1950s, 1960s, British cinema, Horror/Eerie

Dracula (aka Horror of Dracula, 1958) / Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)

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Director: Terence Fisher

By Roderick Heath

Christopher Lee, son of an English soldier and an Anglo-Italian countess who had been an artist’s model, had aristocratic roots that could be traced back to Charlemagne. Born in London, he grew with a diverse education and a swathe of languages at his command, a scion both of imperial England’s waning bastions and Europe’s rapidly fragmenting identities. His gifts and experiences would serve Lee well in life, after his step-father’s bankruptcy and the coming of World War II. His service in the war was shrouded in legend ever after, and some have suggested his step-cousin Ian Fleming based James Bond partly on him. After a suggestion by another cousin, an Italian ambassador, Lee decided to try acting after the war. Lee was marked as a potential star and put through Rank’s “charm school” training, perhaps to mint another dashing screen roué like James Mason or Stewart Granger or to put his fencing talents to work in swashbucklers.
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Lee, however, struggled for a long time to find his place in the cinematic scheme of things. Something about him didn’t quite fit—perhaps he had too much premature gravitas, too little untroubled charm, to be the romantic lead in the anodyne atmosphere of early ’50s British film. Lee carved out a career as a character actor instead, playing everything from a spear-carrying soldier in Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) to a comedic nightclub owner in Powell and Pressburger’s Battle of the River Plate (1956). Ironically for a performer equipped with a deep, unmistakeable, well-trained voice, he was then offered a role with no lines at all. Lee, who had been dogged by the opinion he was too tall for an actor, was offered the part of Frankenstein’s monster for just that reason. He accepted instantly, perhaps remembering that the same part had turned Boris Karloff, another British misfit, into a star.
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The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) represented a gamble for Lee just as it did for Hammer Films, the small, relatively low-rent filmmaking concern built by actor William Hinds and entrepreneur James Carreras and later developed by their sons Anthony and Michael. After success adapting the Quatermass TV serials for the big screen, the company tried its luck with a series of proper horror movies, a genre that had been largely inactive since the mid-1940s. These films were produced in colour, a choice that would automatically make their product stand out when most fantastical films of the time were cheaply made in black and white, and with the disreputable but commercially smart object of shocking audiences with gore. Lee’s costar in Frankenstein was Peter Cushing, another actor whose career had been varied and frustrating but who had finally become a well-known face working on TV. Reviled by critics faced with its gaudy, painterly, potent revision of both Mary Shelley’s model and the well-worn Universal film series, The Curse of Frankenstein was nonetheless a hit, and Hammer quickly gathered the people responsible back to take on another storied horror property, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Cushing again was cast as the lead, and Lee as the monster that he must fend off. Young screenwriter Jimmy Sangster proved himself ingenious when paired with director Terence Fisher. Fisher, a respected editor, had moved into directing like former collaborator David Lean, but where Lean quickly achieved prestige, Fisher subsisted as a quickie helmsman. Yet, like Lee, such fare gave him a chance to develop a no-nonsense professionalism that would serve his creativity exceedingly well when finally let off the leash, and he proved himself adept at dark melodramas like So Long at the Fair (1952) and injecting such cornball scifi as 4-Sided Triangle (1953) with visual drama far beyond its means.
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Fisher proved to have the perfect sensibility for horror cinema, stimulated by the chance he found to play around with the established tropes of gothic horror. Fisher and Sangster had determinedly distorted the Frankenstein myth to return the scientist to the centre of the tale and strip him of nobility, an idea perfect for the growing cynicism of the atomic age. Faced with the equally hoary figure of Dracula, their take centred squarely on the understanding that the vampire overlord was a version of the ancient folk figure of the demon lover. Some critics have seen the Hammer Dracula as a prefiguration of the movie version of James Bond: a sexual fantasy incarnate, if still here held in check as an image of villainy. The film’s opening credits, exploring the surrounds and interior of the vampire overlord’s castle, resolves in a tracking shot that slowly zeroes in on Dracula’s name carved into the lid of a massive stone sarcophagus upon which blood starts to drip. This vision has a powerful quality as an abstract encapsulation of the visual texture where dusty browns and greys and the violent lustre of gory hues will dominate. But it is perhaps more important as a prototypical pop-art declaration of the Hammer brand and the changing face of pop culture, heralding an awareness of iconography, an idea that the James Bond films would exploit more fully.
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Revising the story for a straitened production and with an eye to a tighter, more intimate story, the filmmakers stripped away much of the foliage of Stoker’s novel, including the long voyage from Transylvania to England, the hunt for the vampire’s resting place, and the wealth of background characters, to concentrate on the essential idea of Dracula as dark force assaulting the Victorian bourgeois idyll and faced down by the forces of iron rationality. Jonathan Harker (Fisher regular John Van Eyssen) was changed from a naïve realtor to a fellow scholar engaged with Van Helsing in infiltrating and uncovering abodes of the undead, letting himself be engaged by Dracula to archive his library as a Trojan Horse warrior bent on tracking down the vampire’s resting place and killing him. Fisher set out to bait the audience into taking Dracula as a figure of campy appeal by having him first appear as a looming shadow at the top of the stairs, and then undercut it by having Lee stride into the light, imperious, courtly, smoothly charismatic. Evil suddenly was sexy.
