Vampires (4 page)

Michael Gough and Melissa Stribling play the Holmwood’s, Arthur and Mina. They live quietly in Victorian seclusion with Arthur’s sister, a precocious Carol Marsh as Lucy, their maid Gerda, Olga Dickie, and her daughter, Tanya, Janina Faye, although the action is never transferred to London and everywhere can be reached by the comfort of a swift coach ride. When Dr Seward, Charles Lloyd Pack, fails to diagnose Lucy’s symptoms, Mina calls on the services of Van Helsing. He immediately pinpoints the illness as vampirism and swings into action. Unfortunately, the heroes are beaten back when Gerda removes the prescribed dose of garlic flowers and the girl becomes a victim of Dracula. She entices young Tanya to take midnight walks and hints at an incestuous relationship with her camp brother, Arthur, before succumbing to Van Helsing’s graphic staking. When Lucy is dispatched, the vampire turns his sights on Mina, who moves his coffin into her own cellars to outfox the hunters. Drained of blood, she is forced to take the blood transfusion, and, when Gerda refuses to go into the cellar on her mistress’s command, Van Helsing realizes why their midnight vigilance failed to trap the vampire. He was already inside!

Hammer’s
Dracula
is the first movie to convincingly allude to the Count’s sexual magnetism. Valerie Gaunt, Melissa Stribling and Carol Marsh are pioneers in the aspect of showing visible lust and satisfied smirks after Dracula’s advances. The only other Count Dracula film to even hint at an underlying sexuality with blatant arrogance had been the little seen
Dracula Istanbul’da/Dracula in Istanbul (1953)
with Atif Kaptan. When Lucy is on the turn, she lays on her bed, wild-eyed with anticipation and stares at the open French windows awaiting her lover, while lovingly revealing the two pin pricks of passion at her throat. Mina secretes the Count’s coffin in her cellars and waits for her lover to rise. The vampire in the Count’s castle retreat played by Valerie Gaunt is a man-eater of the worst type, telling lies with tearful, breathy excitement to wandering strangers before eagerly snapping at their throats. One of the few constants in the Hammer
Dracula
series, indeed, their whole film output, would be the beautiful ladies who graced their movies with such deadly, sensual charm.

Christopher Lee came to world-wide prominence in the role of Count Dracula. He had featured in the company’s earlier excursion into horror,
The Curse of Frankenstein
, as the creature – a role that nearly went to
Carry On
regular Bernard Bresslaw – and admits regularly in interviews that he had played all kinds of characters in the preceding ten years. His first part was a gate-crashing, spear carrying, extra in Laurence Olivier’s
Hamlet (1947)
and by the mid-fifties; he was becoming very disillusioned about continuing his acting career in the UK, deciding instead to take himself across the pond where tall actors were very much in demand. But, like Boris Karloff before him, Frankenstein’s
creature
proved to be the lucky turning point in his life. When
Dracula
was announced, no other actor was auditioned for the part, and history has proven that not many more have been able to fill his midnight cape. With a bare minimum of screen time and even less dialogue that amounts to just fifteen lines, Lee takes full command of the role, keeping his brides in check with glaring, red-eyed, ferocity and swatting aside puny male resistance with the sweep of the hand. His Dracula is a jealous domestic abuser whose motive for his vampire shenanigans is the killing of his bride as she rests in her crypt. He does not change into a mist, a wolf or a bat – his supernatural powers would increase or decrease from film to film -, but strides boldly into the nearby village to pick up wandering strays. All the continuing movies would concentrate on an ambiguous revenge motive to carry the Lord of Darkness into the next installment. It is interesting to note that only three of the series of films starring Christopher Lee,
Dracula,
Prince of Darkness, Taste the Blood of Dracula
and
The Satanic Rites of Dracula
, would carry an involving plot structure and narrative; while
Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, Scars of Dracula
and
Dracula AD1972
, seem to be hastily compiled, but enjoyable mash-ups featuring the companies favourite bogeyman. Lee himself would go on to star in most of Hammer’s classic horror films including,
The Mummy (1959), The Gorgon (1964), Rasputin, the Mad Monk (1965), The Devil Rides Out (1967)
and
To the Devil, A Daughter (1976),
as well as playing a myriad of characters for Hammer’s rival company Amicus. But
Dracula
has proven a very hard act to follow and Sir Christopher has only recently been able to step out of the vampire’s long shadow to create one of the longest CVs in British cinematic history.

