Arrow Video Presents Director Michio Yamamoto's The Bloodthirsty Trilogy On Blu-ray This Coming May 15

Genre fans will be celebrating on May 15 when Arrow Video, with domestic sales and distribution support provided by MVD Entertainment Group, releases the double-disc Blu-ray collection of The Bloodthirsty Trilogy.

Recognizing the success that Hammer Films and Amicus Films were having with their horror and anthology releases, Japanese filmmaker Michio Yamamoto teamed with Toho Studios in the early 70s for a trio of gothic-like horror films featuring vampires.   Arrow Video has new hi-def transfer ready (from the original film elements of all three films in the series — The Vampire Doll, Lake of Dracula, and Evil of Dracula — in this Blu-ray collection.

The first of these was The Vampire Doll, which opened theatrically in Japan during the summer of 1970, but did not find its way to the domestic marketplace until the following summer (August of 1971).   Theatrical distribution at that time is a little murky … Toho maintained distribution offices in both Los Angeles and New York at the time, but it appears that The Vampire Doll was strictly an arthouse release, in Japanese with English subtitles.

Lake of Dracula was released in June of 1971 in Japan, but did not arrive on these shores until around Labor Day of 1973.   It too appears to have been a Japanese import destined for limited arthouse exposure.

Lastly, Evil of Dracula didn’t get a theatrical release in Japan until the summer of 1974 and it was another nine months (April of 1975) before it arrived in the United States as a Toho release — again, in Japanese with English subtitles.

In the early 1980s Lake of Dracula and Evil of Dracula were dubbed into English and released through UPA as edited television movies … eventually on VHS as well (Paramount released Evil of Dracula on VHS, of that much we are certain).

So for the most part, the three films that make up Michio Yamamoto’s The Bloodthirsty Trilogy will be new to American home entertainment audiences.  Gothic horror and Japanese horror … a clash of styles, but somehow it all works out.

A newly prepared video session with film critic and author Kim Newman (“Nightmare Movies: A Critical History of the Horror Film, 1968–88) is included in the collection.