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Rejecting the images of ruin and infestation that F.W. Murnau and Tod Browning had originally offered in their takes on the material and Expressionist stylisation, Fisher and the Hammer production team instead insisted on a solid, realistic visual texture loaned light stylisation through the use of colour and lighting. Dracula’s castle, first glimpsed under the opening credits complete with a hulking stone eagle statue hovering with unstated menace against the grey sky, is a definite and tangible abode of stonework in a perpetually autumnal land of damp mists and fleeting brown leaves. This setting resituates Stoker’s material in a solidly English tradition of gothic imagery. Sangster discarded all supernatural manifestations, like Dracula’s ability to transform into a bat or a wolf, again for budgetary reasons, but also to aid Fisher’s program to create a universe for his horror material that is substantial, enacted on the level of physical oppression and appropriation. Dracula’s castle dominates its landscape exactly as such castles were built to do: to intimidate and belittle, to ward off and keep out. Harker can only enter by guile. Dracula’s status as dark romancer was hardly new–Bela Lugosi’s and John Carradine’s counts had both effectively embodied the same idea, in contrast with F.W. Murnau’s rodentlike Nosferatu (1922). But Lee, Fisher, and Sangster pushed the idea into a realm of explicitly erotic menace. Where Lugosi and Carradine compelled with hypnosis, Lee dominates with sensual and corporeal stature, and his close encounters with the women in the films shot unabashedly as erogenous preludes.
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Fisher’s rigorous filmmaking, not as spectacular as Murnau’s or as densely visual as Mario Bava’s, nonetheless made the Hammer brand what it became. Settings are not transformed landscapes of the mind, but islets of obsessively fussy, romanticised folk-memory. Bava, a cinematographer, inevitably offered a decorative eye; Fisher was fascinated by the use of space and the rhythm of structure. Early scenes of Dracula move sonorously through lapping dissolves and deceptive quiet, time slowing to an eerie crawl as Harker enters Dracula’s remote castle on his mission (notwithstanding cheap effects: a “mountain torrent” that looks a bit like someone left the hose on). The sequence leading up to Dracula’s first appearance is a gem of subtle construction. Gaunt’s vampire girl appears in the background as Harker picks up spilt objects from the floor, an unexpected presence bringing unexpected, erotic appeal to the dry-as-dust scholar. Sexual egotism under the façade of gallantry is almost immediately Harker’s downfall when he is confronted after his arrival at Dracula’s castle by a young woman (Valerie Gaunt) who appeals for his help but is actually one of the vampire’s undead companions. Harker is quickly lured close enough for her to launch an attack on his jugular vein, only to suddenly stiffen and dash away. Harker, bewildered, slowly turns and gives a start as he sees a huge, menacing black shadow at the top of a flight of stairs. The shadow advances. Dracula appears, armed with Lee’s looks and impeccably polite authority, instantly dispelling any anticipations of camp amusement. The monster is a charming host, and more importantly, strangely potent. Stoker’s Dracula was a figure out of Europe’s mythical past, a remnant of an ancien regime feeding on the early modern world’s lack of vigilance and credulity for the idea of the past as a haunting thing; Fisher and Sangster’s vampire overlord on the other hand is rudely, impudently alive and assured in tyrannical domain.
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The wry segue from menace to courtly savoir faire gives way later when Fisher restages the sequence for raw horror. This time, when the vampire girl draws close to Harker, his hilariously precious assurances of protective intent are undercut as Fisher privileges the viewer with the sight of the girl eyeing his neck greedily and unsheathing her fangs before plunging them into his jugular. Harker throws her off whilst Dracula appears suddenly in a doorway beyond and between them, in Fisher’s favourite rhetorical device, a single wide shot binding a sudden confluence of actions.
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Fisher then dives in for one of the greatest close-ups in cinema: Dracula, teeth bared, fresh blood smeared on his face, animalistic in his fury at his chattel daring to defy his rule and attack his guest. The effect is delirious after god knows how many viewings: the cool, eerie tone suddenly turns to a display of primal evil, as Dracula hurls his bride about and grips Harker in one hand, squeezing the breath out of him, Lee’s gore-smeared maw elongating with weird and savage glee. Courtly Dracula never returns. The beast is exposed, and it’s a sight so compelling that Lee’s Dracula, for better or worse, would essentially remain in that mode in the next six Hammer entries in which he would star except for a brief scene in The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1974), where he plays a real estate tycoon and employs a plummy Slavic accent.
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Harker awakens under the threat of becoming a monster himself thanks to the bite that’s festering in his neck, and sets out to destroy Dracula and his bride before the sun falls again. Harker successfully kills the girl, but her death wail awakens the Count on the threshold of night. Harker is terrified to realise he’s trapped in the castle vault with the vampire overlord, and in a memorably dark, mischievous touch, Harker is next glimpsed occupying the girl’s sarcophagus, victim of vampire bisexuality? Fisher fades out on the confrontation in the same way directors of the time faded out on imminent rape scenes.
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The revisions to the novel shifts the rest of the action from England to an enclave of Britons resident somewhere in Austro-Hungary. Rather than Dracula being an exile trying to gain a foothold in a new land, the protagonists are all innocents abroad discovering life is a dank and disturbing adventure. The arrival of Van Helsing (Cushing) in the narrative signals a balancing of scales between good and evil. Van Helsing is first glimpsed with back to camera, face abstract, his status as human, but equal adversary to the monster implied. The hostile innkeeper (George Woodbridge) warns him away from prying into the reign of terror and the conspiracy of silence that enables it, but a barmaid, grateful for Harker’s decency, smuggles Van Helsing Harker’s recovered diary, enabling the erstwhile academic to understand the fate of his comrade. When he penetrates Dracula’s castle, he’s confronted by a hearse carrying Dracula away to new hunting grounds and the sight of Harker looking like a sated leech with teeth in his new bed. Conspiring to kill Harker off in this way provides a neat twist in the familiar tale and also helps make Stoker’s rather awkward narrative a bit more logical. In a manner that would permanently mark the horror film, it also offers a realisation that the traditional, romantic ingénue hero a la David Manners’ Harker in the Lugosi version, upright and decent and slightly effete in the face of evil, was not necessary or even particularly desirable in horror stories. Arthur Holmwood (Michael Gough), who takes Harker’s role as husband of the threatened damsel Mina (Melissa Stribling); Gough’s amusingly prissy performance grasps intuitively at the essence of stuffed-shirt Victorian urbanity.
