The Universal Monster movies of the 30s and 40s are classic staples of the horror genre, and it looks like a lesser known story about 1931’s Dracula is about to be told. Deadline reports that Chris and Paul Weitz will co-write and co-direct Spanish Dracula, a film based on the life of their grandmother, Mexican film star Lupita Tovar, who found a second life starring in Spanish versions of classic Hollywood films, like Universal’s Dracula. The brothers are set to produce the film alongside their uncle, Pancho Kohner.

This film is a complete family affair, as Kohner is the author of The Sweetheart of Mexico, a memoir he helped his mother write about her fascinating life story. Tovar became a wildly successful actress when she moved from Mexico to Hollywood and quickly became known as “The Mexican Rose”. The directors’ grandfather, Paul Kohner, was the right-hand man to Universal Pictures Chief Carl Laemmle, and Kohner ran the studio’s international film production business. Eventually, Kohner and Tovar fell in love and Kohner created opportunities for the actress as a result.

When the silent film era was essentially over in 1929, work became a lot harder for actors with any kind of accent to find, but Tovar would go on to star in Santa, Mexico’s first “Talkie” film. The film was also called the Gone with the Wind of Mexican cinema, which would give Tovar the title of “Sweetheart of Mexico”. So what does this have to do with Dracula? Well, according to Chris Weitz, that is the heart of the story. When talking about the film, Weitz said:

“It’s just such a great story, and I think that once Pancho wrote the book it was just an extra reason to bring focus to it. Pancho has been thinking about making a movie about our grandma and grandpops for a while and trying to figure out what the shape of that would be, and we felt the Spanish Dracula is kind of a great focus. It brings together the romance and is an interesting way to look at old Hollywood, and also, to look at foreigners in Hollywood. This isn’t really a story about immigration, but it is a really interesting story about how this very sort of American industry was inflected by the talents of all these people who came from abroad,”

The book Pancho wrote covers his mother’s early childhood and her struggle to find work due to her race once sound became popular in film, but it also focuses on how Kohner fought hard to find her work, and he was the one to have the idea to translate local films like Dracula into Spanish. The American version of Dracula, which famously starred Bela Lugosi, would shoot during the day while the Spanish version, with a completely different cast and crew, would shoot at night.

The only similarity between the films beside the translated script were the sets. The Spanish Dracula would become a big hit and was made specifically for the Spanish markets. While the American version is considered the classic, some horror fans today consider the Spanish version the superior version of the film. Many believe this because of the lack of censorship in the Spanish version, which led to the film being seen as more erotic. Of the film, Paul Weitz said, “It seems so cinematic, the idea of this sort of the American production coming in, and then, this group of people who are making a film that was not subject to the same code. They could make it a little sexier.”

via Collider