Original title: La saga de los Drácula

Argentine director León Klimovsky signed up with Spanish producers Profilmes in 1973 to direct a brace of horror films that ended up paired on double bills (the other was the Paul Naschy vehicle La rebelión de las muertas/Vengeance of the Zombies (1973)). Profilmes had scored a hit with another Naschy film, El espanto surge de la tumba/Horror Rises from the Tomb (1973), and enthusiastically plunged into the booming world of Spanish horror, keeping Klimovsky, fellow directors Amando de Ossorio and Carlos Aured and particularly the polymath Naschy gainfully employed for several years. The grandly titled The Dracula Saga was the first fiction feature film to make use of Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu’s since discredited attempts to tie the fictional Dracula to the real Vlad the Impaler in their book In Search of Dracula, a notion that would gain much traction in the film and television world in coming years.

The pregnant Berta (Tina Sáinz) is a long-lost relative of the Dracula family and she returns to the family castle with husband Hans (Tony Isbert) where her grandfather Dracula (Narciso Ibáñez Menta) rules over what’s left of the once noble line, descended from Vlad III, comprising the much younger Munia (Helga Liné) and Berta’s cousins and childhood playmates Xenia (María Kosty) and Irina (Cristina Suriani). The family has been afflicted by what the melancholy Count calls a genetic disease and hopes for the continuation of the family line are pinned on Berta’s baby.

There are plenty of odd bits of business here and there, including an opening, lens-smeared-with-Vaseline nightmare sequence featuring a bat-faced monster, later a one-eyed mutant offspring kept locked up in the attic and inexplicable use of a strange, gauze-like filter applied to some scenes for no good reason. The script, by “Lazarus Kaplan”, a joint pseudonym for Emilio Martínez Lázaro and Juan Tébar, introduces some intriguing new wrinkles on established vampire mythology – Han’s extra-marital dalliance with Munia seems to transmit the vampire gene to his unborn son after he then sleeps with Berta, and the child starts to feed from his mother in vitero.

But as anyone who’s watched more than a few 70s Spanish horrors will attest, there is a tendency for them to err towards the melodramatic though here the mood is chillier and more restrained than usual, reflected in the more composed performances and a less hammy English dub than usual. Sadly, that other trait of Iberian horrors of the era, a leaden pace, is all too evident and the first half of the film is impeded by too much wandering about the castle and still rather tentative sex scenes. Things pick up immeasurably once the rest of the family is introduced, the pace quickening and driving headlong to a bloody finale in which an insane Berta, having given birth to her blood-thirsty son alone, goes on an exe-wielding, vengeful rampage around the family crypt, seemingly putting an end to the Dracula saga once and for all… only for a disturbing prologue to have Dracula’s disembodied voice informing us that he lives on in Berta’s new born son, seen eagerly lapping up blood falling on his face.

The key attraction here is Menta, the film’s key asset – he’s everything here and without him, The Dracula Saga would just be another run-of-the-mill Spanish Gothic. He’d already played the Count on Argentine television, in the mini-series Otra vez Drácula (1970), and would play him again in Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s Navidad en el castillo de Drácula (1992), an episode of the popular game show Un, dos, tres… responda otra vez (1972-2004), adapted for British television as 3-2-1 (1978-1987). Here, with his white hair and beard, he’s rather more the image of Bram Stoker’s Dracula than we were used to on screen, perhaps his only antecedent being Christopher Lee in Jesús Franco’s Nachts, wenn Dracula erwacht/Count Dracula (1970). His Dracula is one of the best, often overlooked in favour of more obvious candidates like Lee, Lugosi and lesser names, but it deserves more love than it sometimes gets. It’s a forceful and dignified take on the character, shot through with a real melancholy and as soon as he turns up the film steps up a gear or two and finally starts to deliver on its promise.

With its emphasis on the family business of a clan of vampires, The Dracula Saga feels not unlike a Spanish take on Dan Curtis’ Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows (1966-1971), two feature film spin-offs from which had recently been released – House of Dark Shadows (1970) and Night of Dark Shadows (1971). The Dracula Saga is the more interesting take on the idea and, despite some of the expected longueurs (characters do like to talk at great length about what’s going on around them), is a commendably creepy and atmospheric variation on a theme already well-worn by 1973. While Hammer Films and the more forward-looking American producers were bringing the vampire into the twentieth century with films like the aforementioned Dark Shadows spin-offs, and the Count Yorga and Blacula films, this was a pleasing throwback to a Gothic tradition already looking under threat from a new strain of screen horror (it was released in the same year as The Exorcist and a year before The Texas Chain Saw Massacre).

Klimovsky was already near the end of his career when he started making horror films (his last big screen outing would bin in 1978 with the drama La doble historia del Dr. Valmy with only episodes of the television series La barraca (1979) left to come) but he certainly made his mark on the still developing Spanish horror film – he’d made his first film with Paul Naschy in 1971, La noche de Walpurgis/The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman/Werewolf Shadow and would work with him again on Doctor Jekyll y el Hombre Lobo/Dr. Jekyll vs. The Werewolf (1972), La rebelión de las muertas, El mariscal del infierno/Devil’s Possessed (1974) and Último deseo/The People Who Own the Dark (1976) and without him on La orgía nocturna de los vampiros/The Vampire’s Night Orgy (1973), Odio mi cuerpo/I Hate My Body (1974), El extraño amor de los vampiros/Strange Love of the Vampires (1975) and Violación fatal/Trauma (1978). The Dracula Saga remains among his best work in the genre.