In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Shadows of Shadow of a Doubt Adam Knee T he Return of Dracula (1958) is hardly a distinguished film as American horror films go—a low-budget production at a time of a low ebb in the genre, horror having been largely supplanted by science fiction throughout the 1950s. Both in fact remained largely disreputable genres during the decade, rarely commanding “A treatment” and instead serving as fodder for drive-in double bills. The seventy-seven-minute film mentioned here, produced by the small independent company Gramercy Pictures, was itself variously released (by United Artists) on double bills with the genre films The Flame Barrier (1958) and House of the Living (1958).1 As such lowbudget fare goes, however, The Return of Dracula is a reasonably entertaining film, with passable acting, an intermittently strong sense of atmosphere, and several extremely striking scenes—none more so than a staking scene where the film stock suddenly switches from monochrome to color in a gloriously bloody close-up. Moreover, in its attempt to resurrect a moribund genre and give it a New World context, The Return of Dracula utilizes the novel plot device of having the vampire find lodging with a California family who think he’s a long-lost relative and only gradually become aware of his true nature. This means of getting the vampire to the west coast of the United States is all the more unusual in that it strongly echoes a central premise of a major Hollywood success of fifteen years earlier—the Alfred Hitchcock film Shadow of a Doubt (1943)—and it is for this reason that this largely marginal horror film will receive closer scrutiny in this essay. In fact, not just the central premise—murderous relative comes to live with unsuspecting California family—is borrowed; numerous elements of the earlier film seem to be resurrected here in vampiric—or, perhaps more 50 the return of the repressed to the point, vampirized—form. There is again an opening flight from the authorities, an arrival at a California train station involving disguise and subterfuge . There is again a relationship with a teenage woman in the household who feels a deep connection to the visitor and for whom the visitor represents excitement. There is again a visitation to the household by a less-thanforthcoming government agent in pursuit of the visitor. There is again eventually an attempt by the visitor against the young woman’s life, which ends when the visitor has a fatal fall. Certainly many audience members familiar with the Hitchcock text could have drawn the connection. Indeed, there is even a marked allusion to a celebrated Hitchcock transition in one of the opening sequences of the film: when the vampire claims his first victim on a train, there is a cut from the screaming victim to the scream of the train’s whistle, much like the cut from the scream of the landlady finding a corpse in The 39 Steps (1935). On the surface this may sound like a relatively self-conscious remake—citing both a prior film and the renowned style of the director of that film—and a later interview with the scriptwriter in fact confirms that the Hitchcock film “had an influence.”2 Nevertheless, The Return of Dracula differs from most remakes in quite a few ways and therefore makes an interesting “test case” for our understanding of what constitutes a remake and how it functions with respect to its sources. A first difference is that the film’s credits make no acknowledgment of any prior source (neither the original story for Shadow of a Doubt by Gordon McDonnell, nor its screenplay); it simply lists an original story and screenplay by Pat Fiedler. Thomas M. Leitch argues that it is a central tendency of remakes to disavow the prior film text, citing instead the shared literary source material, as a strategy to simultaneously suggest both similarity and superiority.3 One could in one sense describe The Return of Dracula’s not even citing a shared source as an extreme instance of such disavowal. However, I think the functioning of this disavowal is a bit different than in the texts Leitch cites: Return doesn’t really have pretenses to be a superior version of Shadow. If it is to be described as a remake, it would have to be as a debased one, a degeneration of an “A picture” by a top director to a “B picture” from a marginal production out...

Share