Lew Landers’ The Return of the Vampire (1943) plays almost like an Aesop’s fable told by the Grimm Brothers, set against a backdrop of wartime London. There is the typical Gothic villain, an occultist turned vampire, Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi); his reluctant henchman caught between good and evil; a religious and righteous force of good; an arc of moral redemption; and a bomb-ruined, foggy backdrop simmering with creeping vengeance.
The film opens as the first World War closes. After an attack on a child, Dr. Saunders (Gilbert Emery) and Lady Jane (Frieda Inescot) are forced to come to terms with the idea of a vampire in their midst. Overnight, Dr. Saunders reads up on the blood-sucking fiends in a manuscript written by one Armand Tesla, whose striking features are photographed opposite the title page. The next morning, once Dr. Saunders convinces Lady Jane that their problem goes beyond scientific understanding, the two set out to find the supernatural pest and exterminate it.
As night approaches, Lady Jane and Dr. Saunders find Tesla in his coffin and drive a steel spike into his heart, simultaneously freeing Andreas (Matt Willis), Tesla's werewolf lackey, and ending Tesla's reign of terror. Years later, in the aftermath of a World War II Nazi bombing raid, civil defense workers unknowingly remove the spike from Tesla's heart, freeing him to seek vengeance on the family that stopped his vampiric-evil years before.
Andreas, who has been working as Lady Jane’s lab assistant, again succumbs to Tesla's mind control and turns back into his werewolf form, killing people in order to help Tesla assume a new identity and secure vengeance against Lady Jane and her loved ones. Against the backdrop of bombed-out London—the aftermath of real horror—Andreas and his undead master walk quietly amid the ruins, anachronistic folklore monsters in a tableau of a larger monstrosity: the death and destruction of war.
Andreas' persona is more Jekyll and Hyde than the usual howl at the full-moon kind of werewolf. The addition of his werewolf servant is odd, especially since Andreas doesn't act like a werewolf—he talks and wears a suit—but it does provide a unique aspect to the storyline and the need for redemption as Andreas fights for his salvation at the end. Why he becomes a werewolf under Tesla’s control is not explained, nor why he retains his tie and voice whether he's hairy or clean-shaven.
This love triangle walked so Bella, Edward and Jacob could run.
It is significant that the vampiric evil sleeps for 23 years — it is the length of the interwar period for the United States (two years longer than Europe’s). While the war seems to be largely ignored by the characters, it serves its purpose to move the plot forward: destroying the cemetery, allowing the vampire to be awakened. The Luftwaffe shoulders, at least in part, the blame for the resurrection of the undead villain. It also seems to be no coincidence that Dr. Bruckner, Tesla’s disguise after he is resurrected, is a German or perhaps Austrian scientist, nor that ultimate salvation is found in the form of a cross (Hitler believed that in the long run National Socialism and religion would not be able to coexist, and stressed repeatedly that Nazism was a secular ideology, founded on modern science: "Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition").
The comment Dr. Saunders makes at the beginning of the film, regarding the limitations of science, that he uses to convince Lady Jane of the existence of something not analyzable under her microscope is almost ironic. A few years later, the inexplicable horrors of the supernatural world will be supplanted by the similarly inexplicable mutant horrors wrought by science. After World War II and the atomic bomb, vampires and monsters appeared far less frightening compared to the threats of giant mutated ants and blobs.
The Return of the Vampire stands in the middle of the transition from the previous Gothic horror style to the scientifically-induced horrors of the 1950s. By 1944, Lugosi, the first great vampire star, exchanged his opera cape for a lab coat. In the emerging world of science gone amoral, mad science would soon become all the rage.