The Return of the Vampire is a 1943 American horror film directed by Lew Landers and starring Bela Lugosi, Frieda Inescort, Nina Foch, Miles Mander, Roland Varno, and Matt Willis.
His latest victim is admitted to the clinic of Lady Jane Ainsley and her colleague, Professor Walter Saunders.
The vampire infiltrates the clinic; unable to finish his previous victim because she had died from shock, he preys on Prof. Saunders' granddaughter Nicki instead.
Twenty-four years later, Scotland Yard detective Sir Fredrick Fleet reads the deceased Saunders' account of these events.
Lady Jane explains that the man they staked was an eighteenth-century vampire expert named Armand Tesla.
After a bombing raid, cemetery workers find Tesla's corpse exposed, with the metal spike still in his chest.
Helpless to resist, Andréas murders Hugo Bruckner, a scientist who recently escaped from a concentration camp who had arrived in England to work with Lady Jane.
Sir Frederick's suspicions grow when a laboratory analysis of the rifled drawer finds it to be wolf hair.
When Tesla commands Nicki to leave the house, Lady Jane convinces Sir Frederick that they must follow her.
Lady Jane tries again to convince Sir Frederick that Tesla was a vampire, but he refuses to accept her version of events without physical evidence.
In his book Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen, David J. Skal writes: "Columbia Pictures hired Lugosi for Return of the Vampire, in which he played Dracula in all but name; for copyright purposes, the vampire's name was Armand Tesla.
[4] In 2019, Stuart Galbraith IV of DVD Talk wrote, "For all its faults, The Return of the Vampire is as close as audiences got to see Lugosi reprise [his role as Count Dracula] (in all but name) in a straight horror film.
And, low-budget though it is, the picture is in some respects more ambitious than Universal's sausage factory horrors, at least story-wise, and notable for its imitation-Universal look, a remarkable achievement for such a cheap film.