Paul Landres’ The Vampire was one of the last vampire films to be released prior to Hammer’s Dracula (1958) and it tries to do something different with a sub-genre that was about to change forever. Produced by Grammercy Pictures, who released it on a double bill with The Monster That Challenged the World (1957) and written by that film’s scriptwriter Pat Fielder, The Vampire tries to give the venerable vampire a modern science fiction spin.

The recently deceased Dr Campbell (Wood Romoff) had been experimenting with the blood of vampire bats. His colleague Paul Beecher (John Beal) retrieves a bottle of pills from Campbell’s office and inevitably, it gets muddled up with his migraine medication by his young daughter Betsy (Lydia Reed). He becomes addicted to the medication but also undergoes a strange metamorphosis, suffering blackouts during which he transforms into a monster that uses his virus-infected saliva to cause heart failure in his victims. His colleague, Will Beaumont (Dabbs Greer), tells him that Campbell was working on a way to regress animals to a more primitive state and Sheriff Buck Donnelly (Kenneth Tobey) starts sniffing around, coming close to exposing Beecher and his rampages.

In truth, despite the title, it’s really a variation on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde rather than a straightforward vampire film, the pills unleashing a darker side of Beecher’s personality that only incidentally causes him to bite people’s necks. He’s a “vampire” who is still very much alive and who wanders around the picket-fence suburbs in broad daylight. He’s a human monster, an addict to something he can’t control, rather than the Gothic monster that Hammer would re-establish as the default image of the vampire the following year.

It’s a good enough idea that doesn’t quite work, let down by a sub-standard vampire make-up effect and shoddy transformation scenes. The transformation adds nothing to the story, and it would have worked just as well if Beecher had just remained human and gone on a murderous rampage, a dangerous psychotic convinced by his addiction that he’s one of the undead.

But as with The Monster That Challenged the World, Pat Fielder gives her characters a bit more depth than you might be accustomed to from a 1950s B film. It’s a smartly written thriller with a strong central performance from John Beal who conveys the horror of Beecher’s condition with some conviction. He’s the monster lurking in respectable suburbia until he finally meets one of the most ignominious ends of any 50s “monster”, dying in the contents of a sewage outlet pipe.

Fielder’s script isn’t as well paced as the one she wrote for The Monster That Challenged the World (which itself sagged in the mid-section) and would have benefited from more time and money to facilitate one more pass at it to file off some of the rough edges. She’s lumbered with the unenviable task of trying to approach vampirism from a scientific angle three years after Richard Matheson had written the final word on the subject with his excellent novel, I am Legend.

The Vampire isn’t a terrible film by any means, but nor is it particularly memorable or exciting one. It’s an OK time-filler, nicely acted and with a few impressive moments scattered here and there (a nocturnal chase scene with some hand-held camera for example) but it’s hardly essential viewing. Fielder and Landres made the rather better The Return of Dracula for Gramercy the following year and The Flame Barrier, again for Grammercy that same year.