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Popular Culture Review
effectively repel the ongoing attacks by Dracula’s vampire brides whenever they
swoop down on the village. Indeed, Anna’s counter is to mn in order to escape
the bride’s talons, and she is only saved early in the film when the sun
conveniently peeks out from behind the clouds—a convention Sommers
incorporates inconsistently throughout the remainder of the film. At other times,
Anna succumbs to a Van Helsing gas grenade when she intends to stalk down
her werewolf brother, Velkan (Will Kemp), and later she prevents the hunter
from shooting her brother in the town’s graveyard by knocking Van Helsing’s
arm aside. Perhaps more telling, however, is the fact she lacks the toughness to
kill Velkan when she has the opportunity to eradicate him and the problems
caused the villagers and the hunters by his lycanthropy.
Admittedly, Anna successfully dispatches the last of Dracula’s brides
during one of the film’s climactic facedowns, and she saves Van Helsing from
the curse of the werewolf after he has killed Dracula. Of course, she dies at this
point, to be cremated as she joins her family beyond the creamy clouds that have
surfaced in the sky as a result of her and Van Helsing’s cleansing of the land.
This time, then, Sommers makes certain we recognize the lead female is more
trouble than she is worth by knocking her off so Van Helsing may ride on to a
possible sequel without any personal ties distracting him from his job.
Dracula’s three brides also appear as vibrant, independent women at the
film’s outset, but as the plot progresses we recognize they are totally under the
Count’s control. Thus, they are little more than replaceable parts to Dracula who
repeatedly dispatches them to take care of his dirty work while offering little to
them in return. Any doubt regarding this relationship is taken care of during a
scene set in Dracula’s castle shortly af ter Van Helsing arrives in Transylvania as
the Count and the brides discuss the grand plan to bring their offspring to life.
There is little confusion about who is in ciiarge here as Dracula alternates from
bombastic dictator to loving protector in the flick of a phrase, requesting of his
brides, “No, no, no. Do not fear me, you must not fear me, everyone else fears
me.” As is the nonn with Sommers’s evil personages, all three brides and Count
Dracula are done away with by the film’s conclusion.
In From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies,
Molly Haskell identifies “the big lie,” Western society’s perpetuation of the
“idea of women’s inferiority, a lie so deeply ingrained in our social behavior that
merely to recognize it is to risk unraveling the entire fabric of civilization” (1).
Haskell goes on to note, “In the movie business we have had an industry
dedicated for the most part to reinforcing the lie” (2). Haskell wrote these words
in her seminal text in 1973, and one would expect the social, statutory, and legal
changes that have occurred since then to have resulted in more balanced
treatment for the distaff side of cinema’s cast of characters. The intervening
years since Haskell’s publication, however, beg the question of gender equality.
When a writer/director publicly claims to be creating strong female characters
equal to their male counterparts, and a close analysis of these women shows the