Zoltan, Hound of Dracula (also released as Dracula’s Dog) is a 1978 film in which a 17th century innkeeper (played by Reggie Nalder) becomes the willing thrall to the line of Dracula. An alternative title for the movie and its novelization is ‘Dracula’s Dog’.

Synopsis

A Russian road crew accidentally blasts open a subterranean crypt, and the captain of the road crew, fearing looters and criminals, stations a guard near the site. Late in the night, an earthquake shakes lose one of the coffins, which slides down and lands at the feet of the confused guard. Curious as to what has fallen before him, the guard opens the coffin and discovers the body of a dog, impaled by a stake. He removes the stake from the corpse, which revives the vampiric hound, Zoltan.

Zoltan opens another coffin shaken lose from the crypt, this one the body of an innkeeper (played by Reggie Nalder) that once owned the crypt. Zoltan removes the stake from the innkeeper’s chest, reanimating the innkeeper. The movie cuts to a flashback of a village in Russia 200 years prior.

The dog of an innkeeper saves a woman from being bitten by a bat, Dracula in disguise. Furious over losing his meal to a dog, Dracula bites the woman’s saviour, turning the dog into a vampire. Now a vampire, the dog turns on its owner, turning the innkeeper into a vampire as well.

200 years later, in the present, it appears that Dracula has only one surviving descendant, Michael Drake, a mild-mannered psychiatrist (played by Michael Pataki) who decides to take his wife and children on a vacation in his Winnebago, hoping to spend some quality time with his family out in the national forest. Unknown to Micheal, the crypt containing Zoltan and the innkeeper has been unearthed in Russia.

Still loyal to the Dracula family the two vampires travel to America, shipping themselves via a boat to California. Eventually, Zoltan and company find themselves in the same forest as Micheal and his family.

Other campers, vacationing with their dogs discover that their pets are being killed by a strange beast. The deceased animals soon reanimate into vampiric dogs, the minions of Zoltan.

Zoltan is killed in the final scene of the film, but whether or not all the reanimated dogs were is left unsaid and open to a sequel, although one was never filmed.