“Lake of Dracula” Japanese Theatrical Poster
Director: Michio Yamamoto
Writer: Ei Ogawa, Masaru Takesue
Cast: Midori Fujita, Sanae Emi, Choei Takahashi, Shin Kishida, Tadao Futami, Mika Katsuragi, Setsuko Kawaguchi, Tatsuo Matsushita, Yasuzo Ogawa, Haruo Suzuki
Running Time: 81 min.
By Kyle Warner
In Vampire Doll, the first film of Michio Yamamoto’s Bloodthirsty Trilogy, the director made a vampire movie that wasn’t much of a vampire movie. The Vampire Doll is this strange, dreamlike tale of devotion to the undead playing out in a spooky house in the woods. For the second film of the trilogy, Lake of Dracula (aka Bloodthirsty Eyes), Yamamoto crafts a story more in tune with vampire lore – here we get wooden stakes, a coffin, and a dude with pointy fangs who wears a cape. But just like the previous film, Yamamoto is not interested in telling the usual sort of vampire story. For while the surface details all tell you that Lake of Dracula is a vampire horror film, the underlying details tell a story about women’s fear of men.
Akiko (Midori Fujita) is a young teacher and artist. Her latest painting (and we are led to believe much of her previous work) is devoted to an obsession within herself that she cannot understand, depicting a sinister golden eye looking over a lake. Throughout the film, that painting can be seen in the background of many a scene, like an oppressive force always watching over Akiko. In one of the early scenes, her dog Leo runs off ahead of her and she shouts for him to return. The moment, though trivial on the surface because the dog quickly returns, awakens memories of a recurring dream in which Akiko as a child followed her dog (also named Leo) into a house where she witnessed something horrible. She shares the dream with her sister Natsuko (Sanae Emi) and her boyfriend Dr. Saeki (Choei Takahashi) and both write it off as her subconscious messing with her. But we soon learn it is more than that; it’s not a dream but a repressed memory of the moment when her childhood innocence was shattered and a lingering anxiety took over her life.
Things get weird in Akiko’s life when her neighbor (Kaku Takushina), who runs a commercial boathouse, accepts an unexpected delivery of a long rectangular box. The box’s shipment was ordered by a stranger named Dracula (the only mention of Dracula in the film, despite the title) but there seems to be no other record of who it was intended for. Curious, the neighbor opens the box, revealing a coffin, and thus unleashing a vampire onto the lake.
The neighbor is bitten by the vampire and turned into a slave. When Akiko sees the neighbor next, he lunges at her, knocks her out, and drags her off. Akiko doesn’t think it’s the act of a supernatural villain but rather that her neighbor, a friendly man she’s known for a long time now, has suddenly decided to rape her. When she tries to tell this to her sister and boyfriend, they either suggest she misunderstood the situation or shrug it off. And in their disbelief, they become adversaries as Akiko begins to feel less and less safe.
Lake of Dracula is a film about a girl who saw a vampire as a child and then grew up to meet that vampire again and realize the cause for her nightmares, yes. But it’s easy to read it as a film about trauma (of a sexual or a violent nature) leaving a lasting, misunderstood effect on a woman and making her life worse as a result. When totally innocent men step in to help Akiko after she is nearly attacked by the vampire (again, she sees it as a potential rape), she sees even her saviors as potential threats. And because vampires are often the most sexualized movie monster, using the vampire as a way to talk about sexual trauma seems an interesting and obvious choice to me.
Lake of Dracula employs too many of the old school scares like a hand on the shoulder and birds flying out of the bushes to really surprise you with shocks. But the anxiety and suspense it creates as we watch our heroine worrying over locked doors and windows works pretty well. So much of the film rests on the shoulders of lead actress Midori Fujita and I thought she handled the workload well. What’s surprising is that this is the first of only a small handful of films for the actress. Sanae Emi, who plays the sister Natsuko, also had a very short film career, with Lake of Dracula the third and final film of her filmography.
Shin Kishida (Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla) plays the vampire with two modes, entitled playboy in a fancy scarf and bloodsucking monster. The makeup doesn’t play the best when he’s not expressing monstrous intent, but when the fangs come out and the eyes glow gold Kishida makes for an impressive vampire. Kishida’s vamp is not onscreen that often, but in the final act the vampire and the horror effects crew give us more than a few nasty surprises. There is a great moment of body horror as a long-dormant body is disturbed that made me squirm, so props for that.
Riichiro Manabe provides a weird musical score that calls to mind the rubbery squelching sounds of his Godzilla vs. Hedorah score from the same year. Cinematographer Rokuro Nishigaki’s dark, shadowy visuals lack the dreamlike haze of Vampire Doll but still makes the film look better than its budget probably suggested it should. And screenwriters Ei Ogawa (Space Amoeba) and Masaru Takesue (Evil of Dracula) do interesting work by balancing the underlying themes while also having its cast of intellectual characters seriously discuss whether they’re dealing with vampires on a lake.
There’s a point early on in the film where Natsuko teases her sister by saying that she plans to write a paper on the themes of “women’s latent terrors.” Maybe Lake of Dracula didn’t need to spell it out for us but it works regardless. Lake of Dracula is a nervy horror story that looks familiar but has more on its mind than the usual bloodsucking vampire tale.
Kyle Warner’s Rating: 7.5/10
