Gothic Originals: La Cripta e L’Incubo / ‘Crypt of the Vampire’ (Camillo Mastrocinque, 1964)

One of the more frequently overlooked entries in Italy’s cycle of ‘60s gothic horrors, ‘La Cripta e L’incubo’ had escaped my attention prior to its re-emergence this year as part of Severin’s Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee box set. It is all the more satisfying therefore to discover that it actually holds up as one of the very best second-tier Italio-gothics, muscling in just below the canonical classics of Bava, Freda and Margheriti in my own personal ranking of such things.

Leaving aside for a moment the contributions of director Camillo Mastrocinque (who went on to helm the similarly underappreciated Barbara Steele vehicle An Angel for Satan two years later), ‘Cripta e L’incubo’ seems to have been a project chiefly instigated by its co-writers, future director Tonino Valerii and the ubiquitous Ernesto Gastaldi.

As Valerii and Gastaldi have both recalled in interviews, their script for the film was produced in a single, heavily caffeinated all-night writing session, after producer Mario Mariani called their bluff by telling them he’d finance the top flight horror picture Gastaldi was boasting about having written, if they could drop the script round to his office the following morning.

The fevered, ‘first thought / best thought’ approach to writing which resulted from this circumstance is perhaps reflected in the pleasantly disjointed mish-mash of ideas which eventually made it to the screen.

Expanding upon a garbled retelling of Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ (already filmed by Roger Vadim as the epochal ‘Blood & Roses’ a few years earlier), the two writers add a largely unconnected opening half hour cribbed either from Hammer’s ‘Dracula’ or Corman’s House of Usher (bequiffed young hero José Campos has arrived at the sinister castle to catalogue and restore the library of Christopher Lee’s saturnine Count Karnstein), alongside assorted hints of Gastaldi’s future notoriety as an architect of the giallo (see below), some blatant borrowings from Bava’s ‘Black Sunday’/‘La Maschera del Demonio’, and a startling injection of below stairs black magickal intrigue which anticipates the kind of imagery more commonly encountered in the wave of Erotic Castle Movies which kept the Euro-gothic tradition alive through the ‘70s.

Charged with knitting all this together into a coherent whole, Mastrocinque - a veteran director tackling his first horror film here after decades of comedies and melodramas - seems to have faced a certain amount of criticism over the years, not least from Valerii and Gastaldi, neither of whom seem to have held him in high regard. Reading between the lines, one suspects the younger writers may have resented not being given the opportunity to take a crack at directing their script themselves, whilst the fact that Mastrocinque sacked Gastaldi’s wife (the recently departed Mara Maryl, R.I.P.) from the film after less than a day on set can scarcely have helped matters.

The director has also been criticised though by some later commentators, who have accused him of failing the lacking a ‘feel’ for the horror genre - an accusation I find rather unfair.

Admittedly, both of Mastrocinque’s horror films are lugubriously paced even by the standards of this sub-genre, downplaying the kind of visceral shocks modern viewers might expect, and ‘Cripta e L’incubo’s early scenes do feel rather stiff and uninvolving, but regardless - once the film gets going, it is positively dripping with the very best kind of gothic atmos, as the director’s rather stately, old fashioned style intersects quite beautifully with the more irrational, exploitational content the writers have jammed into the screenplay.

Right from the outset, the use of one of Italio-gothic’s homes-from-home, the Castello Piccolomini in Balsorano, as the primary shooting location adds greatly to the sense of crumbling, atavistic weirdness (the Castello’s later tenants included both Lady Frankenstein and The Crimson Executioner), whilst a frantic, wild-eyed performance from Adriana Ambesi as the troubled Laura Karnstein also immediately grabs our attention. Though she still looks appropriately stunning in her period accoutrements, Ambesi brings a distraught, human fragility to her character which sets her apart from the icy brunettes who usually dominate this emotionally frigid sub-genre.

Carlo Savina’s score meanwhile nails down the mood perfectly with dissonant, droning organ chords, creepy harp arpeggios and gratuitous theremin, and from the moment we hear a ghostly church bell tolling across the desolate valley housing the deserted ruins of the village which once bore the Karnstein name (subsequently seen in evocative location shots of some suitably blighted/abandoned locale), we know we’re getting the real deal here.

Presumably by accident rather than design (although he was certainly old enough to remember them the first time around), Mastrocinque draws here on imagery recalling the pre-war ur-texts of Euro-horror, giving us diaphanous, slo-mo curtains dancing in the breeze (ala Epstein’s 1928 ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’) and Cocteau-esque pools of translucent darkness, along with glass-topped coffins, spectral, ruin-dwelling crones, and other faint echoes of Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931).

At the same time though, ‘Cripta e L’incubo’ also pre-empts much of the more envelope-pushing content which would come to dominate the genre as time went on, giving the film a bit of a transitional feeling - a gateway from one mode/era of horror filmmaking to another, if you will.

