"Thomas Hutter (Jonathan Harker in Stoker's novel) lives in the fictitious German city of Wisborg. His employer, Knock (loosely based on Renfield), sends Hutter to Transylvania to visit a new client named Orlok. Hutter entrusts his loving wife Ellen to his good friend Harding and Harding's wife Annie, before embarking on his long journey.
Nearing his destination in the Carpathian mountains, Hutter stops at an inn for dinner. The locals become frightened by the mere mention of Orlok's name and discourage him from traveling to his castle at night, warning of a werewolf on the prowl. In his room, Hutter finds a book, The Book of the Vampires, through which he leaves before falling asleep."
"Renfield (Dwight Frye), a British solicitor, travels through the Carpathian Mountains via stagecoach. The people in the stagecoach are fearful that the coach won’t reach the local inn before sundown. Arriving there safely before sundown, Renfield refuses to stay at the inn and asks the driver to take him to the Borgo Pass. The innkeeper and his wife seem to be afraid of Renfield’s destination, Castle Dracula, and warn him about vampires. The innkeeper's wife gives Renfield a crucifix for protection before he leaves for Borgo Pass, whence he is driven to the castle by Dracula's coach, which was awaiting him at Borgo Pass, with Dracula himself disguised as the driver. During the bumpy ride, Renfield leans out and starts to ask the driver to slow down, but is startled to see that the driver has disappeared, and a bat is leading the horses."
"Dracula's Daughter is a 1936 American vampirehorror film produced by Universal Studios, a sequel to the 1931 film Dracula. Directed by Lambert Hillyer from a screenplay by Garrett Fort, the film stars Otto Kruger, Gloria Holden, Marguerite Churchill and, as the only cast member to return from the original, Edward Van Sloan. Dracula's Daughter tells the story of Countess Marya Zaleska, the daughter of Count Dracula and herself a vampire. Following Dracula's death, she believes that by destroying his body she will be free of his influence and can live as a human. When this fails, she turns to psychiatry and Dr. Jeffrey Garth. When his efforts fail, she kidnaps Janet, the woman Jeffrey loves, and flees with her to Transylvania in an attempt to bind Jeffrey to her. She is foiled and destroyed when her jealous manservant shoots her with an arrow.
Ostensibly based on a short story titled "Dracula's Guest" by Bram Stoker, the film bears little or no resemblance to the original source material. David O. Selznick initially purchased the rights to the story for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Selznick, probably knowing he could not legally make the film because of Universal's copyright on the original film, sold the rights to Universal. After first assigning the picture to James Whale, Universal production head Carl Laemmle, Jr.finally put Hillyer in the director's chair.
Upon its release, Dracula's Daughter was not as successful as the original, although it was generally critically well-reviewed. In the intervening decades, criticism has been deeply divided. Modern critics and scholars have noted the strong lesbian overtones of the film, overtones that Universal acknowledged from the start of filming and which they exploited in some early advertising."
