Moviestore/ShutterstockIn 1936, Dracula’s Daughter was just another B-movie in the now iconic Universal horror lineup, which produced such classics as The Mummy, Frankenstein, and of course, Dracula. Dracula’s Daughter was and is lesser known, and it featured a troubled production history given shifts in studio leadership, and difficulties in everything from writing, casting, and shooting due to its female lead and queer themes. Some things never change.What did emerge from its brisk, relatively slim 71-minute runtime is still one of the great tragic villains of cinema in Countess Marya Zaleska. Given the subtext of her desires, the Production Code at the time not only demanded her demise, but her status as a predatory monster in one way or another. But thanks to Gloria Holden's hypnotic eyes and elegant performance, Marya Zaleska is treated with dignity, even sympathy. And thus, cinema got its first queer vampire.Many of the writers, credited and not, clearly knew their way around the genre, having penned many a horror screenplay, and would later go on to do the same for far more, both in horror and darker women’s picture films such as Ladies in Retirement and Gaslight. Because compared to the popular western and gangster movies at the time — which were overwhelmingly male centered — horror and melodramas would often champion the concerns of women, and, better yet, introduce complex anti-heroines rarely seen in cinema.So it’s not exactly an anomaly that we are introduced to the Countess before we meet the comparatively boring hero of the story, and get invested in her struggle and her complexities. Picking up where the 1931 Dracula left off, Marya is there to ensure her vampiric father is truly dead; it is also the catalyst for the tragedy of her story. Unlike her father, Marya is truly desperate to be good, to live the life that society deemed normal.As Dracula’s body is reduced to ash, she exults, “Free to live as a woman! Free to take my place in the bright world of the living, instead of in the shadows of the dead.” That resolve doesn’t last, as later that night she finds the hunger hasn’t left her, and she goes out and comes across a handsome young man, shortly thereafter returning home to inform her manservant Sandor (a sinister, amoral Irving Pichel) that there’s blood on her cloak again.The Countess’ seduction of the women of London was a great cause for concern for the censors at the time. | The Legacy Collection/THA/ShutterstockVillains often make or break a story, and the so-called good guy, Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger), never stands a chance. Garth is not only coldly withdrawn as befits the respectable scientific mind of the time, his severity and lack of compassion seem more fitting for the actual villain, which became his niche later in his career. If he often seems like he’s in a different genre altogether, that’s mostly thanks to his secretary Janet (Marguerite Churchill), who often comes across as a screwball comedy heroine messing with her absurdly uptight, straitlaced love interest. Too bad the movie’s obligated to take him seriously, unlike Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, or more accurately, His Girl Friday.But the Countess, still holding out hope for normality, believes Garth can cure her of her dark desires, and she follows his absolutely terrible advice of confronting her obsession head on and summoning the force of will to fight and defeat temptation. And the audiences discover that temptation is a beautiful young woman with bared neck and shoulders. The scene quickly becomes erotically charged, and the subsequent fade out informs audiences that Marya Zaleska has succumbed.She is indeed desperate to be human, and consistently fails at doing so partly due to a nature she can’t fight. The implications are so obvious it’s a wonder it got past the censorship that forbade any mention of lesbianism (among other topics deemed taboo). Even as she proceeds toward the final end we know the movie must give her, it is the Countess who remains the driver of the action, with even the previous movie’s hero Professor Von Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) taking a backseat.Zaleska remains so mesmerizing, in fact, that it is not those deemed upstanding men of society who kill her, but Sandor, who has lost all hope that his dark mistress will give him immortality. And Garth, who has rushed onto the scene in an attempt to save Janet, doesn’t even share a kiss with her at the end. And it is the Countess Marya Zaleska who gets the final word as the camera lingers on her beauty in the final frame, and who would go on to inspire many a vampire talethereafter.Dracula’s Daughter is available to rent on Prime Video and other digital platforms.