As noted above, Valerii & Gastaldi have got the basics of the ‘Carmilla’ story rather muddled here, so that their Karnstein family are actually the occupants of the home into which the Carmilla surrogate character (renamed Ljuba, and played by Ursula Davis) is welcomed following the traditional coach crash.

In this retelling furthermore, the daughter to which the predatory vampire turns her attentions (that of course being Laura) already has a whole heap of trouble on her plate, what with being hypnotised into participating in black magick rites at the behest of housekeeper/covert witch Rowena (Nela Conjui), causing her to experience occasional possession by the spirit of her inevitable, curse-declaiming witch ancestor (whom we see in flashback meeting her grisly fate at the hands of the Inquisition, in a blatant lift from ‘Black Sunday’). In addition to to this, Laura also suffers from nightmares in which she experiences real-time visions of crimes perpetrated by Ljuba prior to her arrival at the castle. Poor lass - no wonder she’s feeling a bit flustered.

The lesbian connotations of the ‘Carmilla’ story may be subtlety handled here, but - presumably following the example of Vadim’s film - they are still present, which must have been dynamite for audiences in ’64. Meanwhile, red-blooded cinemagoers were also given the opportunity to thrill to the sight of Ambesi’s naked back, which is presented to us on multiple occasions, not least in particularly kinky context during the Satanic rites and the inquisition sequence (I don’t really need to tell you that Ambesi plays her own ancestor during the flashbacks do I?) The highly suggestive nightmare sequence in which Laura’s assorted female tormenters appear at her bedside bearing over-sized goblets of blood (paging Dr Freud), is also excellent.

Speaking of which, all that occult stuff down in the catacombs - sans any real explanation of its origins or narrative purpose - feels incredibly potent and deranged. Bearing a paper pentangle covertly sliced from an ancient manuscript, the malevolent Rowena calls upon the spirit of her infernal mistress, as a mesmerised Laura drops her robe and lays face down, spread eagled within the crudely wrought magic circle, and Savina’s music explodes into a cacophony of fevered gong battering and shrieking, ring-modulated feedback. Again, wild stuff for the early ‘60s.

The comingling of vampirism and diabolism may be old as the hills (even creeping into Hammer’s ‘Brides of Dracula’ and ‘Kiss of the Vampire’ in the years preceding this), but it still elicits a charge of pure weirdness which I never tire of, whilst the trope of a domestic servant turning to black magick to commune with his/her departed mistress/master is one which would recur incessantly through the next few decades of Euro-horror.

In particular, Rowena’s practice has a DIY / folkloric aspect to it which I find interesting. Late in the film, she whips out a ‘hand of glory’ (nearly a decade prior to ‘The Wicker Man’), and the sequence in which she creeps through the castle’s nocturnal halls, bearing her strange talisman, is one of the most evocative and wordlessly weird in the movie, providing a great showcase for the classically crepuscular monochrome cinematography (provided either by Julio Ortas or Giuseppe Aquari, depending on whop you speak to).

I’ve long believed there is a thesis waiting to be written on the symbolic significance of hands in Italian gothic horror (seriously, they’re everywhere), and the presence of this crudely embalmed murderer’s extremity, traditionally left burning at a victim’s bedside, could no doubt provide some great ammunition to the brave scholar tackling such a topic.

For a more direct expression of sexuality meanwhile, look no further than the scenes between Lee (looking rather louche in a terrific quilted dressing gown, monogrammed with an appropriately gothic ‘K’) and Véra Valmont, playing housemaid Annette. Rather surprisingly in view of the usual bottoned up conventions of the sub-genre, we at one point see the pair lounging about together in the Count’s bed chamber, having completed the latest bout in what appears to be a long term affair.

Surprisingly mature and cynical, the couple’s dialogue in this scene transcends the pulpy/melodramatic writing usually encountered in gothic horror, giving us a rather more interesting and ambiguous character relationship, which, as mentioned above, anticipates the kind of thing Gastaldi in particular would make his bread and butter in later years, once the giallo kicked off as a viable genre later in the decade.

All of this aided greatly by Mastrocinique’s decision - repeated in ‘An Angel For Satan’ - to play things totally straight, refusing to wink to the audiences or leave room for sniggers, even as the narrative piles up genre clichés like dirty dishes; mismatched remnants of delicious, pulp/comic book indulgence.

By maintaining a stately pace and liminal, laid-back tone, the director gives his cast the opportunity to stretch out and deliver something closer to ‘proper’ performances than was common within the genre. Lee (who provides his own voice on the English dub) seems more relaxed than usual here - grateful perhaps to be playing a low key, relatively sympathetic, role instead of being slathered in ‘walking dead’ face paint as per many of his other European Counts - whilst Ambessi, Valmont and Conjui are all very good.

