Tim Lucas's last post here absolutely hits the nail on the head about how you can detect certain undertones in "The Brides of Dracula". Describing Meinster as more "openly transgressive" than Dracula is wonderfully apt and this characterization is why I've always contended that "Brides..." is actually more perverse that any of the Lee vehicles. Dracula is less of a character than an archetype: as the "fountainhead" of vampirism, he simply exists as evil incarnate, having much less of a hand in his own fate. Meinster-- "monstrous in terms of his immorality before his immortality was even as issue" (also very apt)-- seems to be much more a product of waywardness, of his own licentiousness. Even, dare we say, of a willingness to join the dark side. There's some real darkness there and an attentive viewer can read a good deal into that. Other films like "Dracula Has Risen From The Grave" and "Scars of Dracula" are much more straight forward and conventional with their vampirism. Lee's dark prince is resurrected, rails against a priest or vampire slayer, sinks his teeth into some swooning young ladies, and is struck down again. The specificity and very personal natures of the baron's victims in "Brides..."-- his own mother, his faithful nurse, even Van Helsing-- implies a true iconoclasm on both the character's and the writer's parts. There's just a depth and a terrific moral murkiness to this film that allows greater interpretation than a more "obvious" Dracula vehicle. This thread also proves how widely-varied and nuanced audience spectatorship of a single film can be.
"Breaking away with the beast of both worlds, a smile that you can't disguise..."