Last night's late movie was BLOOD OF DRACULA (1957) which should have been titled I WAS A TEENAGE VAMPIRE... set in an exclusive girls' school. Among the faculty is Miss Branding (Louise Lewis), who is "experimenting" to prove the existence of a "terrible power" within each human that would make the pursuit of atomic bombs an irrelevance. Miss Branding, whose experiments involve hypnosis using an elaborately carved medallion which came from a "legendary" region of the Carpathian mountains, seemed quite reminiscent of a certain obsessed lady doctor who debuted on
Dark Shadows ten years after this film was released, in the Summer of 1967. I should stress that Miss Branding seemed to foreshadow the original concept of Julia Hoffman--which altered considerably thanks to the genius and popularity of Grayson Hall in the role. The frustrated, coded-as-lesbian scientist in the 1957 film did not meet so kindly a fate.
Complete film here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN-37tFJcNQ&t=1sG.
