Let’s start with the obvious: Blacula is a great title. It rolls off the tongue like a late-night punchline delivered by a half-drunk stand-up on amateur night. Unfortunately, the movie that comes attached to it isn’t nearly as cool as its name. Instead of a funky, bloodsucking thrill ride through the dark alleys of 1970s Los Angeles, what we get is an undead slog smothered in shag carpeting, bell-bottoms, and dramatic monologues that sound like they were written by a hungover English major with a Dracula coloring book.
Directed by William Crain — a man who somehow managed to take both vampire lore and the blaxploitation craze and suck the energy out of both — Blacula tries to ride two horses and ends up face-first in the polyester. It wants to be a horror movie. It wants to be a social commentary. It ends up as a film where Dracula’s leftover houseguest spends half his time murdering extras and the other half brooding in crushed velvet.
Let’s unpack this coffin of clichés.
The film opens in 1780, because no bad horror film is complete without an unnecessary historical prologue. African Prince Mamuwalde (William Marshall) visits Transylvania with his wife Luva to speak with Count Dracula about ending the slave trade. This is already a stretch — because who the hell thought Dracula was the guy to go to about human rights? Unsurprisingly, things go south. Dracula, proving he’s not only undead but also a flaming racist, insults Mamuwalde, bites him, locks him in a coffin, and curses him with a name that sounds like it was invented by a racist comic strip writer: Blacula. Subtle, right?
Cut to 1972 Los Angeles, where a pair of flamboyantly gay antique dealers (because nothing says progressive horror like cartoonish stereotypes) buy Dracula’s belongings at a Romanian estate sale and ship it all to California. Inside one of the coffins? You guessed it — Blacula, now rocking a cape, a fro, and a thirst for both blood and melodrama.
From here, the movie shifts into a rut so deep even Nosferatu couldn’t claw out of it. Blacula begins hunting people across the city, but not before spotting a woman who looks exactly like his lost love Luva. She’s Tina (Vonetta McGee), and she’s got the emotional depth of a tea candle. Somehow, within two conversations, she’s falling in love with a tall, ominous stranger who wears a cape and avoids sunlight like it owes him money.
William Marshall, to his credit, gives it his all. He delivers lines with Shakespearean gravitas, even when they sound like rejected fortune cookie slogans. He tries to elevate the material, but it’s hard to look dignified when you’re chasing people through alleyways while wearing a collar that could land planes.
Blacula’s powers? Questionable. He can teleport, kind of. He can command other vampires, sort of. He can stare really hard at people and make them trip over furniture. His greatest power, however, seems to be his ability to enter any room at any time with no explanation — like a bad improv partner with fangs.
The horror? Nonexistent. The “scary” moments are built around people opening doors really slowly, followed by Blacula lunging forward with his arms out like a drunk Frankenstein. The vampire make-up is tragic — white greasepaint and plastic fangs you could find at a 7-Eleven during Halloween clearance. The victims scream like they’re being mildly tickled, and the chase scenes are shot with the kinetic energy of a traffic safety video.
And the dialogue? Hold on to your ribs:
“You shall pay, black prince… I shall place a curse on you so that all who look upon you shall see… Blacula!”
“What do you mean he turned into a bat?”
“I mean he turned. Into. A bat.”
“It is not the soul of my wife I seek… it is her image. Her beauty. Her reflection. In this… nightclub.”
Yes, nothing sets the gothic mood quite like existential dread between disco tracks. Speaking of which — the music. Blacula is drenched in an early-’70s funk-soul soundtrack that’s so jarringly upbeat it feels like it was edited in from a completely different, better movie. You’ll go from a violent vampire bite to wah-wah guitars and backup singers chanting “there’s a killer in the night” like you accidentally flipped the channel to Soul Train halfway through a funeral.
As Blacula racks up a body count, a police pathologist named Dr. Gordon (Thalmus Rasulala) starts to suspect something’s off. His solution? Flip through some vampire books and dramatically state, “There’s no medical explanation… except for vampirism.” You have to admire his speed-reading.
The movie eventually limps toward a tragic love story climax, where Blacula must choose between eternal life with Tina or sacrificing himself for her freedom. Spoiler: he chooses melodramatic self-termination in a warehouse lit like a porno shoot. He walks into sunlight, screams with all the fury of a man who just found out his dry cleaning was lost, and melts in one of the saddest sequences of vampire death ever committed to film. You’ve seen more convincing disintegration from Play-Doh in the sun.
Final Verdict: 1.5 out of 5 funk-fueled fangs
Blacula had potential. It really did. A black vampire dealing with modern-day racism, love, and immortality in a major U.S. city? That could’ve been compelling. But instead, we got a half-baked monster mash-up with the production values of a student film and the energy of a coma ward. William Marshall tries to sell it, but Franco’s fog machine, a disco ball, and some fake teeth are not enough to save this undead dud from its own crushing mediocrity.
Watch it only if you’re doing a deep dive into cult horror history or have a high tolerance for bloodless violence, tragic pacing, and the fashion choices of a decade that thought mustard yellow was a neutral color. Everyone else? Stake this one before it rises again on your streaming queue.
