SCARS OF DRACULA

Count Dracula's remains lie on a stone plinth in a chamber in his castle. The chamber can be accessed only through the window, set high in his castle wall. A large bat flies in and hovers over the plinth, regurgitating blood onto the Count's remains. The remains start to interact and bond with the dripped blood. Within seconds, Dracula is once more resurrected.

Local villagers are soon enraged that yet another young woman has been murdered by the Count. With a priest's blessing, they rise up and set fire to Dracula's castle. However, Dracula is safely asleep in his solid stone chamber. When the villagers return home, they find that every woman in the village has been slaughtered in the church by vampire bats.

Elsewhere, libertine Paul Carlson is falsely accused of rape and flees the Kleinenberg authorities by jumping into a coach which, though driverless, heads off at great speed. After breaking through the border guard, he is knocked off the coach, and stumbles into an inn, persuading the waitress Julie to let him in. The innkeeper interrupts them and throws Paul out. Walking in the forest, he finds the driverless coach, which the returning Klove, Dracula's servant, drives back to the castle. Initially Paul is welcomed by the Count and Tania, a woman who later reveals herself to be imprisoned by Dracula as his mistress. Paul has a liaison with Tania, who concludes their lovemaking by trying to bite his neck. Dracula appears and, casually throwing off Paul's efforts to stop him, stabs Tania through the heart with a dagger for betraying him. He then stoops over to drink the blood from the wounds of her dead body. Klove dismembers her body and dissolves it in a bath of acid. Locked in the room high in the castle, Paul uses tied-together bed curtains to climb down to a lower window, but the line is withdrawn by Klove and he finds himself in the Count's chamber.

Paul's more sober brother Simon, and Simon's fiancée Sarah Framsen, come searching for him. Julie the tavern directs them to the castle and they investigate. Dracula immediately has designs on Sarah, but Klove, who has fallen in love with the woman after seeing her photograph amongst Paul's possessions, helps the couple escape by refusing to do Dracula's bidding and remove Sarah's crucifix. As punishment, the servant is burnt by Dracula with a red-hot cutlass. Simon, having enlisted the help of the priest, goes back to the castle to look for Paul. However, the priest is attacked and killed by a vampire bat, and Simon is betrayed by Klove, ending up in the same doorless, inescapable room that Paul had been trapped in previously. Opening the coffin in the middle of the room, Simon discovers the sleeping Dracula, but the vampire's power reaches through his closed eyelids, causing the human to collapse before being able to take action against the Count.

When Simon recovers, the vampire has vanished. Investigating the room further, he is horrified to find Paul's drained corpse on a spike. Looking out of the window, Simon is amazed to see the Count running up the wall outside like an insect. With a rope let down by Klove, Simon climbs up the outer wall to go after Sarah, knowing that Dracula may use her as his new mistress. Sarah, meanwhile, has made her way back to the castle battlements as a storm approaches. She is confronted by Dracula, who this time uses his bat familiar to remove her crucifix. Just then, Klove arrives on the battlements and attacks the Count with the dagger that murdered Tania, but the servant is outmatched by Dracula's inhuman strength and is thrown over the side of the castle. Simon appears, removes a loose metal spike from the castle's battlements, and throws it at Dracula. The spike pierces the Count's lower torso, missing his heart. Unharmed, the Count raises the spike to impale Simon, but it is struck by lightning and Dracula is engulfed in flames. Staggering in agony, the Count collapses and topples over the castle's battlements, falling to the ground far below, where his corpse continues to burn.

Dracula is ultimately destroyed when he is impaled by a lightning-struck iron spike, which causes him to burn to ashes. Simon and Sarah escape the castle, leaving Dracula’s remains behind.

The finale sees Dracula’s supernatural strength finally countered by the forces of nature, rather than traditional vampire-slaying methods. The lightning and iron spike serve as poetic justice for the Count’s reign of terror, emphasizing that even the most powerful monster can meet a spectacularly brutal end. The survivors’ escape underscores the film’s theme of human resilience amid supernatural horror.