The film stars Lon Chaney Jr., Louise Allbritton, Robert Paige, Evelyn Ankers, and Frank Craven.

Katherine begins to look and act strangely, leading her former romantic partner Frank Stanley (Paige) to suspect that something has happened to her.

On its initial release, the trade magazine Boxoffice declared Son of Dracula as a hit in the United States where its sales were 23% above average.

Shortly after his arrival, the Colonel dies of apparent heart failure and leaves his wealth to his two daughters.

[2] Within three weeks of the premier of Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), Universal presented three titles for follow-ups to the Hays Office.

[4] Profits at Universal by 1941 has been higher than they had been in 1940 while a double bill of both Dracula and Frankenstein (1931) in early 1942 was declared to have "staggeringly good business" in the Motion Picture Herald.

[8] On July 24, the Motion Picture Herald announced that Universal had purchased Siodmak's finished draft of the script.

[9] Taylor had worked previously on Black Friday with Siodmak as well as on Phantom of the Opera (1943) and The Ghost of Frankenstein.

[2][17] George Waggner was originally set to be the associate producer on the film, but became too sidetracked by Phantom of the Opera.

[19] According to Rhodes, few details about the production of Son of Dracula survive in the form of studio files or trade reports.

[21] Robert Siodmak, then on a $150 a week contract, said he was reluctant to take the film; he called the script "terrible—it had been knocked together in a few days".

He said that he was persuaded to take the job by his wife, who said if he showed he was "a little bit better" than Universal's other directors, it would impress the studio.

[24] The Motion Picture Herald had the film listed as being among the 162 features Hollywood Studios had yet to assign a release date in their February 27, 1943, issue.

It was released with a Spanish-language dub as El hijo de Dracula on the top half of a double feature with Captive Wild Woman.

[26] Son of Dracula and The Mad Ghoul had been put into late night midnight screenings on October 30 in small towns in cities in the United States.

[28] Most trade presses declared the screening at the Rialto in New York City on November 5 as the premiere, although the theatre did not bill the engagement as such.

[29] In the November 11, 1944, issue of the trade magazine Boxoffice, a report showed the first-run performances of 336 features released between the third quarter of 1943 and mid-year 1944 from 22 major American cities.

[30] Outside of large cities, bookings for Son of Dracula lasted for two or three days which was the standard practice of the period.

[32] In August 1951, Realart Pictures released Son of Dracula as parts of its "7 Days of Horror" package, which featured 14 Universal films over the course of a week.

[37] From contemporary reviews, The Hollywood Reporter declared that Son of Dracula was "a topline entry" as a horror film as it was "well made" with "intelligent direction by Robert Siodmak" and that "Chaney's Dracula is an outstanding job, accomplished without the gobs of makeup with which he is generally smeared".

[38] Irene Thirer of The New York Post ranked the film as "Fair to good", finding it "is neatly turned out [...] and is certainly guaranteed for goose-pimples—and we might add, laughs".

[39] A. H. Weiler of The New York Times found the film as "unintentionally funny as it is chilling" and concluded it a "pretty pallid offering".

[39] A review in Harrison's Reports noted that Son of Dracula was "extremely weird, fantastic, and morbid, but because the theme has been done many times, it fails to attain the terrifying impact of the original".

[39] In their book Universal Horrors, Weaver, Michael Brunas and John Brunas stated that Son of Dracula is "often lumped together with the rest of the Universal monster pictures of the '40s in the early years of horror scholarship, it has incrementally been seen as the product of a more sophisticated mindset" and in the canon of Robert Siodmak's career, Son of Dracula was "still regarded as a footnote, a stepping stone to his later highly regarded film noir works".

[40] Bob Mastrangelo of AllMovie referred to the film as "strictly minor-league, harmless entertainment that never reaches its potential", finding Chaney was "not doing a very good job" but that "the problems with Son of Dracula are beyond Chaney, as the script never really takes advantage of the juicy potential of the story and lacks the dark humor and beautiful atmospherics that make the best Universal horror films so timeless".

[41] Sean Axmaker wrote in The Seattle Times that Son of Dracula was a "moody minor horror gem" that was held back by "clumsy antics of the skeptical cops and the plodding exposition spouted by an old Carpathian doctor".