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Murnau and Browning had never really seemed to know what to do with Van Helsing as a character in a drama woozy with fascination for the sepulchral. Edward Van Sloan had been appropriately intelligent and resolute in Browning version, but even there he was left a somewhat passive onlooker, a Merlinlike guide for the handsome young men and women who are the familiar protagonists of romantic melodrama. Instead Fisher and Sangster remoulded Van Helsing as a heroic figure, creating a more direct opposition of the avatars of rationality and chaos. This approach both extends and inverts that of the Curse of Frankenstein, where the scientist and monster were made virtually interchangeable to better explore the implications of science without morality. But in Dracula, the scheme is used to study the inhuman aspect of both unleashed priapism and punitive moralism struggling over the fates of the merely human and the pathetically victimised in a tug-of-war. It also bears noting that in Expressionist-style horror, the rare rational figure was an interloper in a dream world, whereas the solidity of Fisher’s vision reimagines the vampire as the eruption of the id into the everyday.
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The rest of Dracula is dominated by the notion of the vampire eating the Victorian bourgeois home first from the outside and then, most ingeniously, from within. Dracula targets first Harker’s fiancée Lucy (Carol Marsh) and then Mina, wife of Lucy’s brother Arthur, in a programme of calculated revenge for the death of the first bride. Lucy’s nightly visitations by the vampire see her lying in thrall in her bed awaiting the black-clad seducer, his approach signalled by stirring autumnal leaves beyond the threshold of her open French windows, whilst James Bernard’s score swirls with increasingly feverish impatience and cloud whips by the full moon. Later, when Dracula sets his sights on Mina, he gets her to hide his coffin in the household cellar.
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The prim and wan Mina turns up the morning after being lured to Dracula’s hiding place with an unmistakeably postcoital glow: Fisher’s wit extends to the impression that Mina has far more blood in her veins after being attacked by a vampire (Fisher purportedly told her to act as if she’d just had the best sex of her life). Whilst Arthur and Van Helsing watch her bedroom windows from outside, the vampire is able to walk into her room for a night of sanguinary passion, a moment as close to the outright erotic as mainstream film could get at the time, Stribling’s Mina the goggle-eyed bird fixated by the beast in her boudoir before he pins her on the bed and caresses her face with imperious appetite. Dracula has been reconstructed, not even the novel’s dark, entitled romancer anymore, but a creature of utterly uncontained sexual appeal. Meanwhile Van Helsing’s attempt to intervene and prevent Lucy’s death fails when the Holmwoods’ servant Gerda (Olga Dickie) clears out the garlic flowers planted to keep the monster out, and Arthur blames Van Helsing for her death. The professor is forced to hand over Harker’s diary as proof of the nature of the evil.
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Lucy’s resurrected form haunts the forests beyond the town, enticing Tania (Janine Faye), Gerda’s daughter, out for moonlit games. Another superlatively mounted, instantly iconic sequence comes as Arthur, with the seeds of expectation planted by Harker’s diary, goes to check Lucy’s crypt and finds her arriving with Tania in tow. The setting is a nirvana of gothic fantasy, with whirling leaves, licking ground fog, and desolate stonework. Sickly intimations of paedophilia and incest abound as Lucy turns from small girl into a dead-eyed parasite delighted at the thought of partaking of her brother’s blood, begging for a fraternal kiss from the appalled Arthur. A crucifix is thrust into the frame, cutting the air between the pair: Van Helsing, the sentinel of implacable reckoning, drives the terrified vampire back and scorches her brow with the touch of the holy object. The dark side of Van Helsing’s heroism is underlined both here and when he subsequently stakes Lucy, giving her rest at the expense of extinguishing a powerfully carnal creature, both victim and byproduct of failed repression. Fisher also takes a moment to observe Van Helsing comforting Tania, giving her a “pretty thing”–the cross–and telling her to wait and watch the sun rise with the solicitude of a favourite uncle. In spite of the brutal necessities and insidious forces in this vision, Fisher accords a simple grace between such Manichaean extremes.
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The flaws of Dracula stem, like its best ideas, from concatenating a complex narrative for a low budget. The relative proximity of Dracula’s homeland and the locale of the Holmwood house here means that the epic pursuit described in the book gives way to a horse chase that could have strayed out a lesser western. Comic relief is variable: the actor and writer Miles Malleson, who had helped pen the screenplay of The Thief of Baghdad (1940), one of the few British fantasy films of its age and in some ways a precursor to the Hammer horror brand (with Conrad Veidt’s Jaffar a definite ancestor of Lee’s Dracula), appears briefly but amusingly as a gabby, absent-minded undertaker, whilst Geoffrey Bayldon contributes less funny stuff as a corrupt border guard. But the proper finale is another breathlessly well-staged sequence that sees the horror film lurching close to something like action cinema. Indeed, Fisher would have an acknowledged influence on later, kinetically gifted, blockbuster filmmakers like Spielberg, Lucas, and Burton, and Cushing pushed for a climax that had a physicality worthy of Douglas Fairbanks. The production couldn’t quite stretch that far, but the battle between Dracula and Van Helsing has a ferocity that’s still gripping thanks to the combination of Fisher’s jagged edits, the actors, and Bernard’s thunderous scoring. The fight builds to a swashbuckling move where the vampire hunter leaps onto a long table, dashes down its length and pulls down curtains, pinioning Dracula in the sun’s rays, where he agonisingly disintegrates into a pile of ashes, a moment that stands as one of the most quoted sequences in horror cinema, in spite of, and perhaps because of, the resolutely low-tech effects.
