The Vampire Doll (1970)

directed by Michio Yamamoto

Japan

71 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is the first, and most obscure, of what would eventually become Michio Yamamoto's "Bloodthirsty Trilogy", comprising The Vampire Doll, Lake of Dracula, and Evil of Dracula. It is odd (to me) that the first film in a trilogy should also be the one that's generally regarded as not being as good as the others, but that's the situation here. The word "trilogy" is kind of used loosely, as the three movies are only vaguely connected to each other - the last two more so than this one, which is essentially a stand-alone film - but I much prefer the latter two because they feature Shin Kishida as maybe my favorite on-screen Dracula of all time.

(Also, as a sidenote, this is my third time attempting to watch this movie; the first two times the file was either corrupt or too large and just buffered endlessly. I think the difficulty I've had in procuring a watchable file of this goes to show that it really is more obscure than Lake of Dracula, the trilogy's standout hit, which you can probably just buy off the internet or something.)

The film begins when Sagawa, who we're sort of lead to believe will be our main character, is summoned to the remote country estate of his girlfriend Yuko, only to find that he's arrived too late and that she died in a car crash some time ago.  I'm not entirely sure about the specifics of their relationship, it's a little strange to me that he was spending six months away in the city while she was hanging out at her mom's place, but hey, whatever. There's no real plot reason for this, it just kind of seems to be the way the two characters were doing things for their own personal reasons. But anyway,  Sagawa ends up staying over at his girlfriend's mother's house, and things are as chock-full of red flags as they could possibly be. Mysterious wailing sounds and impossible visions of his deceased girlfriend plague Sagawa until finally he is lured outside by one of these visions, and the last we see of him until the final act is when his apparently reanimated girlfriend overpowers him. Again, there's no real reason to think Sagawa is not going to be the main character if you don't know anything at all about this movie, so it's a bit surprising that he disappears from the screen so early on.

He is replaced with his sister and her boyfriend (played by future Godzilla Prime Minister Akira Nakao) who follow him to the house and then fake a busted car as an excuse to stay over and snoop around. Everything around them at this point is indicating that something seriously weird is going on at the crumbling, once-beautiful country house; the townspeople seem to know that there's some suspicious aura surrounding the place, not only because of the tragic story behind Yuko's parentage and the death of most of her family, which is apparently an open secret in the town. The two start hearing the same strange noises in the night as Sagawa did, and are menaced by Yuko's mother and her ever-loyal silent butler, but remain determined to get to the bottom of Sagawa's disappearance.

This is a very short film at 71 minutes, but its compact nature works to squeeze all the creepiness into one condensed cup of perfect gothic horror. It's unsettling because while we do know a little bit more than the characters do about what's happening, we still don't know why; we can, in our heads, warn Keiko Sagawa and her boyfriend that there's a weird corpse hanging around, but even we are blind to certain elements of the story. I like the Bloodthirsty Trilogy specifically because it plays so loosely with the concept of what a vampire is. The film's original title notably does not use the word "kyūketsu", which is what generally gets translated as "vampire", but the title does imply that Yuko sucks blood, so... I don't know, man, don't worry about it. Maybe she's just a miscellaneous blood-sucking fiend who does not feel the need to adopt the title of "vampire". But this vagueness is good! This allows for more freedom to give Yuko a backstory that is really genuinely chilling. We find out that the murderous acts she's committed are entirely against her will, and in moments when she manages to break through the spell she's under, she begs anybody around to kill her. I will keep the exact details vague because the whole story is complex and really upsetting, but the end result is that Yuko is stuck as a revenant, only partially in control of herself, haunting the landscape in a perpetual state of limbo. It's awful when you think about it.

Yukiko Kobayashi has experience playing a doll, from her time in Ultraseven as Zero One, an uncanny humanoid robot used in a plot to make toys come to life and attack people. I have little doubt that that role directly inspired her performance in The Vampire Doll, and may have even landed her the part, given how similar Zero One and Yuko look. She clearly has a talent for putting on a perfectly blank face while somehow giving off a threatening aura at the same time. This film also introduces what would become a recurring element throughout the trilogy, which is that yellow irises denote a vampire - I don't remember this ever being used in any other vampire media; as far as I know it's unique to these movies, but I really love it for some reason. The contacts look horrendous to wear, but the effect is creepy.

All in all, although it feels like it lacks the "staying power" that Lake and Evil of Dracula have, this is a really eerie film dripping in gothic atmosphere and hidden tragedy. There's not a lot of real grab-you-by-the-shoulders scary moments, but the sparse horror imagery that is there leaves an impression. We may never see Yuko suck anybody's blood, but one of the most horrifying moments of the whole film is when we see for a brief second what she did to Sagawa. Yuko's death scene is also strongly reminiscent of the vampire's deaths in the following two films, although in this case she takes a fairly normal amount of time to die and doesn't spend literally about ten minutes in the process of dying (I say this with nothing but affection in my heart for Lake of Dracula). The lack of connectedness between this and the rest of the trilogy makes them not quite gel together if you're doing a marathon of them, but The Vampire Doll is highly underrated and I wish I would hear more people talk about it.