The 1990 Television Movie Daughter of the Darkness Found Auteur Stuart Gordon Chafing Against the Restrictions of Network Television
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Stuart Gordon’s remarkable career ended on a high note with the terrific, empathetic thriller Stuck. I’m nearly done with my journey through Gordon’s television and film career and I want to end strong.
So before I get to Stuck, a movie I have seen several times, made my top ten list for 2008, and have enormous fondness for I figured I would get the last movie out of the way and write up 1990’s Daughter of Darkness.
I am a big fan of Stuart Gordon. I’ve seen all his films. Seriously! No fooling! Heck, I’ve seen them all for this website and this column and I had never even heard of Daughter of Darkness before.
It turns out that there’s a good reason for that. Gordon was a filmmaker of extremes, a Lovecraftian auteur whose body horror masterpieces are full of grotesque imagery, graphic violence, profanity and lurid sexuality.
Gordon is consequently ill-suited for the dreary, moralistic limitations of network television. Gordon’s work was designed first for the stage, where he was a groundbreaking director in Madison, Wisconsin, where I went to college, and later Chicago, where I lived for many years, and then for the big screen.
Gordon did fine work later in his career for Masters of Horror, where he adapted his beloved H.P Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe, and Fear Itself, where he directed the grisly and effective Eater.
Daughter of Darkness was unique in that it found Gordon working for the unholy ghouls at CBS to help sell commercials for laundry detergent and soap operas and all of the other horrific detritus of capitalist society.
Daughter of Darkness is about communism and vampires and the spooky place that Russia and the Eastern bloc occupied in the Western mind during the Cold War.
Watching Daughter of Darkness took me back to my childhood, where I was inundated with propaganda depicting life under Communist rule in Russia as a spooky hellscape where the streets were empty because everyone lived in fear of the secret police or had been murdered by the state.
It was a place where people just disappeared, with no warning and no explanation. And if you were to ask too many questions then there was a good chance that you’d end up mysteriously disappearing as well.
Romania under hated tyrant Nicolae Ceauşescu was a scary place ruled by a monster who was ultimately killed by the people he oppressed.
Daughter of Darkness exploits Western fears about the gloom and doom of life behind the Iron Curtain with the timely tale of an American innocent who travels to Romania at the tale end of Ceauşescu’s reign of terror in search of her long-lost father and finds a pack of Eurotrash blood-suckers hungering to walk in the daylight.
Mia Sara of Legend and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is serviceable as Katherine Thatcher, the aforementioned American innocent abroad. Anthony Perkins costars as our heroine’s father, a vampire prince who at first hides his identity as a way of protecting his daughter from his colleagues in the Romanian vampire underworld.
Daughter of Darkness marks the only time Perkins played a vampire. I vaguely recall him acting in other horror films as well but I can’t find anything on the internet so that might be a Mandela Effect situation.
Perkins barely factors into the film’s first half. Daughter of Darkness is like Gordon’s Dolls, Dagon and Castle Freak in that it is about weary travelers visiting a place full of evil and secrets, sinister vibes and ominous omens.
The primary villain in Daughter of Darkness is Grigori Petescu (Robert Reynolds) an oversexed, keyboard-playing Goth vampire who wants to harness Katherine’s unique status as a half-vampire, half-human hybrid to launch the next phase in vampire evolution.
But the villain is also a haunted Romania populated by monsters of the dead and undead kind. Katherine finds herself tormented by visions that have an ominous way of coming true.
Katherine soon finds herself in a civil war between Romania’s vampire community that pits Perkins’ old-fashioned, tradition-bound Prince, who wants to cling to the old ways and hide from daylight, against the power-mad Grigori Petescu, who wants to be able to walk in the daylight and doesn’t care who he needs to kill to make that happen.
Daughter of Darkness is not the only time Gordon has worked in television but there’s a big difference between directing a segment of an auteur-driven pay cable horror anthology like Masters of Horror or Fear Itself and working in network television.
Gordon is used to working with the same people in film after film, both in front of the camera and behind it. Gordon was the manager of a winning creative team that included actors Jeffrey Combs, George Wendt and Barbara Frampton, producer/screenwriter Brian Yuzna, screenwriter Dennis Paoli, and the Band family of Full Moon fame.
The Re-Animator director’s squad are unfortunately absent from Daughter of Darkness. Instead of a screenplay written by some combination of Gordon, Yuzna and Paoli, the workmanlike script for Daughter of Darkness was written by Andrew Laskos, a television veteran with credits like Remington Steele, Beauty and the Beast, Deadly Medicine and Deadly Matrimony to his name.
Gordon does what he can with standard-issue material and gets a strong performance out of Perkins (probably the biggest star he ever worked with) as a monster who wants to redeem himself for an ungodly life by saving his daughter.
The director of From Beyond and preeminent adapter of the works of H.P. Lovecraft was an incredibly distinctive filmmaker with a set of thematic concerns that reappeared in film after film.
Gordon was a true auteur. Daughter of Darkness’ fatal flaw, consequently, is that it simply does not feel like a Stuart Gordon movie. It lacks the stomach-churning gore, ruthless nihilism and ghoulish craft that define not just his masterpieces but just about everything he touched with the possible exception of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit.
Daughter of Darkness isn’t bad, necessarily, but it’s not particularly memorable or scary, which cannot be said of the rest of the theater maverick turned indie filmmaker’s oddball oeuvre.
The watchable television movie is further hamstrung by a bland romance between the heroine and a fresh faced American diplomat who takes an interest in her story and her.
Daughter of Darkness is for Gordon completists only. It might just be the worst movie he’s ever made but that’s mainly because all of his other films are so good and he maintained such a high level of quality control over the course of his extraordinary if too-brief film career.
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