Count Dracula’s Great Love (1973)

Count Dracula’s Great Love is a 1973 Spanish gothic horror movie starring Paul Naschy. It starts off giving the impression that it’s going to be a by-the-numbers Dracula movie but then takes some very surprising turns. Javier Aguirre was the director and co-writer. The original idea seems to have been Naschy’s. Naschy co-wrote the screenplay. It’s now available in a superb Blu-Ray presentation from Vinegar Syndrome.

The setting is the late 19th century. It seems to be exactly the sort of setting and time period you’d expect in a stock-standard Dracula movie.

It begins with five young people, a man and four women, in a carriage near the Borgo Pass. The man, Imre, points out that they are near the spot where Jonathan Harker and Van Helsing had their final encounter with Dracula. Imre believes that Dracula was real.

You may be a little surprised that anyone in the late 19th century would allow four very pretty young unmarried girls to go traveling without a chaperone, accompanied only by a young man. Especially given the budding romance between Imre and one of the girls, Marlene.

The carriage meets with a minor accident, and the coachman meets with a fatal accident. Luckily the five young people are passing Dr Marlow’s sanatorium. Dr Marlow (Paul Naschy) insists that they take advantage of his hospitality until their carriage can be repaired.

One of the girls, Karen (Haydée Politoff), finds a book in Dr Marlow’s library. It is Van Helsing’s memoirs. Van Helsing tells of a legend that Dracula needs to find a true virgin. If he has normal (non-vampiric) sex with her his powers will be fully restored. Karen is horrified but excited.

The viewer is not going to be the least bit surprised that there are vampires wandering about the sanatorium. It doesn’t take long for the first of the girls to be recruited into the ranks of the Undead.

Dr Marlow is a dedicated scientist and physician and a kind charming man. The girls are reassured by his presence.

We get the kind of stuff we expect in a vampire movie, until we start to realise that there’s something else going on. When we find out why Dracula needs a virgin we realise just how radically this movie is going to depart from the conventions of the vampire movie.

These departures are so interesting that I’m not going to give any more hints about the way the plot will develop.

This was an incredibly interesting time for the vampire movie. Film-makers like Jess Franco (in Vampyros Lesbos in 1970), Jean Rollin (in movies like The Nude Vampire in 1970 and Requiem for a Vampire in 1971), Stephanie Rothman (in The Velvet Vampire in 1971) and José Larraz (in Vampyres in 1974) were taking the vampire film Ito all sorts of new directions. It’s clear that Naschy and Aguirre were part of that trend. Their approach was however a little different - they made a vampire film that looked totally conventional but was very different thematically.

What Naschy and Aguirre give us is not just a Dracula who is capable of love, but a Dracula for whom love becomes the primary motivation. On the audio commentary Naschy makes the point, quite correctly, that the ideas that excited people about Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Dracula were all present in Count Dracula’s Great Love nearly twenty years earlier. Those ideas are developed differently, but the basic concepts are the same.

Naschy of course is best-known for his many movies about a troubled sympathetic werewolf. Here he’s offering us a vampire with both moral and emotional complexity.

Naschy’s movies do tend to have very high trashiness and sleaze levels. Personally I like trashy sleazy movies so that doesn’t bother me. It’s fascinating here to see trashiness and sleaze combined with clever ideas and also combined with a deep respect for the traditional horror movie.

Aguirre and Naschy were very careful to include all of the traditional gothic horror visual elements. They were going to take the story in unexpected directions but they wanted it to be a gothic horror movie. Naschy believed very strongly in respecting the conventions of the genre.

Count Dracula’s Great Love manages to be intelligent, emotionally nuanced, clever, provocative, trashy and sleazy all at once. And it works on all those levels.

This movie has been available for years on DVD in truly wretched transfers. Vinegar Syndrome recently released it on Blu-Ray (the uncut “unclothed” version) and it now looks terrific. The Blu-Ray includes an excellent commentary track with Paul Naschy and Javier Aguirre.

The Vinegar Syndrome release provides a good opportunity to reassess a movie that has in the past been rather disparaged. It’s a fine movie that really does deserve a reassessment. Highly recommended.