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Dracula was a big hit upon release, one that set a horror renaissance that would power on until the 1980s officially on course. Lee later estimated the film made upwards of $25 million, a huge sum for the day. Lee himself declined to play the vampire again, afraid of being typecast. In the interval, Fisher helmed The Brides of Dracula (1960), with Cushing returning as Van Helsing, but that film, though later reappraised as amongst the finest Hammer films, was greeted as a compromise at the time. Finally, after eight years and some commercial stumbles by Hammer and Fisher in working through the classic canon of horror tales, Lee was persuaded to return as the count in Dracula: Prince of Darkness. The result of this deal, has often itself been regarded as a lesser Hammer horror, but Prince of Darkness deserves more respect, in large part because whilst the original Dracula had been a perfect fit for 1958, the sequel has a prognosticative element, one Hammer would ultimately fail to comprehend, leading to its commercial decline. Dracula: Prince of Darkness strips down Fisher’s concept of Stoker’s mythology to an even more purified essence and, with it, the underpinning anxieties and fantasies of much horror storytelling; in doing so, it looks forward to what would happen in the genre in the ’70s. The basic plot is the same as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and other films where a bunch of young people find themselves stranded in some evil locale at the mercy of malignant foes. This time Dracula didn’t even get a single line, and it testifies to the force of Lee’s performance and Fisher’s direction that he doesn’t need any to bend the gravitational flow of the film.
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This time, Fisher and screenwriter Anthony Hinds, a regular Hammer producer working under his usual writing pseudonym John Elder, replaced Van Helsing with Father Sandor (Andrew Keir), a creation who, as a religious man, focuses the dualistic take on good vss evil more than Van Helsing could. Following a replay of the first film’s climax, Sandor is glimpsed at the outset berating a fellow priest as a superstitious idiot and warning the Carpathian villagers not go desecrating the dead in the belief the Dracula is still plaguing them. Sandor later warns a quartet of English tourists not to go anywhere near Dracula’s castle, which is missing from maps. The unwitting tourists are brothers Alan (Charles “Bud” Tingwell) and Charles (Francis Matthews) and their wives Helen (Barbara Shelley) and Diana (Suzan Farmer). Charles is the younger, glibber, mostly reformed playboy brother who delights in teasing Helen, the uptight and nervous representative of stiff-necked English mores.
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In spite of Dracula’s death, the locals are still petrified by his memory, a fear that plays a part in the travellers being left stranded before his castle and forced to take refuge there–helped along by a mysterious carriage pulled by a couple of self-directing horses. They find a servant, Klove (Phillip Latham), tending to the castle and maintaining the supposed last wishes of his deceased master to take care of all visitors. Fisher stages Klove’s appearance as a new twist on Dracula’s in the previous film, stepping out of shadow to reveal himself as neither hideously deformed nor towering and charismatic, but rather like someone left Alistair Sim in the fridge too long. Helen quivers with anxiety as she senses the malevolent strangeness behind all of the odd events, but her companions remain oblivious and increasingly irritated by her mood. During the night, the sound of Klove dragging a large chest around draws Alan out to find what’s happening, only for Klove to stab him to death, suspend his body over an open sarcophagus, and use his life blood to reconstitute Dracula from his own collected ashes. Klove then entices Helen out to become the resurrected monster’s first victim/bride. Charles and Diana fight their way out of the castle and take refuge at the monastery headed by Sandor, but Klove brings the count and Helen to the monastery and lays siege.
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Fisher’s direction this time around was more of an experiment in pacing, prowling camerawork suggesting the presence of evil long before it shows its face, a mood of quiet oddness dominating the first half. The narrative is deceptively straightforward, paring away distractions to create a cleverly focused variation on the original’s concerns. Hinds’ script works in elements from the novel left out of the ’58 film, including a version of Renfield named Ludwig (Thorley Walters, in a note-perfect turn), a resident at Sandor’s monastery who lost his mind after some hideous experience near Castle Dracula and now binds books for the monks. He soon proves to be a sleeper agent for the besieging monster, and the key to the moment when Dracula forces Diana to drink his blood from a gash in his chest. Fisher observes the slow gathering of forces that will attack the interlopers, with their readily familiar quirks and flaws plotted exactingly and building to the hideously beautiful sight of Alan’s gushing blood feeding the reconstituting mess in the sarcophagus. Matthews’ Charles makes for a deliberately callow hero, forced to rapidly grow up in the course of fighting for his and Diana’s lives, whilst Diana herself, though in thrall to the vampire later in the film, is, in many ways, the most forthright and gutsy character: her attempt to intervene and save her husband reveals to Sandor a way to kill the monster.
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But Dracula: Prince of Darkness is essentially about Helen, a vehicle for Fisher to return to the obsessive point of duality that drives this fantasy and push the metaphors of neurotic repression and lunatic explosion to an extreme within a single character. She’s insufferable in her vinegary attitude and priggishness, the epitome of a certain cliché of English repression. She’s also the only one with the sense to see the situation for what it is, a Cassandra no one will listen to. Presented to the dark marauder lurking in the castle, Helen is transformed into a devilishly passionate creature, lusting after Diana and clinging tightly to the count. Shelley, who had only gotten to play half of Fisher’s last study in dichotomous female representation, The Gorgon (1963), here describes the shift from lamb to predator with fiendish grace, as when Helen appears at Diana’s window at the monastery, playing the lost and freezing innocent in a vision out of folk myth, then leaping for Diana’s neck with wolfish delight the moment her way is clear.
