THE VAMPIRE DOLL: Returning to Japan after a six month trip abroad, Kazuhiko (Atsuo Nakamura, KILL!) travels to the countryside village of Tadeshina and the forbidding country home of his fiancée Yûko (Yukiko Kobayashi, DESTROY ALL MONSTERS) only to learn from the girl's mother Shidu (Yôko Minakaze, A MAN CALLED TIGER) that Yûko died two weeks before in a landslide. Spending the night in the house, the mourning Kazuhiko – in between fending off attacks from deaf-mute handyman Genzô (Kaku Takashina, BLACK TIGHTS KILLERS) – hears the sound of weeping in the corridors and swears that he has seen Yûko in the flesh. When his sister Keiko (Kayo Matsuo, OUTLAW GANGSTER V.I.P) does not hear from him eight days later, she and her fiancé Hiroshi (Akira Nakao, DEATH AT AN OLD MANSION) travel to the house to investigate. Although Keiko also swears that she has seen Yûko, Hiroshi is sure that there is a logical explanation. Upon confirming Yûko's death at the town hall, the two also learn that Yûko's mother was the survivor of a massacre in which her family was murdered twenty years before, and that Yûko's father is believed to have been the killer. The family physician Dr. Yamaguchi (Jun Usami, TORA! TORA! TORA!) confirms the circumstances of Yûko's death although he too is not so quick to dismiss the possibility of the supernatural due to his own studies of the occult. With the help of nosy gas station attendant (Ginzô Sekiguchi, WOMAN IN THE DUNES), Hiroshi decides to open up Yûko's grave while Keiko rushes back to the house to confront Yûko's mother with her belief that her brother never left the house.

Not widely exported and long unavailable, THE VAMPIRE DOLL unfortunately fails to live up to the promise of either of the other entries. Beneath the gorgeous Tohoscope photography, the appearances of golden-eyed Yûko, and the production design – particularly the Western-style mansion in which the traditional kimono dress of Yûko's mother makes her seem like the foreign presence more so than the staring faces in the eighteenth century Dutch portraits – is a traditional old dark house film with characters hearing sounds and running down corridors from room to room with a climactic shock that echoes PSYCHO before a talky finale in which both hero and villain make some strained leaps of logic to link vampirism and science. Some gushing throat wounds and one bit of arterial spray seem surprising for a Japanese horror film of the period, but they were not out of place in the yakuza and samurai films of Toho and competing studios.

LAKE OF DRACULA is the story of high school teacher Akiko (Midori Fujita) who is spending her school holidays in a cottage by the lake working on a painting of a landscape dominated by a golden eye which she recalls from a childhood nightmare. Her cozy and familiar world becomes dark and mysterious when a delivery truck brings a crate containing a coffin to the warehouse of bait seller/local handyman Kyûsaku (THE VAMPIRE DOLL's Takashina). Soon, Akiko's dog has been murdered, Kyûsaku tries to rape her, and a mysterious man (Shin Kishida, SHOGUN ASSASSIN) conjures up further memories that suggest her childhood nightmare really happened. Her younger sister Natsuko (Sanae Emi) downplays her sister's behavior as looking for attention, but Akiko's doctor fiancé Takashi (Chôei Takahashi, TAMPOPO) has recently treated a comatose young woman suffering from blood loss who was found in the same area as Akiko's cottage. When Natsuko starts getting colder, paler, and sleepwalking at night, Akiko must literally come face to face with her fears.

Much more assured and challenging than THE VAMPIRE DOLL, LAKE OF DRACULA actually makes a halfway convincing case that Akiko may be going crazy or unconsciously seeking attention in the manner in which she realizes she once did as a child by coming to believe her trauma was just a dream but using it to steal focus from her younger sister. The early introduction of Takashi's patient works at cross purposes to this interpretation but the film remains entertaining not only for its gorgeous visual which fuse the former film's gothic sets with surreal touches but also for the homage it pays to the Hammer Dracula series entries up through SCARS OF DRACULA – incorporating even BRIDES OF DRACULA into the backstory – released the previous year; indeed, it is tempting to believe that the vampire's demise is not only patterned after the end of HORROR OF DRACULA (with a side of DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE) but actually based on the filmmakers' recollections of the Japanese export cut of Dracula's demise. The vampire's death is actually not the film's most gruesome touch as another nod to PSYCHO has the flesh of a decomposed corpse's hand pulling away from the skeletal fingers and the skin beneath which has become fused to the surface of a desk. Kishida makes a fine vampire in the Christopher Lee tradition whether growling with a blood-spattered mouth or waiting in the blue moonlight to put the bite on his sleepwalking victim.

