Craig Mitchell’s “Los Vampires” imagines tensions and sinister events during Universal’s unusual 1930 production of “Dracula”, which used the same sets for separate English- and Spanish-language versions. The film pits fictionalised counterparts of Bela Lugosi and Carlos Villarias against each other before their rivalry becomes entangled with fears of murder and vampirism, creating an affectionate but uneven early-Hollywood mystery.

Henry Ian Cusick plays Spanish actor Luis de Ossario, who resists being told to copy the English-language performance exactly for the night-time Spanish shoot, while Thomas Kretschmann’s Romanian star Kurt Orlov faces the same instruction. The review says the film draws appeal from its period setting, horror elements and cinematic-history premise, though its mixture of homage, mystery and horror is not always well balanced; it also references the Spanish “Dracula”, restored in the 1990s after decades of obscurity.