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Like the use of the monster in Curse of Frankenstein as a way of revealing the monstrosity of the creator, here Fisher reduces Dracula to an almost abstract force peeling away the contrivances of civilisation, anticipating the increasingly blank and faceless avatars of evil that would proliferate in later horror films. When the monks capture Helen, the scene is staged like a gang-rape, Sandor hammering the life out of her. Here Fisher looks forward to the historical savagery and indictments of Witchfinder General (1969) and The Devils (1971). Fisher complicates by not making Sandor an obvious avatar for repressive religious fanaticism, but rather a good-natured, earthy man whose fearsome streak is stirred only by the spectacle of real evil. In spite of his relatively marginal presence in the film, Dracula is not reduced; his authority, and Lee’s, is brought out all the more as he silently and effortlessly dominates any character and any scene he’s in, as when he gestures for a mesmerised Diana to remove her crucifix necklace, a moment that perhaps better than any other captures the level of concentration and rigour Lee poured into his performances as Dracula. The film’s cobra-and-mongoose-like intensity finally combusts for another segue into serial-like action at the climax. Charles and Sandor dash across country to catch the carriage driven by Klove and carrying Dracula and the stolen Diana to the castle. Here the script makes inspired use of a relatively obscure piece of vampire lore, that running water is a fatal barrier. As Charles and Dracula fight on the frozen mantle of the castle’s moat, Sandor shoots the ice until the vampire is stranded on a frigid raft, before he pitches into the brine and sinks to his doom. Naturally, the count would be back. Having broken his ban, Lee would return to the role seven more times, five of them for Hammer. In spite of those films’ varying levels of quality and inspiration, and following a remarkable late-career resurgence as the must-have actor mascot for grand movie fantasies in the 2000s, Lee would, nonetheless and above all, always be Dracula.

1960s, British cinema, Horror/Eerie

The Brides of Dracula (1960)

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Director: Terence Fisher

By Roderick Heath

A fog-rimmed lake. A sonorous voice on the soundtrack telling us we are now in Transylvania. A carriage careening through the twilight forest, the driver whipping his horses in frenzy, his comely passenger panicking as her journey to a new life seems to be turning into a nightmarish ride in unknown territory. What looks like dead body lies on the road, blocking the way. A mysterious stranger watches from the woods, looking for his opportunity to stealthily climb aboard the coach and work his mysterious purpose. Now that’s how you start a horror movie.
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Amongst horror movie fans and connoisseurs of Hammer Films’ output, The Brides of Dracula has slowly gained repute, to the point where some state today that it’s the best horror work the studio ever made. The film’s delayed rise to such acclaim was due to its being overshadowed and dismissed as a by-product at the time of its release. Christopher Lee had played Bram Stoker’s vampire overlord in Terence Fisher’s Dracula (1958) to audience-delighting, icon-making effect. Titling a film The Brides of Dracula without Dracula actually turning up was received as a bit of a cheat, and after Lee resumed the role, Hammer’s first stab at extending its vampire franchise was obscured. Lee, frightened with good reason of being typecast, refused to play the role again, and would not buckle until 1966’s Dracula, Prince of Darkness. In the meantime, Fisher and the creative team at Hammer tried to synthesise a replacement for Dracula whilst retaining his antagonist, Peter Cushing’s Dr Van Helsing, for another bout with evil. Lee and Cushing wouldn’t be reunited in their archetypal roles until Dracula A.D. 1972. The film’s development was rocky, with three credited screenwriters including the studio’s two main horror scribes, Jimmy Sangster and Peter Bryan, and contributions from producer Anthony Hinds, Fisher, and Cushing, and a planned finale that was dropped and then used in another film. And yet Brides stands alongside the likes of Fisher’s own The Gorgon (1964) and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), Don Sharp’s Kiss of the Vampire (1963), and John Gilling’s The Reptile (1966), as one of the supreme Hammer films, a fiercely concentrated and lushly executed work of the studio’s peculiar brand of Technicolor Gothic, instantly recognisable for its near-operatic sense of colour and drama.
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The Brides of Dracula arrived when Hammer’s budgets and ambitions were expanding, with more elaborate sets and some special effects, but still limited enough to deliver some of the shoddy pleasures associated with the brand, here apparent most particularly in a delightfully unconvincing devil bat. But Brides is a vibrant work, one that revels in being freed from the specific mythos of Dracula himself whilst still remixing the themes and images established so vividly by Fisher’s first take. Early sequences provide a tweak on Stoker’s template by placing a woman, rather than a man, in danger in a remote locale, and emphasising more forcefully the theme of the innocent abroad taking a plunge into the abyss. The innocent here is Marianne Danielle (Yvonne Monlaur), a young Frenchwoman on her way to work as a student-teacher in the small town of Badstein, in the usual hazily defined Mittel Europa of Hammer works, supposedly in what the narrator describes as, “Transylvania – land of dark forests, dread mountains and black, unfathomed lakes – still the home of magic and devilry as the Nineteenth century draws to a close.” The thunder of the opening resolves in a fake-out, as the body on the road proves to be only a peculiarly shaped log, which the fretful coachman (inevitably, Michael Ripper) clears out of the way. But this anticlimax turns out to be a ploy by the stranger in the woods (actually Black Park in Buckinghamshire, soon be all too familiar to audiences of Hammer films) who catches hold of the back of the coach and rides secretly with it into the nearby village.
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The stranger’s part in the film proves the most enigmatic element, an emissary of evil who’s never named (although the credits and the famously whacko novelisation by Dean Owen call him Latour) and vanishes from the proceedings having performed his deed, as he bribes the coachman to leave the village and abandon Marianne while she’s in a tavern having dinner. Already gilded genre cliché is already in play, but with a twist: the locale is strange, the underlying mood tense, but the locals are friendly enough in a workaday fashion, until the time of dread falls upon them, at which point the innkeeper so solicitous to Marianne (Norman Pierce) and his wife (Vera Cook) are gripped by enigmatic, hysterical urgency. Fisher offers a lovely weird moment when an abrupt silence draws the attention of Marianne and the innkeeper, who have been conversing pleasantly, to the front door, and see that the stranger is standing there, watching them with a satisfied smile, whilst everyone else in the room has fallen gravely quiet. Marianne is advised to flee by the two solicitous hoteliers, but before they can bustle her away, the sound of another coach coming into town signals the limits of their bravery and resistance. “Don’t open it,” the wife says; “I must,” the man replies in bleak concession to life under a tyranny. Tyranny in this village has a courtly face, however, as the owner of the coach Baroness Meinster (Martita Hunt), who offers Marianne hospitality for night, beguiling the young woman with aristocratic indulgences, like fancy wine. Marianne accepts and dines with the Baroness in the castle overlooking the village.
