principal. And the last entry reads, it is certain the principal and his wife had changed since they got married. They stopped going out during the day. The same thing happened to the former principal, too. So then we get this explanation about how there were actually three principles in a row who all changed like this. And so that's a lot.

They've been through a lot of principles. But anyway, the entry reads, if the devil is to exist in the world, it cannot look like a devil. It must be in disguise. It must live in the disguise of an ordinary human being. So anyway, I guess I'll narrate the following bit of the movie more lightly. Later that night, there is a vampire attack on the dorm. Kumi is out of the room making dinner. And then suddenly Kyoko begins to act strangely.

She says to Yukiko, he is calling you and grabs her wrist. And then the principal appears and attacks Yukiko. And the men come running, Shinemura and Shiraki come running. And the principal jumps out the window when he is caught. So Shinomura and the night watchman, who's there with them, run out into the woods chasing the principal. Shiraki and Kumi stay behind to take care of Yukiko. And Kyoko tries to stab Shiraki with a pair of scissors and then throws herself from the top of the stairwell and dies when she hits the bottom.

Now, an important plot point at this point is that they saw the vampire principal jump out the window only from behind. There'll be much talk of this later when the detective shows up.

Yes. So, meanwhile, Yukiko disappears out the window. And then later in the woods, Shinomura spies Yukiko and the principal together. He takes a picture with his camera as the principal embraces Yukiko to suck her blood. But then Shinomura is caught. The principal sees him and pins him against a tree and strangles him. So, no.

Yeah, I was saddened to see this character go. He was so much fun.

So police arrive on the scene. Shiraki tries to explain what happened, but the detective does not accept, not only does not accept what Shiraki is saying, he doesn't even accept this is a murder case. He's saying from the evidence available, it looks like an accidental death. You're saying she threw herself from the top of the stairs, but it was the principal's fault. Yeah, it's hard to explain this like vampire hypnotism. So then Shiraki accuses the principal of being in the student's room and jumping out the window.

But again, says he saw him from behind. So they the police go to interview the principal at his mansion. Principal, of course, denies everything. And he has an alibi. Why, Professor Yoshi was here with me all night. We've been here together. So I couldn't have gone out and done any of that. Oh, and then Yoshi says, uh, says to the detective, in fact, I know someone who looks like the principal from behind implying Shiraki himself and the cops all have a good laugh at this. Like, oh yeah, maybe it was you.

There's a great, uh, sense that the detective and, and, uh, and his fellow policemen here are really not going to shake any rock the boat at all. Like they're just here to sort of as a formality. And they're just like, oh, yeah, this kind of thing happens, and we're just going to ride it up and move on.

There's a later scene where Yoshii goes downstairs, and he gets the body of the principal's wife out of her coffin, and he's doing something to it. Is he trying to drink blood from the vampire's body?

Mm-hmm.

She wakes up and embraces him, but I couldn't tell exactly what was happening here.

Well, we're beginning to understand, and then it's more properly revealed in a bit, that I think Yoshi is not a full-blown vampire, but maybe like a vampire spawn. So maybe there is some sort of a feeding of Yoshi that has to take place. But yeah, he's the ultimate vampire toady here.

But we're closing in on the, the climax of the film. So there is a dark room scene, kind of a research scene where Shiraki and Kumi together develop the role of film from Dr. Shinomura's camera. And they find a photo of Yukiko with her arms outstretched in the air. And then by kind of posing themselves, they figure out what's happening. They say she's embracing someone who is invisible. Yeah.

Cannot be captured on film as sometimes how the, like no reflection in the mirror thing is, uh, is utilized in films.

