Movie Review: The Vampire (1957) directed by Paul Landre
Dr. Paul Beecher (John Beal) is a typical small-town doctor of the 1950s. He has an office in his house staffed by new pretty nurse Carol Butler (Coleen Gray), and also makes house calls. A widower, he lives with his young (11-12) daughter Betsy (Lydia Reed), who cooks for him when not taking ballet and piano lessons (the teachers can’t afford to pay their medical bills in money.) Dr. Beecher is friends with the police chief, Buck Donnelly (Kenneth Tobey) who hasn’t had much to do since an axe murder a few years ago. But lately, things have not been well with the doctor. He’s been getting blackout migraines, and each time he does so, someone turns up dead!
This horror movie doesn’t use most of the supernatural vampire lore, as the mechanism is explained by dubious science instead. The most notable carryovers are the blood thing due to pills made from vampire bats, and puncture wounds in the necks of the victims. (Actual cause of death: capillary disintegration.) Dr. Beecher is the tragic kind of monster, infected by accident and initially not realizing what’s happened to him. Once he begins to work it out, his conscience moves him to trying to protect his loved ones and eventually the community from himself.
My favorite character was Henry Winston (James Griffith), a researcher who in a different movie would have been the primary suspect of the vampire attacks. He wears dark glasses even at night due to light sensitivity caused by a tragic past, primarily works at night, and has an off-putting personality. He’s comically blunt and only interested in science, but seems to mean well. You could make a case for him being neurodivergent, or just eccentric.
Overall, the writing and acting are decent, conveying the feeling of a typical small town possibly a bit further south (based on the glimpse of a lawn jockey in the doctor’s yard) than north. The opening, where a delivery boy about Betsy’s age (Brad Morrow) pedals his bike to incongruously sinister music, then finds researcher Matt Campbell (Wood Romoff) stricken and summons Dr. Beecher, sets the tone nicely.
Content note: several people are killed on screen; we see a severely deteriorated corpse later in a bit of a jump scare. A character is interrupted trying to commit suicide. The pills are treated like addictive drugs. Lab animals die between scenes, we only see their corpses afterward.
While this movie by no means makes it into the “great” category, it’s very serviceable and watchable. It might do well as a scary movie for family night, with parents on hand for explaining how things worked in the 1950s and reassurance during the monster scenes.