Above all, ‘La Cripta e L’Incubo’ is a mood piece, and as such, it is probably not for all tastes. Those liable to be frustrated by the film’s sedate progress through a disjointed, weirdly structured and cliché-ridden narrative may prefer to give it a wide berth. But, for those of us who love the texture, the atmosphere, and the underlying sense of oneiric delirium which define Italian gothic horror, it is an absolute treat - a pure draught straight from the well of the genre’s fetid, short-lived high water mark. 

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Gothic Originals: The Virgin of Nuremberg (Antonio Margheriti, 1963)

(AKA ‘Horror Castle’, ‘The Castle of Terror’, ‘Das Schloss des Grauens’, etc.)

When ploughing my way through the canon of ‘60s Italian gothics a few years back, I overlooked this early effort from Antonio Margheriti – his first entrée into the horror genre, I believe - simply because I couldn’t locate a watchable copy. Nowadays of course, the internet provides, but I’m not sure that ‘La Vergine di Norimberga’ was entirely worth the wait.

Filmed in colour on the same sets used for Mario Bava’s The Whip and The Body (does the presence of Christopher Lee indicate that both films were filmed around the same time?), Margheriti conjures some splendid - albeit entirely conventional - passages of gothic atmosphere here, complete with all the looming, cob-webbed staircases, candelabra-bearing, night-gowned peregrinations and baroque, wrought iron latticework one could possibly ask for.

Ernesto Gastaldi’s script (supposedly based on a book by the fictitious sounding ‘Frank Bogart’) meanwhile throws a few novel ideas into the mix to off-set the clichés – not least the decision to make this one of the first ‘60s gothic horror films which ostensibly takes place in the present day. It’s unfortunate therefore that the filmmakers consistently fail to put these innovations to very effective use, but… more on that later. (1)

For now, let’s simply state that the idea of our unsuspecting young bride (Mary, played by Rossana Podestà, in this case) discovering that the airless rooms of her aristocratic German husband’s creepy familial mansion are haunted not only by the memory of his most infamous ancestor, a scarlet-garbed inquisition torturer, but also by the more recent horrors of the Third Reich, is a fantastic and potent one indeed.

Specifically, the heroine’s dashing husband Max (Georges Rivière) is the son of a deceased Nazi general / surgeon, whose legacy is personified by the menacing presence of Lee, who remains largely in ‘looming heavy’ mode here in the role of Erich, the taciturn, scar-faced former adjutant of the house’s dead patriarch, who, obedient to the last, now spends his days maintaining his erstwhile commanding officer’s on-site family museum, dusting off the thumb-screws and iron maidens, and keeping the black-hooded effigy of the ‘The Punisher’ (as the medieval torturer was known) in good nick.

“He laid down the law in this region, and punished adultery with death,” Max cheerily notes of his nefarious ancestor. “It seems he killed many women, torturing them to death. Was he a moralist, or a maniac?” Let’s hope that was intended as a rhetorical question.

Though this ‘return of the torturer’ plot-line is a direct lift from Corman’s ‘The Pit & the Pendulum’, which had been a huge hit in Italy the previous year, the version of it presented here must surely have exerted a strong influence upon Massimo Pupillo’s camp classic Bloody Pit of Horror (1965), after which the idea of defunct torture instruments being put to use by contemporary killers went on to become a common motif in Italian horror, recurring in Fernando Di Leo’s ‘Slaughter Hotel’, Bava’s ‘Baron Blood’ and Emilio P. Miraglia’s ‘The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave’, to name but a few.

Likewise, the rich crossover between gothic horror’s familial, sins-of-the-past atavism and unresolved Nazi guilt was irreverently explored in a number of later European horrors - Jean Brismée’s supremely entertaining ‘The Devil’s Nightmare’ (1971) and Sergio Bergonzelli’s delirious giallo ‘In The Folds of the Flesh’ (1970) immediately spring to mind - but ‘The Virgin of Nuremberg’ feels very much like ground zero in this regard.

Indeed, unease over the inclusion of such contentious subject matter at this comparatively early date perhaps accounts for the fact that the treatment of this theme is somewhat bungled here by Gastaldi and Margheriti. The shaky lines connecting dusty medieval sadism, ultra-masculine Teutonic tradition and the apparent impossibility of reconciling war-time atrocities with peace-time forgiveness are all plainly visible to the viewer, but they remain frustratingly undrawn by the writer and director.

In particular, the final act revelation (conveyed to us via a crudely assembled stock footage-based flashback) that Max’s father was actually one of the conspirators who plotted to assassinate Hitler circa 1944, and that he was subsequently disfigured and driven insane by the punishments inflicted upon him as a result, feels like a real face-palm-worthy example of missing the point.