Like this right unfortunately that does not provide good evidence that the police can use against the principal um so uh now kumi has to keep watch over yukiko who is unwell and in bed while shiraki drives over the mountains to the mental hospital to meet the other man who is slated to become the principal and they meet shiraki prods him but the man does not speak eventually the man turns his head and reveals a long gash in his, like a scar under his jawbone. It looks like someone tried to cut his throat or cut under his jaw. What could that be? And then back at the dorms, Yukiko is called away by the vampire, so she wanders off. Kumi tries to stop her, but Kumi is prevented by Professor Yoshii, who obstructs her path and

then quotes Baudelaire at her until she faints on the floor, you know. So finally, we see Yukiko going to the vampire's crypt, where not only does the principal's wife drink her blood, she places Yukiko's body on a table and then begins to cut into the flesh under her jaw. What's this that's happening? Here's a big twist.

Yeah, yeah. I was not prepared for this at all. She's cutting in the same place as that mysterious scar on the gentleman in the asylum. Uh, and so what we, we quickly watch as she, and fairly in a mix of like graphic bloody detail and implied shadow play, we see her cut the face off of the girl and then pull this face up over her own face and begin to kind of like meld it into place, like on top of, or into her own, her own face, assuming the girl's likeness. And we can tell already ultimately her identity. Presumably, this is how this pair of vampires have been surviving all of this time. They keep claiming new victims, stealing new faces, and maintaining a position of authority within the school where they just happen to continually

get all of this fresh meat each and every semester.

So whenever there's a new principal, it's actually just the same vampire who has taken someone else's face.

Right, right.

You can see why they wanted Shiraki because he's so handsome.

Yeah, and I guess they kind of like use, they use identities up after a little bit and they need something fresh. And also it helps to partially cover for the murders because I guess they figured out we can, what, we can kill one student per semester, I guess.

Yeah, they're being, they're rationing it. Yeah. So the vampire now wearing Yukiko's face appears to Kumi in the dormitory. But Kumi, because she is virtuous and true, she knows it is not really Yukiko. You know, virtue sees through the illusion. There's a lot of that in movies like this. And so the vampire says, fine, I guess I can't fool you, you know, but I'm going to be the new principal's wife and the new principal is going to be Principal Shiraki. So I think she's trying to make Kumi jealous because she knows Kumi likes Shiraki. So the vampire woman steals Yukiko's face. The principal is going to steal Shiraki's face. And then they're going to pose as a married couple and live in the school principal's mansion

and just keep trading faces.

I like it. I think it's rather clever because it's, you know, this is this idea that like these two vampires were, you know, they faced a two. a terrible fate initially because they were found out. And so once they escape from that iron casket, you know, they have to live in secret. They have to feed in secret.

And they found themselves a very clever scheme that they can they hope to maintain for some number of years before they have to move on to some other kind of cover. And yeah, I thought this was rather clever.

I liked it. So when Shiraki finally gets back to the dorm, the vampire with Yukiko's face tries to fool him. She says she has something she needs to show him and leads him to the edge of a spooky lake covered in mist. And then she asks him to marry her. He doesn't go for it. He reveals what he knows.

He says, you're not Yukiko. You're the principal's wife. And she laughs at him. She says, you sound like a fantasy. Nobody would believe you. But she reveals Dr. Shinomura is here at the bottom of the lake, like so many others. When people mess with us, they die. We put them in the lake. And she says, we have Kumi also.

She's at the house. So you're toast.

This reminds me, I think there's some distinct bits of Japanese folklore about bodies at the bottom of a lake that they're drawing on here.

After this, we have a fight between Shiraki and Yoshii. Yoshii shows up and they punch up and wrestle around on the banks here. The fight ends when Shiraki throws Yoshii into the water. It seems he has no defense against water. He just sort of freezes and then sinks into the deep. That's a kind of creepy image. Yeah, yeah.

And it does play on some beliefs about vampires. Often at times it's running water, but I think other times just water in general may do the trick.

Even stagnant water will get this one. But anyway, we're up to the climax now. Shiraki has to take the fight to the principal's house. So we come there, and there's going to be a final confrontation and battle.

Yeah, and this is pretty great. It's pretty action-packed. We have the sort of hammer house of horror setting. But the action is pretty intense. It covers multiple floors of the house, I believe. And we're going to have Shiraki battling the principal. And then also Kumi's battling the female vamp as well. So we have like kind of two different battles going on that are eventually going to converge into the one battle. And yeah, just full of attempted stakings, axe throwing, furniture busting. It's really good.

