Here is an amazing midnight-movie adventure, in the shape of the 1994 Dracula’s daughter horror romance from indie film-maker Michael Almereyda. It’s a lo-fi indie gem shot partly in indistinct monochrome, featuring dreamlike transitions and looming closeups, like something from early cinema. It was bankrolled and executive-produced by David Lynch, who appears in a cameo role as the morgue attendant where the deceased count’s remains are temporarily residing.
The story is that Dracula has recently died (“He was like Elvis at the end, going through the motions ...”), and his unquiet spirit lives on in the form of his impossibly glamorous and aristocratic daughter, played with much hauteur and predatory sexuality by Romanian actor Elina Löwensohn. According to her, incidentally, the full family name is “Ceausescu-Dracula” (the script elsewhere alludes to the revolution of 1989) and I repeat here my plea that Romanian director Radu Jude makes a biopic of the late Romanian dictator. However, her ailing brother Edgar (Jared Harris) thinks it is “Ionescu-Dracula”. Did we mishear?
Dracula fille’s first name is Nadja, in homage to the elusive and troubled heroine of André Breton’s surrealist novel-slash-prose-poem, and she has a manservant called Renfield, whom she describes as her “slave”; he is named after the character in Bram Stoker’s novel and who is Irish, perhaps in homage to Stoker himself. Nadja and Renfield remove the count’s remains from New York, and then journey to find her brother Edgar, to revive him from his indolent sick bed, where he has been developing a tendresse for his nurse Cassandra (Suzy Amis). As for Nadja, she seduces and makes a quasi-vampiric zombie of innocent Lucy (Galaxy Craze), who is married to Jim (Martin Donovan); his uncle just so happens to be Professor Van Helsing, a wonderfully droll, eccentric role for Peter Fonda. The action finally moves to Transylvania, at which point there’s a touch of Mel Brooks, and no less disturbing for that. (There is another touch of Brooks in the huge gag involving a harp.)
Nadja appeared a year before Abel Ferrara’s delirious New York vampire movie masterpiece The Addiction, another monochrome NYC horror fantasy whose extraordinary description of human-into-vampire metamorphosis, in the person of Lili Taylor, makes it in my view a little more interesting (although Nadja has some brilliant poetic barbs in its script). Van Helsing broods on the importance of menstruation and declares that it confers superior wisdom on women: “Once a month their bodies let them know that nature is a continuous disaster ...” (Very 90s non-PC material, this.) In a testy mood, Nadja snaps to Cassandra: “Our bodies are so complicated and ugly!” – “Compared to what?” – “Plants! Look at a leaf, look at a fern ...!” These are lines that Jacques Prévert might have given to the great French actress Arletty to say in some lost scene of Les Enfants du Paradis.
All these great lines are intoned doomily within that faint ambient echo, like a distant wind or grind of industrial machinery, or the almost inaudible moan of lost souls in hell – a sound design mannerism that I associate a little with Lynch, perhaps more now with Nicolas Winding Refn. It’s a contemporary vampire treat.
• Nadja is in UK cinemas from 7 August.
