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"The Vampire's Coffin" (1958) opens with Doctor Marion and his hired thug, Baraza, robbing a mausoleum of its most interesting corpse: that of Count Levad, whose chest sports a fat wooden stake and a costly trinket. Doc Marion's aim is to crack the scientific secrets of the corpse's strange relationship to mirrors; Baraza, attempting to pinch Levad's necklace yanks out the stake frees the vampire to look up his old flame, Martha.
Played by German Rubles, Levad is an elegant menace, a vampire more in the vein of Bela Lugosi's "Dracula" (1931) than Max Schreck's vampire in "Nosferatu" (1922). The notion of a handsome, even seductive, monster sets the genus of vampire apart from other things that go bump in the night—at least until recently, when werewolves and other beasties have been allowed to be tempting as well as deadly. Even in "The Vampire's Coffin", where Martha spurns the count's advances, the possibility of true seduction lurks beneath the surface: seduction of the viewer, who may vicariously fall under the suave vampire's spell.
Originally titled "El ataud del Vampiro" in its Mexican release, this film was directed by Fernando Mendez as a sequel to "El Vampiro" (1957). Despite deliciously laughable moments such as bats dangling from visible wires and a heroine who looks like she sits down when fleeing (we're supposed to think she's tripped), Mendez manages to wreak goth on nearly every frame. The play of shadows as Levad stalks a victim is spectacular and, over all, the film manages to be fantastic good fun.