In EVIL OF DRACULA, charismatic Tokyo teacher Shiraki (Toshio Kurosawa, LADY SNOWBLOOD) travels to the countryside to teach at the Seimei private girls college. Upon arrival, he learns that the Principal's wife (Mika Katsuragi) was killed in a road accident two days before and the Principal (LAKE OF DRACULA's Kishida) is dying from an illness and has already decided to appoint him as his successor. Spending the night in the Principal's home, he is woken from a brandy-assisted sleep by a melancholy singing and encounters a girl (Yasuko Agawa, TERROR OF MECHAGODZILLA) with a bleeding breast and is attacked by the Principal's wife sporting fangs. He dismisses all of this as a nightmare until he learns from dorm-mates Kumi (Mariko Mochizuki), Yukiko (Mio Ôta), and Kyôko (Keiko Aramaki) that the girl is Keiko who went missing a few days before his arrival. He also learns from the school's doctor Shimomura (Kunie Tanaka, SWORD OF THE BEAST) that one or two girls go missing every year from the school and that his own predecessor went insane.

After paying tribute to the Hammer Draculas with LAKE OF DRACULA, Toho and director Michio Yamamoto did their own take on the Karnstein trilogy while restaging elements from both THE VAMPIRE DOLL and LAKE OF DRACULA with greater stylistic aplomb. EVIL OF DRACULA does have some bare breasts but eschews overt lesbianism – the film's most obvious borrowing from LUST FOR A VAMPIRE is the substitution of the first two film's Renfield-like henchmen for a Baudelaire-quoting French literature professor (Katsuhiko Sasaki, GODZILLA VS. MEGALON) who spies on the girls and willingly submits to the vampire's bite – for some added gruesomeness (when the vampires change bodies, the possession is not spiritual but involves the literally wearing the skin of their vessel). Kishida gets more dialogue but the film still does not know what to do with him when not growling or pouncing. As with the earlier two films, the Western influence in gothic architecture is seen as something foreign and sinister, but EVIL OF DRACULA comes up with a more compelling backstory than LAKE OF DRACULA about the foreign origins of vampirism in Japan. The climax is more energetically-staged here than in LAKE OF DRACULA, but it is weakened like the previous film by cutting back and forth between the frenzied fighting between Shiraki and the vampire and the more feeble skirmish between the final girl and the vampire woman. While it is perhaps a fitting final entry in the trilogy, it is unfortunate that director Yamamoto had no further opportunities to explore the horror genre.

Also known as BLOODTHIRSTY EYES, THE VAMPIRE DOLL had a brief subtitled theatrical release in the United States under that title at Toho's own theaters but was never dubbed into English. LAKE OF DRACULA and EVIL OF DRACULA were also released by Toho in subtitled versions before being dubbed. The dubbed versions were picked up for television by United Productions of America. These panned-and-scanned transfers would play on television intermittently through the 1990s before Paramount put them out on VHS as part of their "Master Sharp" EP/SLP line that also debuted releases of BLOOD AND ROSES, FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL, and THE SKULL among others. Subtitled and letterboxed transfers of all three films appeared in the UK – where THE VAMPIRE DOLL was christened LEGACY OF DRACULA – but they were derived from poor quality non-anamorphic masters. Superior anamorphic transfers appeared later in Japan with commentary tracks but they were not English-friendly.

Arrow's dual-territory two-disc set presents all three films in high-bitrate 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen encodes from masters that are handsome if likely not new transfers. Virtually spotless unlike many of the Nikkatsu transfers, all three films are colorful and crisp with slightly diluted black levels as seen in many Japanese masters. THE VAMPIRE DOLL looks a tad softer than the other two films, although that may have less to do with the elements or the transfer than the approach of the filmmakers with a certain reserve to the staging and composition whereas the latter two films with their Hammer and Count Yorga borrowings include more vampires surging towards the camera and Kishida practically frothing at the mouth when bearing his fangs in close-up (not to mention the various examinations of puncture wounds that require bare breast close-up insert shots). While earlier transfers of THE VAMPIRE DOLL staged the brief flashback between Kazuhiko and Yûko in standard color, the Blu-ray transfer desaturates the image and focuses the compositions on the actors by framing the surroundings with a violet filter. All three films feature clean-sounding LPCM 1.0 mono Japanese tracks with optional English subtitles; however, LAKE OF DRACULA and EVIL OF DRACULA come with the unadvertised option of their English dubs in LPCM 1.0 selectable only from your player's remote (as are the English SDH subtitles that will not automatically turned on with the track since neither is available from the setup menu). The film's really do play better in Japanese – particularly LAKE OF DRACULA since Kishida when he does talk sounds like a bad Bela Lugosi impression – but the inclusion of the dubs is a nice touch for those stateside viewers who first caught the latter two films on television (where they were at least once screened back-to-back with the unrelated American "Cliffhangers" TV pilot THE CURSE OF DRACULA with Michael Nouri as the Count).