For the month of October, as part of the Countdown to Halloween, I’ll be revisiting each of the thirteen stories in Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts and suggesting movies that pair well with them, for your viewing pleasure!

The second story in Painted Monsters is also the one that has probably the least connection to cinema. “The White Prince” was written for Steve Berman’s incubus anthology Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction, and when I wrote it what I had in mind were the early treatments of vampires in novels and stories.

That said, just about any cinematic adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula seems like it would be an appropriate pairing. Most people have probably already seen the 1931 Bela Lugosi version and the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola version, so to go along with your reading of “The White Prince” I recommend the Spanish-language version that was filmed at night on the same sets that Lugosi and company were using to film their version during the day, or the 1979 version starring Frank Langella, whose hands do more acting than most actors who portrayed the sinister and seductive count throughout the years.