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The Baroness offers that most hallowed of gothic horror tropes, the devolved remnant of the ancien regime reminiscing with exultant sadness about the times when the castle was the scene of grand parties and conspicuous consumption. By this time, however, Marianne is privy to the mysterious secret of Castle Meinster, having glimpsed from the room the Baroness assigns her a young man, standing on a balcony far below. The Baroness admits this is her son, the young Baron who is, she explains, beset by a malady that has destroyed their lives, a malady he picked up in his wild, indulgent youth: “We pray for death, my son and I,” she reports, shocking Danielle but also stirring her empathy. However, during the night, Marianne catches sight again of the Baron, this time seemingly about to hurl himself to his death from his apartment balcony. She screams out to stop what she presumes to be his imminent suicide, but after she find her way through the house into the Baron’s apartment, she is confronted by the contrivance that makes his suicide by jumping impossible: he’s chained by the leg. The Baron, far from being an imprisoned lunatic, steps out from the shadows to reveal himself as a starkly handsome, soft-spoken romantic idol who appeals desperately to Marianne to find the key to the lock on his ankle in his mother’s room.
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The Brides of Dracula offers a fun burlesque here on classic historical romantic fiction, calling back to British cinema’s mid-‘40s heyday of films in that genre when James Mason and Stewart Granger played roguish, black-hearted seducers not that far removed from Hammer’s Dracula. Marianne is cast as plucky damsel freeing the cruelly imprisoned heir with an impressive feat of bravery, stealing into the Baroness’s room and locating the key and then, when she’s almost trapped by the Baroness’s arrival, escaping through the window and traversing a narrow ledge to safety, all whilst still clad in her nightgown. But Marianne’s act of love-struck bravery proves, of course, to have been performed in the service of bottomless evil, because the Baron is a vampire, held in restraint by his mother and kept sated with young women like Marianne. The freed Baron shields Marianne from the Baroness’s wrath however, telling Marianne to go pack and then addressing his mother with smoothly menacing intensity that compels her to follow him back into his former prison. Marianne, once dressed and ready to leave, hears a strange cackling laugh echoing from the Baron’s apartment and descends to investigate. Rather than her beautiful prize for gallant action, Marianne only finds Frieda laughing in nihilistic delight over the Baron’s discarded restraint, and the cracked servant happily makes Marianne face the consequence of her act: the Baroness sitting dead in an armchair. Marianne, horrified and panicked, flees into the night and traverses the forest by moonlight. Frieda remains behind, muttering a Shakespearean soliloquy as she admonishes the dead Baroness for her history of indulging the young Baron until he finally become an undoubted monster, and anticipates the Baron’s inevitable return to his coffin, waiting empty for its owner’s return.
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Hammer’s brand of horror was usually quite literal and straightforward, portraying eruptions of the irrational in a thoroughly tangible context, an alternative to the otherworldly approach of German expressionism. This alternative was rooted in a peculiarly British variety of magic-realism, one that had long lurked within classic gothic literature and romantic fiction, a distorted, magnified sense of the compellingly vicious that had generally only found cinematic expression in Britain through Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell, and the charismatic bounders and bitches of the Gainsborough Melodramas of the ‘40s. Evil, no matter how supernaturally powered, becomes a materialist thing infesting and infecting the human world in the Hammer ethos, whilst Fisher’s approach to the genre’s monochromatic moral essence was resolutely totemic and vivid, staked in flesh and blood and stone and wood. Social evil is indivisible from the less palpable kind, feeding each-other. The Brides of Dracula, however, sees the director straining beyond the studio’s usual realistic template, as he would again with The Gorgon. As usual with Fisher’s direction, the dramatic, geographical, and interpersonal relationships are all mapped with an exacting sense of linkage, progression, cause and effect in Brides. He builds a little world with the fastidiousness of a model train enthusiast, where all the elements exist precisely to facilitate others and are demonstrably connected, like the plainly visible chateau above the Meinster village set, and the keen camera movements and angles in the chateau that make the set feel both labyrinthine and spatially coherent.
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Yet Fisher often invested his horror films with hints of dark fairy tale and folk myth, an inflection fully apparent in images here like Marianne stalking the shadowy halls of the fairy tale castle, trying to free her demon lover, and then running away into the dark forest like Snow White, only to be found as a sleeping beauty lying in the midst of the woods by an improbable Prince Charming. The Brides of Dracula skirts of a kind of airy cinematic mysticism usually associated with continental filmmakers like Lang, Cocteau, and Franju, with their love of permeable realities and blithe manifestations of the fantastic. The film also harkens explicitly to Fisher’s early, pre-Hammer work, the Hitchcockian thriller So Long at the Fair (1952) where another young female traveller falls through the permeable barriers between normal and abnormal worlds, faced with jarring disappearances and conspiracies of silence. Van Helsing speaks of vampirism not as individual monstrosities but a “Cult of the Undead,” a “remnant of one of the ancient pagan religions,” which introduces a note of dense, conspiratorial evil reminiscent of Lang’s films, whilst the darkly romantic fairy tale motifs in a proto-modern world anticipate Franju’s remix of Judex (1963). Moreover, Brides may well be the most specifically influential of Hammer films, certainly in its visuals the quintessential studio entry. The rich Technicolor photography by Fisher’s regular photographer Jack Asher painting a world in musty, muted blues and browns that suggest a permanent autumn in the world, punctuated by eye-gorging, saturated hues in clothing and décor, evoking Victorian lithographic and book plate illustration to generate a sense of gothic atmosphere. Neil Jordan, with The Company of Wolves (1984), and Tim Burton, in Sleepy Hollow (1999), would later pay explicit tribute to that style, with Burton even recreating the windmill featured in this film’s finale for his tribute.