In March 2012, a restored print of
Dracula
was released on Blu-Ray DVD with added extra footage showing the full meltdown of the Crown Prince of Horror salvaged from the remains of a rescued, but damaged, Japanese print and proved to be a world-wide best-seller.

Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1965)
Christopher Lee as
Count Dracula,
Andrew Kier as
Father Sandor
, Francis Matthews as
Charles
, Barbara Shelley as
Helen
, Charles Tingwell as
Alan
, Suzan Farmer as
Diana,
Philip Latham as
Klove
and Thorley Walters as
Ludwig
. Screenplay based on the character created by Bram Stoker and an idea by John Elder: John Sansom (Jimmy Sangster, Anthony Hinds). Director; Terence Fisher

Synopsis
Four English travelers are holidaying in the Carpathian Mountains. At a local Inn they meet Father Sandor, who berates the townspeople for their insistence in keeping alive the superstition of vampires and werewolves by hanging cloves of garlic everywhere and insist on staking every corpse that turns up. Sandor invites the tourists to visit his monastery. When they decline he insists that they stay away from the castle that is not marked on any map. As they take their leave, the passengers find themselves ejected from their transport by a driver who refuses to venture any further in the dark. He takes his coach and bolts. In the distance can be seen a large looming castle. From nowhere appears a driverless carriage and the travelers capture it but the horses have their own ideas of the destination. The four are taken to the seemingly deserted castle that is prepared for dinner. A servant, Klove, makes his presence known and insists that his late Master, Count Dracula, has left a clause in his will that the castle should always be ready to receive guests. After a hearty meal, the four retire to their respective rooms. During the night, Klove is witnessed dragging a large trunk through the castle hallways. Allan Kent decides to investigate and is savagely murdered. His body is hung over a large sarcophagus and his throat is cut. The blood drips onto the ashes in the sarcophagus and reconstitutes the undead Count. During the course of the night, Helen Kent is vampirized and Charles and Diana barely escape with their lives; eventually running into Father Sandor who takes them into his protection at the local monastery. Over the course of the next few nights the vampires attack the monastery gaining admittance with the help of an inmate named Ludwig who had been found years earlier in the region of Castle Dracula, a helpless lunatic. The battle reaches meteoric proportions when Helen is staked by the monks at the monastery and Dracula escapes with the girl Diana. Sandor and Charles Kent give chase. Klove is shot and Dracula’s coffin comes to rest on the icy terrain of the castle moat. As Charles moves in to drive the stake home, Dracula rises and begins to strangle his adversary. Diana takes Sandor‘s rifle and fires breaking the ice. The cleric fires more shots and the vampire is submerged below the freezing water at the fade out.

Review
A fine pre-credits sequence opens
Dracula, Prince of Darkness
as the last few minutes of
Dracula/The Horror of Dracula
are replayed against James Bernard’s thunderous background score. Christopher Lee’s Count is caught under the glare of Peter Cushing’s crossed candlesticks as a voice over narrative is given like a final declaration:

“After a reign of hideous terror spanning more than a century, the King of the undead was finally traced to his lair high in the Carpathian mountains. Through the decades many had sought to destroy him. All had failed. Here at last was an adversary armed with sufficient knowledge of the ways of the vampire to bring about the final and absolute destruction. This then was his fate. Thousands had been enslaved by the obscene cult of vampirism. Now the fountainhead himself, perished. Only the memory remained. The memory of the most evil and terrible creature who ever set his seal on civilization”.  
The credits fill the screen and we realize we are comfortable in the company of familiar friends who have held our hands and guided us through some of the best fantasy movies of the decade so far. However, there are a couple of differences inherent that would make
Dracula, Prince of Darkness
stand out as one of the best, and worst, treatments of the tale..
There are many plus factors on show. Terence Fisher’s direction is as tight as ever, and the frenetic action sequences belie the senses, as in the previous movie. Bernard Robinson’s lush set designs and Jack Asher’s cinematography are even more pleasing to the eye than before and Christopher Lee as a more saturnine Count would cement his reputation as the definitive screen Dracula of the modern cinema. This movie also had the input of Anthony Hinds and Jimmy Sangster battling gamely to avoid censorship and to be able to out-do the previous film. Peter Cushing was unavailable and Van Helsing was replaced by the granite persona of Andrew Kier as Father Sandor. The victims on offer are very likeable consisting of two delectable ladies in Barbara Shelley and Suzan Farmer and their sibling husbands Charles Tingwell and Francis Matthews.

