Abigail’s Big Sisters: A Short History of Dracula’s Other Daughters

The pint-sized ballerina at the center of 'Abigail' is part of a decades-old tradition of Dracula spawn.

It’s 2024’s worst-kept secret that the title character of Abigail, the new movie from the Radio Silence team of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, is a pint-sized vampire. The poster hints at this, the trailer gives it away, and if anyone was paying attention to the press releases around the film, they’d know it was originally titled Dracula’s Daughter. And though the Daddy Vampire played by Matthew Goode who shows up in the film’s final scenes isn’t ever called Dracula by name, the implication is pretty clear. Abigail isn’t just any tiny vampire dancer, she’s the daughter of the big guy himself. 

That makes her a member of a crowded branch of Dracula’s family tree. Though you’d think all the bloodsucking and villager-menacing would keep Dracula too busy for parental duties, movies have depicted his offspring since shortly after Bela Lugosi dawned his cape, even though Bram Stoker’s novel makes no reference to Dracusons or Dracudaughters. It sort of makes sense, though. Assuming Dracula was not rendered infertile by vampirism, he does have all those Brides hanging around the castle. Perhaps nature must take its course even amongst its undead abominations.

We’ll leave Dracula’s male offspring for another time—perhaps one will show up in an Abigail sequel—but it’s perhaps worth noting that female offspring outnumber them by a healthy margin, in movies at least. That Universal’s 1943 film Son of Dracula cast Lon Chaney Jr. in a role way outside his range might have squelched enthusiasm for such stories early on. Or maybe, with Dracula already out there casting a morbidly masculine erotic allure, it has felt like an opening existed for a female counterpart with an ancestral claim on the Dracula estate.

The first arrived in 1936 via the appropriately titled Dracula’s Daughter. Nominally adapted from the Bram Stoker short story “Dracula’s Guest,” the film opens just moments after the conclusion of Dracula, as a couple of bobbies find the body of Renfield and discover Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan, the sole holdover from 1931’s Dracula) admitting he’s killed Dracula. Except he didn’t “kill” him, as the bloodsucker was already dead, an excuse that falls they regard as legally iffy. To defend himself, he turns to psychiatrist Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger), believing he’s just the man to prove his innocence.

The logic of the Lambert Hillyer-directed film is, to put it mildly, a little loose. But it’s really the atmosphere and emotions that matter anyway. This was the last of the first wave of Universal horror movies—1939’s Son of Frankenstein marks the beginning of a new phase—so maybe it’s fitting that the film returns to the world of the film that made Hollywood monster mad in the early 1930s and features the cycle’s most sympathetic “monster”—at least at first. 

Dracula’s Daughter introduces Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden) as a hooded figure with an unusual ring that gives her mesmeric powers that she uses to retrieve the body of her father from the morgue. But her designs are on destroying it, not reviving it. She and her companion Sandor (Irving Pichel), a sort of hulking, less talkative Renfield, burn Dracula’s body and even call on God to make sure he never returns, even holding a cross as she makes her prayer. “Free! Free forever!,” she tells Sandor. “Free to live as a woman. Free to take my place in the bright world of the living instead of the dark shadows of the dead.” “Perhaps,” he replies.

But Marya’s not as free as she hopes. She still has to live by night. And though she tells Sandor, “I can live a normal life now. Think normal things, even play normal music again,” as she sits behind a piano keyboard the music takes a sinister turn despite her best efforts, confirming her doubts. Soon she’ll discover other compulsions haven’t left her, either, as she takes to the streets of London to seek out victims.

Though we first see Marya mesmerizing a top-hatted man about town then draining his blood (off screen, but it’s clear what happens), it’s her next attack that sets Dracula’s Daughter apart. With Sandor’s help, Marya lures a pretty, down-on-her-luck woman named Lili (Nan Grey) back to her Chelsea studio for a modeling job, a legit enough request as Marya is also an artist. As Marya is making a head-and-shoulders study, it makes sense that Lili would need to take off her top and pull down the shoulder straps of her undergarments. But the way Marya looks at her suggests some mix of lust and sinister designs even before she transfixes Lili with her ring. She then moves closer and closer until, as the camera pans up, Lili lets out a scream.