It opens with librarian Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) arriving after a long journey at the menacing Castle Dracula in Transylvania, where he’s been employed by Count Dracula (Christopher Lee) to index his vast book collection. We first see Dracula descending the opulent staircase as an imposing figure emerging from the shadows and in his cape acting every bit the aristocrat in his politeness in welcoming his guest, but eerily we can’t hear his footsteps so he creeps up unexpectedly on his guest. Harker already knows the Count is a vampire and his secret mission as an amateur vampire hunter is to find where Dracula sleeps during the day so he can rid the world of this evil monster. But before he can act Harker’s attacked by one of Dracula’s pretty undead victims (Valerie Gaunt), who suddenly bares her fangs while asking him for help and bites him on the neck. Dracula reveals himself as he goes into a snarling rage and shows his fangs as he tosses the undead lady vampire aside and then with his massive strength overcomes Harker. Nevertheless during the daytime Harker stakes the lady vic to free her tortured soul from an eternity of suffering and smuggles his diary out with a waitress at the local inn, but wastes too much time to stake Dracula. When Harker’s scholarly English colleague Dr. Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) visits an inn before he arrives at Castle Dracula to search for his missing friend, the waitress lays on him Harker’s diary. The locals are frightened and unfriendly, and offer no help to the stranger. Thusly, Van Helsing abruptly leaves as soon as he finds that Dracula has flown the coop. Back in some unidentified nearby neighboring country to Transylvania (either Germany or Austria), Van Helsing visits Lucy Holmwood (Carol Marsh), Harker’s fiancée, to tell of Harker’s death only to find her bedridden with a mysterious ailment and her snotty and untrusting brother Arthur Holmwood (Michael Gough) in a snit and treating the compassionate scholar snidely. As Lucy’s condition worsens and Dr. Seward’s belief that she’s suffering from anemia doesn’t add up, Arthur’s wife Mina (Melissa Stribling) comes to Van Helsing for a second opinion and he immediately notes her gruesome teethmarks and comes up with the old lock the windows at night and keep her bedroom filled with garlic flower treatment. Housekeeper Gerde (Olga Dickie) feels sorry for a complaining Lucy who is suffocating and takes out the garlic and opens the window. The result is that Dracula makes Lucy a vampire. Now an intense Van Helsing has his dander up and when Dracula attacks Mina, he uses his vampire smarts to finally outwit Dracula and after putting a cross in his empty coffin he chases him down at night before he buries Mina while she’s still alive and then Van Helsing finds the vampire in his castle and turns him bloodlessly to dust with the help of daylight coming into the castle’s crypt room when the curtain is opened and then the enterprising scholar makes a makeshift Christian cross out of two candlesticks and uses it to finish the job.