The Vampire of the Night

• The film is the first entry in Toho's "Bloodthirsty Trilogy," directed by Michio Yamamoto, followed by Lake of Dracula (1971) and Evil of Dracula (1974); it was released in the U.S. in an English-subtitled cut titled The Night of the Vampire.
• Composer Riichiro Manabe — who also scored Godzilla vs. Hedorah and Godzilla vs. Megalon — built the film's unsettling music from harpsichord, piano, and organ mixed with dissonant, non-orchestral tones.
• Lead actress Yukiko Kobayashi, who plays Yuko, had just come off two Ishiro Honda tokusatsu films for Toho — Destroy All Monsters (1968) and Space Amoeba (1970) — before taking the role.
• Toho greenlit the vampire trilogy chasing the box-office success of Britain's Hammer horror pictures, at a point when the studio's finances were sliding and it was losing ground to television.
• In the film's own mythology, Yuko isn't a traditional vampire but a corpse animated by a post-hypnotic suggestion from an occult-obsessed physician, Dr. Yamaguchi — a trick that keeps her from dying while driving her insane.

Yuko's "vampirism" reads less like a curse and more like a psychological refusal to grieve — the trance keeping her body from decaying mirrors Shizu's own repressed guilt and denial over her daughter's death, given monstrous form through Dr. Yamaguchi's hypnosis rather than through any real supernatural force.

The Nonomura family's buried wartime trauma — a home invasion that killed most of the household and left Shizu pregnant with Yuko after being raped by the attacker — mirrors Japan's own suppressed postwar wounds, with Yuko's vengeful revenant standing in for violence the family was never allowed to grieve openly.

The rule that only the hypnotist's will (or death) can release Yuko from her trance suggests she was never truly undead at all — just trapped inside someone else's obsession, making the horror less about a monster on the loose and more about how the living weaponize the dead to avoid facing their own guilt.

Kazuhiko comes home from a six-month business trip abroad and heads straight for the isolated country estate of his fiancée, Yuko Nonomura — only to be told by her mother, Shizu, that Yuko died two weeks earlier when a landslide crushed her car. He doesn't buy it, stays the night, and spots Yuko wandering the family cemetery after dark before he vanishes too. His sister Keiko and her fiancé Hiroshi come looking for him next, fake a car breakdown to buy a night in the house, and start pulling the same thread. What they find is worse than a ghost: Yuko isn't dead, exactly — she's been kept animate by a post-hypnotic suggestion from an occult-obsessed physician, a trance that stops her body from decaying while driving her homicidal and insane. Digging further, they uncover the Nonomura family's real wound: a postwar home invasion that killed almost everyone in the house and left Shizu pregnant with Yuko after being raped by the attacker. Between Yuko's rage and the hulking, half-mute servant Genzo guarding the family's secret, the investigation turns into a fight for survival that ends in a cliffside brawl and a spray of blood that owes more to samurai cinema than Gothic tradition.