Cushing’s Van Helsing had reduced the vampire to nothing more than ash floating across the floor on the air of the morning breeze in
Dracula.
This created two problems for the company.
How does one go about resuscitating the demon? And, once awakened, what do we do with him?
Many sources state that Terence Fisher had planned a full-blown satanic ritual that would involve an inverted crucifix complete with shackled maiden, but budget restriction and censorship warnings made this impossible. In the movie it is the corpse of Alan Kent who is cut down and strung up by a faithful servant who never appeared in the original film. The captive’s throat is slit and blood pours onto the ashes reviving the naked vampire in all his glory, without questioning the logistics of the ashes landing in just the right spot in the sarcophagus. It takes forty-five minutes to bring Dracula to life in an eighty-six minute movie and we spend the first half of the film concentrating on four rather bland Victorian sightseers.

The Kents are travelling across Europe and consist of very blatant stereotypes. Alan (Charles Tingwell) is the quiet studious type who is constantly embarrassed by the narrow minded ramblings of his wife Helen (Barbara Shelley), whilst his rambunctious younger brother Charles (Francis Matthews) spends his days being the life and soul of the party with his demure and pretty young wife Diana (Suzan Farmer) at his side. At the inn, Helen complains constantly of her young brother-in-law’s generosity to the natives as he buys endless rounds of drinks for all the patrons. Amidst all the merry-making a large gruff figure enters the inn and berates the townsfolk for stringing up garlic flowers.

“There are no devils and even if there were, these wouldn’t keep him out!”

He introduces himself as Father Sandor, a cleric of Kleinberg who criticizes social
etiquettes
and explains away a carbine rifle as putting venison on the table. When he hears that the young company is headed for Carlsbad, he warns them to stay away from the castle that is not marked on any map.
As the film trails on, we discover that Alan Kent and his wife are mere cannon fodder to be instrumental in bringing the Count back to life. There is an eerie sequence with a driverless carriage that takes the four to the castle in the Carpathians after their original coach driver has decided against travelling at night and leaving his charges stranded in the middle of nowhere. On closer inspection they find that the castle is ready to receive guests and their own luggage has been deposited in the various bedrooms. As the guests settle down for the night, Fisher guides his camera stealthily around the uninhabited castle that suggests the restless spirit of the Count and the horrors to come. The servant Klove (Philip Latham), has no intentions of sleep as he prepares a midnight bloodbath. He stealthily drags a large trunk down to the cellars and peppers ashes from an antique box into a large sarcophagus. His thumps and bumps alert his visitors who decide to investigate. Alan Kent is not the first fool to be bumped off in a horror movie, but as his hosts midnight ventures are really none of his affair, I grinned when Klove took him out with a knife between his shoulder blades. When Dracula is revitalized, Klove intercepts Helen to provide his first meal. Very quickly she notices that Alan has been put away very neatly in an old wooden box. Originally, the script asked that his severed head be placed on top of the casket smiling at the audience, but the censor wouldn’t hear of it. Helen screams and turns to face Christopher Lee’s Count Dracula for the first time.
Bereft of dialogue – Lee claims that he refused to speak the lines that were written for him, while Sangster always maintained that he never wrote any – Dracula is reduced to being nothing more than a second cousin to the bogeyman who jumps out at people when the audience becomes restless. One can understand Lee becoming very disillusioned on reading the draft for this script, but it is unclear whether or not he would have had the necessary authority to question its contents at the time. The final third of the movie simply replays his animal savagery from the first film but with considerably less bloodletting. He bites Helen off screen, even though many stills have shown different over the years, and without any explanation opens a vein in his chest for Suzan Farmer to drink his blood. He throttles Francis Matthew’s useless hero two or three times during the course of the movie and, after chasing the heroes and then being chased in turn, he eventually meets his end in the icy waters of the Castle moat – courtesy, in part, of his stand-in Eddie Powell. Dracula is the Prince of Darkness and he was relegated to the shadows for most of this film. However, his performance in this movie elevated him to the rank of the definitive Count Dracula for millions of fans.