Nadja

Count Dracula dies from a stake in his heart. His daughter Nadja shows up to claim the body, hoping that his death will free her from the life he has forced on her. She has the body cremated and prepares to take the ashes to Brooklyn to pay a visit to her twin brother Edgar. Before she departs, she stops for a drink and meets Lucy, a similarly disillusioned young woman. They leave the bar and share a charged, impulsive night, setting a tone of defiance and longing that threads through the unfolding plot.

Following Dracula’s death, Van Helsing has been jailed, and his nephew, Jim (who is also Lucy’s husband) bails him out. When Van Helsing learns that Dracula’s body has been removed from the morgue, he enlists Jim’s help to destroy it properly and ensure that the ancient menace cannot return. The alliance between hunter and relative tightens the chase, turning a personal vendetta into a mission to break a curse that lingers beyond death.

Meanwhile, Nadja visits [Edgar], who is sick, and meets his nurse and live-in lover, Cassandra. Nadja persuasively motivates Cassandra to move Edgar to her apartment, and she conceives a plan to heal him by transfusing him with plasma drawn from shark embryos. The experiment bears fruit as Edgar revives enough to drink Nadja’s blood, deepening the strange, almost ritual bond forming between them.

Lucy has fallen under Nadja’s trance, and her allegiance becomes a troubling thread in the unfolding story. She leads Jim and Van Helsing to Edgar’s house, where Nadja is staying with Renfield, a figure tied to Dracula’s lingering influence. Edgar awakens and warns Cassandra that she is in mortal danger, a warning that triggers a frantic flight sequence and a tense cat-and-mouse chase through familiar urban spaces.

Cassandra, revealed to be Van Helsing’s daughter, attempts to escape, while Nadja pursues her with relentless determination. Lucy pursues Nadja, and Jim pursues Lucy, creating a spiraling web of pursuit that pushes every character toward the same destination—the heart of Nadja’s deception and the truth about the living nature of Edgar’s revival. Cassandra runs into a gas station where two mechanics try to shield her, but Nadja mesmerizes them and kills one, prompting a gunshot from a nearby policeman that wounds Nadja in the abdomen.

Edgar, steadily improving, joins forces with Van Helsing to end Nadja’s threat once and for all. He receives a psychic fax from Nadja, telling him that she is injured and must return to Transylvania with Cassandra. As they close in on the castle, Nadja intensifies a blood transfusion from Cassandra while Cassandra sleeps, a chilling reminder of the tenuous boundary between healing and harm that pervades the narrative. Edgar and Van Helsing finally drive a stake through Nadja’s heart, Lucy is freed from the spell, Nadja is destroyed, and Cassandra awakens to a new, uncertain reality.

Yet the story refuses to settle into a neat conclusion. The epilogue is delivered in Nadja’s own voice, turning the ending into a haunting meditation on identity and survival:

They cut off my head… burned my body… no one knew… no one suspected that I was now alive in Cassandra’s body. Edgar and I were married at City Hall… there is a better way to live.

Last Updated: October 04, 2025 at 10:30