There are weapons that appear that have not been Chekhov'd at all. Like at some point. Shiraki ends up with an ax that we've never seen before in the movie. He just picks it up and he throws it at the principal and hits him in the heart. And we think, oh, we got him. And you see the principal's wife upstairs.

She's attacking Kumi and suddenly she seizes up and they collapse. Like, okay, it's going to be all right now. But then they recover. It's like that wasn't enough. And finally, Shiraki has to kill the principal with a fire poker, which he hammers into the principal's chest with a stool. Yeah.

And then the final moments with the two vampires is I think it's horrifying, but also fittingly sad. And because, you know, they're they're slowly reduced to like these elder forms, especially the principal. Suddenly he's white haired and white flaky skin. And and he's reaching out not to try and hurt our protagonist, but to to touch the hand of this female vampire that he's he's been with all this time.

And it implies a rather complex relationship between these two vampires, you know, born out of blasphemy and curse, out of predation, shame, and then mutual imprisonment. And again, here they are, presumably like the only two of their kind, truly, in this country, you know, that were locked in a casket together for so long and now have, you know, had to live in secret in this strange new world that they emerged into. Yeah.

And then we see them decay rapidly, of course. So we go through, we get the dry oatmeal face, and then that turns into melting face. And we see their flesh liquefy and melt off, and finally just bones are left with a big fire poker sticking out of one of them. Yeah.

They're turned to bones and ash on the floor. And then Shiraki and Kumi embrace. I guess teacher and student will now become married. I don't know.

He doesn't say that. There's a lot of talk of that in the film.

Yeah, I don't know how we're supposed to assume what this ending means for these two characters, but they've been through a lot. Certainly an experience like this could bring you closer together. I just, I don't know what the school's policies are in this sort of thing. There's probably a clause, like in case of encountering vampires, werewolves, or Frankensteins, you know, we'll give a pass. Student-teacher romances, I don't know.

Is he still going to become the next principal?

I don't know if he got that in writing. It's going to be a hard one to convince, right? To convince people on. So I'm not sure. I'm thinking maybe not. He might decide he really wants a different school for his next posting after all.

Yeah.

Though there are a number of openings. They also need a new French literature professor.

Oh, that's true. Yeah.

So yeah, that is Evil of Dracula. Again, just a rollicking good time. I loved it. The only, it just makes me, I mean, I'm happy that I still have two full Bloodthirsty Trilogy films to watch at some point, but I'm also kind of saddened because I kind of want there to be like a full Jayhammer universe in which we also get a Frankenstein film with this kind of flavor, a werewolf film with this kind of flavor and everything else as well.

That would be great.

Yeah. in the same way, you know, that we kind of, that we have like the whole sort of Nashy verse, you know, I really wanted it. I kind of wanted that here as well, but Hey, three films is still a blessing. So I'm happy that we got them.

Okay. Well, do we have anything else on the horror, not horror of Dracula, evil of Dracula, horror of Dracula is a hammer. Yeah. Yeah.

Uh, no, I think that does it. Uh, but again, this was a lot of fun. I'd love to hear anyone out there from anyone out there who has thoughts on this film, um, other films in the bloodthirsty trilogy, uh, or just other takes on the Hammer formula, if you will. Write in, love to hear from you. If anyone ever went to that Toho Theater in Hawaii, I definitely want to hear about that.

Please.

Yeah, and always feel free to write in with your recommendations for the future or comments on current and past episodes of Weird House Cinema, which publishes every Friday in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. We're normally a science and culture podcast, but on Fridays we said most of that aside and we just focused in on a weird movie. during the month of October. These are all going to be horror movies, of course. So stick with us. We've still got a couple of selections to go this month. And yeah, who knows? Sometimes we carry it over into the first week of November as well.

We'll see how we feel.

Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Weirdhouse Cinema: Evil of Dracula

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