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The morning following Marianne’s adventure sees a passing coach halt on the forest roadside. A casual downward pan reveals Marianne sprawled unconscious on autumnal leaves. The passenger in the coach proves to be just the person you want to find you after a terrifying encounter with a vampire: Dr Van Helsing plucks Marianne off the ground and transports her to the village, where the innkeepers are surprised and happy to see her safe. Van Helsing has been invited to the village by the local Cure (Fred Johnson) who suspects the nature of the evil previously held within the Chateau and wants Van Helsing to investigate. Van Helsing carefully teases out details of Marianne’s story whilst trying to shield her from the nature of the danger she faced, hoping to speedily return her to normality, but this proves a miscalculation on his part, as he leaves the door open for the Baron to approach Marianne still playing the hapless young lover, his mother’s death dismissed as tragic culmination of her own violence. Van Helsing escorts Marianne to her new place of employment, a Girl’s Academy run by the sweet-and-sour couple Frau and Herr Lang (Mona Washbourne and Henry Oscar). Van Helsing calmly faces down the overbearing Herr Lang, whose own wife describes him as “a little bit terrifying,” when he chastises Marianne for being late and in a man’s company: Van Helsing producing his business card with its long list of impressive doctorates instantly turns petty overlord into grovelling bourgeois. This joke is repeated with a slightly more pointed inference later when Baron Meinster turns up to romance Marianne, and Lang, not knowing him, threatens to throw him out. The Baron explains he’s Lang’s landlord with suave assurance, but gets a measure of revenge as he congratulates Lang on maintaining “such a charming house and grounds – at so low a rent.”
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Cushing’s Van Helsing here wields the same specific gravitas he held in Dracula, as the unremittingly rational being who battles supernatural evil with the trappings of religion and myth but with the method of a scientist, slowly cutting out the cancer of ancient ills as the emblem of modernity as faith. “Who is it is who has no fear?” Baroness Meinster asks him when he approaches her: “Only God has no fear,” he replies, but Van Helsing hesitates at no threshold. Cushing was better off than Lee in returning to his character, as Lee would find to his increasing chagrin as he was reduced to an intensely glowering monster in Hammer’s later Dracula entries, whilst here Cushing was allowed to develop nuances in the role. Van Helsing had been courageous but brutal in Dracula, embodying the puritanical force pounding life out of the sensually gorged lovers of the vampire overlord, but turning on a penny to solicitously comfort a small girl with fatherly grace. Here that side of him is emphasised as he appears as the essential crusader hero, bringing relief from tyranny and insidious evil.
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Producer Hinds quipped once that he and Fisher and Sangster had all regarded these films as their own babies but Cushing was certain of it, and Cushing’s contributions to the script perhaps helped this recasting of the hero in something like his own image, kinder and with a dash of romanticism. Van Helsing engages in rivalry with the Baron for Marianne’s affection as well as her soul, the Baron’s pretty boy charms pitted against the spindly savant’s hangdog intensity and winning out initially. Cushing pulls off a marvellous scene when Marianne informs Van Helsing she’s now engaged: he congratulates her with a good grace that’s ever so slightly pallid, but when she mentions just who it is she’s marrying he reacts with horror and checks her hands for signs of the tell-tale venereal stigmata of the “kiss of Dracula.” “Do you love him?” he asks in mild incredulity, and quickly leaves when Marianne answers yes, silently astounded at the perversities of existence but not swayed from his mission.
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The deep veins of perversity that spread through The Brides of Dracula are indeed a source of the film’s specific richness. The notion that vampirism was a metaphor for sexuality permeates Fisher and Sangster’s take and permanently inflected the genre, but here Meinster’s attentions are indiscriminate and suggestively pansexual. Even Van Helsing, who’s seen a thing or two, is revolted by the discovery Meinster has drunk his mother’s blood, and this comes on top of the narrative’s hints of homosexuality, as the good doctor himself comes in for the vampire’s attentions. The film’s title suggests the Girl’s Academy will be a feasting ground for the bloodsucker as one would be in Lust for a Vampire (1970), but Meinster only attacks one of Marianne’s fellows there, her fast friend Gina (Andree Melly). On the night of his first release, Meinster kills a village girl (Marie Devereux), and her heartbroken father is confused and appalled when the Cure, after finding her buried in the churchyard, tells him she must be removed. Van Helsing, who overhears, assures the Cure that he can prevent the girl’s revival, but when he arrives in the churchyard finds Frieda lying upon the grave, playing midwife in encouraging the new vampire’s emergence in a travesty of birth. This cues one of the most memorable scenes in the genre’s history as it climaxes with the ecstatically morbid images of the girl’s white hand thrusting out of the earth, and then pushing back the lid of her coffin and sitting up with a dead-eyed smile of sensual gratification.
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Van Helsing can’t help but watch in disgusted but mesmerised fascination, a spell only broken when the Cure, who’s just arrived, bellows his protest and then leap to secure Frieda whilst Van Helsing chases the vampire. Van Helsing’s pursuit is stalled however by Meinster, transformed into a huge bat which dive-bombs the vampire hunter until his kitbag tumbles open and his crucifix spills out. Van Helsing heads up to the Chateau Meinster, where he finds the Baroness, now revived as a vampire, haunting her own castle. The splendidly patrician Hunt was most famous for her role as Miss Havisham in David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), which Fisher had edited, and her casting here plays on that role as a reclusive and haughty grande dame whose hospitality entails destruction (Jackson, playing her servant, was also in the Lean film where she played the fearsome Mrs Joe), but here is allowed to retain more pathos as an eerie, existentially tormented victim who hides her new vampire fangs like a demure maiden behind a veil. The Baroness recites with dread the indulgences that brought disease upon her son and self and now believing herself cursed to eternally bend to her son’s will. David Peel, chiefly known as a stage actor, was received badly as a stand-in for Lee when the film came out, an understandable response as far as it goes.
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Peel is, nonetheless, a coldly confident presence as a younger, more sadistically callow but superficially debonair evil lord, charming Marianne with his Mod hairdo, hints of intense sensuality, and precise, plummy Old Vic accent reminiscent of a better-looking edition of fellow Hammer alumnus Michael Gough: he’s the vampire prince as a mix of boarding school bully and toffy-nosed pop heartthrob. Meinster is presented as a Byronic sleaze who takes active delight in spectacles of cruelty, stripped of even the faint remnant of noble hauteur Lee gave his Dracula. Peel handles the alterations between the smooth façade he puts on to people he needs to charm and the animalistic savagery of his true nature with élan, particularly when he suddenly appears from nowhere whilst Van Helsing talks to his mother, teeth extended and mouth dripping blood, hissing like a snake at the sight of its only natural predator.
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Meinster and Van Helsing have brief but vigorous tussle as the doctor fends off vampire by sliding his crucifix down the length of a table toward him, forcing the vampire back, cringing in pain. Meinster flees after upending the table to trap Van Helsing in turn, leaving Van Helsing alone with his mother. Fisher offers another starkly simple yet rhythmically powerful aside as Van Helsing waits for the dawn to give the Baroness the release she craves, whereupon he takes out stake and hammer and drives it through her body: Fisher cuts from the spurt of red blood to a deep crimson curtain which Van Helsing rips down and spreads across her body with solicitous care that mirrors the vampire midwifery, laying the desiccated matriarch to rest like a mother himself putting a baby to bed. The scoring by Malcolm Williamson, an Australian-born composer who later became Master of the Queen’s Music, is particularly notable in this sequence, a lightly funereal organ on sound rising to a crescendo that helps the vigorous cutting and colour inflate the brief sequence into something rhapsodic. Van Helsing’s return to the village coincides with news of Gina’s death at the Academy. At the Cure’s urging, Van Helsing goes with the local GP, Tobler (Miles Malleson) to look at the body, and convinces Tobler to let him deal with the problem by quickly quarantining the body locked in a stout, padlocked coffin and assigning reliable people to keep a watch over it. Marianne relieves Frau Lang in this task and waits with the school’s stable master Severin (Henry Scott). Before Van Helsing can return with his vampire killing kit, however, Severin is killed by Meinster in bat form, whilst Marianne is confronted by Gina rising out of her coffin.
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Fisher borrows a flourish here from M. R. James’ “Count Magnus” as the padlocks on Gina’s coffin fall one by one to the floor unlocked. The vampire Gina stalks the terrified Marianne with fiendishly sensual intent even as she begs her forgiveness for “letting him love me” whilst urging Marianne to kiss “your little Gina.” The lesbian vampire film still has to wait until the following year’s Blood and Roses to come out of the coffin however, as Van Helsing arrives in time to chase Gina off, but Brides does rack up the possibly more interesting landmark of gay vampiric activity later. Van Helsing breaks his unspoken compact to protect Marianne from the truth as she confronts her with the Baron’s nature and forces her to tell him where she expects to meet him. This proves to be an old windmill at the edge of town, a marvellous arena for a final confrontation where Van Helsing finds Gina and the other vampire bride with a harshly mocking Greta. Van Helsing holds off the two girls with his crucifix but Greta simply jumps on him and fights for the talisman, only to accidentally plunge with it over a balcony and crash to her death on some boards laid over a well. The cross drops through a crack into the well before Van Helsing can retrieve it, leaving him vulnerable to Meinster when he enters producing a chain from under his cape and almost throttling Van Helsing to death with it, before gleefully biting his nemesis, taking enough blood to put him under his command. The Baron then goes to drag Marianne out of the Academy and bring her back so that he can force Van Helsing to watch her initiation into the undead fold.
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When he wakes up, Van Helsing is distraught to find the vampire’s mark on his neck, but he isn’t out of tricks yet. In another of the film’s innovative and clever ideas, much mimicked in vampire cinema ever since, Van Helsing tries a radical cure. He stokes a branding iron red hot in a brazier and then jams it against his wound, scalding him hideously but removing the stain of this most transgressive “kiss.” A little dab of holy water from a cask the Cure gave him heals the burn immediately, and Van Helsing is back to form. When Meinster returns he doesn’t realise his enemy is able to fight, and before he can vamp on Marianne, Van Helsing helps to a face-full of holy water that leaves him horribly scarred. Meinster escapes after warding off Van Helsing by kicking the brazier over, turning the windmill immediately into an inferno, but Van Helsing escapes with Marianne to the mill’s upper balcony.
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The climax originally intended of Brides was for Van Helsing to use a curse to call down other vampires as bats upon the Baron, for his transgression in drinking his mother’s blood. Budget constraints and Cushing’s objection to the idea Van Helsing would engage in black magic meant this concept was abandoned, only to be used a few years later in Kiss of the Vampire. Meinster’s comeuppance here is less spectacular but still original and memorable, as Van Helsing jumps onto the mill’s sail and drags it down to turn the whole structure into a crucifix, pinioning the Baron under the shadow of religious sanctity and finally killing him, leaving a fade out with Marianne in Van Helsing’s arms and the mill with the two vampire girls within going up in flames as the credits roll. The Brides of Dracula was released in what proved a banner year for horror cinema as the commercial force of Hammer’s success unleashed a new wave of films, including Mario Bava’s La Maschera del Demonio, Roger Corman’s House of Usher, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and it stands tall with them in the genre’s mottled history. After all but dying out in the mid-1940s, the horror film was well and truly back from the dead.