Thereafter, the film’s villain is allowed to become an ultimately sympathetic figure, somewhat akin to the tragic / damaged characters played by Vincent Price in the early Poe films, rather than the black-hearted, unrepentant monster from Europe’s collective id which this story’s younger characters should really be finding a way to stand up to and deal with as they try to build a new life for themselves in the 1960s.

Whilst the skull-faced killer’s depredations may be curtailed in the physical sense at the film’s conclusion, the psychic and historical wounds he represents remain untended and unacknowledged, lending the film a numb, depressing feel which is only enhanced by the longueurs of relative tedium which precede its finale.

Readers familiar with Margheriti’s work will be aware that his chief behind-the-scenes innovation involved dramatically speeding up production schedules on his films by using the kind of multi-camera shooting style which would later become the norm for TV soap operas and sit-coms. Said readers will also sadly be aware though that, however much money this technique may have saved for his producers, it also had a tendency to leave Margheriti’s films feeling distant and emotionally uninvolving, even when (as here) all the necessary ingredients for a greatness were seemingly present and correct.

This was by no means always the case of course (career highlights like ‘Castle of Blood’ (1964) and Cannibal Apocalypse (1980) remain absolute bangers), but ‘The Virgin of Nuremberg’ suffers particularly acutely from Margheriti’s characteristic lack of dynamism, to the extent that it’s run-time feels padded to an absurd degree, even at a double-bill friendly 80 minutes.

The purportedly exciting final act in particular feels like a master class in how to not generate tension, as Rivière’s character finds himself stuck in that ever-green classic, the locked room slowly filling with water, whilst Podestà, unaware of her husband’s predicament, traipses around the house’s interior in the company of a maid, in search of a door that the killer hasn’t yet locked.

Suspenseful stuff, you might think, but as Margheriti proceeds to simply cut between master shot footage of these two scenarios for about ten minutes, with no narrative development and no clearly defined, visible goal for his imperilled characters, even the most indulgent of viewers will be liable to find their eyelids crashing down in anticipation of bed-time.

Performances are likewise pretty flat across the board. Not even Sir Chris (who is dubbed by other actors in all of the film’s extant language tracks, much to his chagrin no doubt) manages to make much of an impression, despite some impressive scar make-up, whilst editing and audio/visual match up feels sloppy throughout (in the version viewed for this review, at least), suggesting that a rushed and/or uncaring attitude prevailed during the film’s post-production.

An incongruously upbeat, jazz-inflected score from the usually reliable Riz Ortolani doesn’t exactly help matters either, incorporating a series of hysterically bombastic cues which sometimes feel entirely inappropriate to the relatively sedate activity on screen.

In accordance with its torture theme, ‘The Virgin of Nuremberg’ does dutifully include a few ghoulishly sadistic horror ‘bits’, which I’m sure must have sent the British censors in particular into a veritable meltdown when it arrived on these shores as ‘Caste of Terror’ in 1964. Most notably, one somewhat revolting scene involves an unfortunate woman getting a basket containing a hungry rat strapped to her face - whilst ‘The Punisher’ meanwhile delivers a chilling monologue concerning the universality of torture techniques across the globe, which serves as probably the film's most legitmately unsettling moment.

The rat device dates from the fifteenth century and was utilised as far afield as China, he calmly informs his victim, as if she might find this interesting. Whilst the modern era has brought us many innovations, he darkly reflects, the old methods are the best.

Though not as explicit or impactful as they might have been in the hands of some of Margheriti’s more visually daring contemporaries, such ‘shock’ moments – including the ‘Black Sunday’-influenced opening in which Podestà finds a mutilated corpse within the iron maiden, and some equally gory B&W surgery flashbacks - have a touch of sordid, low rent nastiness about them which makes them feel like distant precursors to the hey-day of Nazisploitation other more full-on forms of Italian exploitation, which were still some 15 years down the line at this point. (The idea of a hideously mutilated, insane surgeon lurking in a darkened dungeon even reminded me slightly of Fulci’s ‘The House by the Cemetery’ (1981), if we’re keeping score.)

If the sheer number of later films I’ve managed to name-check above might suggest that ‘The Virgin of Nuremberg’ deserves to be reconsidered as a significant landmark in the development of Italian horror though, this would have been cold comfort to anyone who actually paid to see this visually attractive but otherwise rather dreary plod through the halls of gothic cliché in the early 1960s, especially after the local censors’ scissors had inevitably done a number on it.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the film doesn’t seem to have made much headway in winning over the hearts and minds of horror fans in the decades since then either, despite of its scattered innovations and points of interest, joining such later cobweb-strewn Margheriti snooze-fests as ‘Web of the Spider’ (1971) and ‘Seven Deaths in a Cats Eye’ (1973) on the “walk don’t run” / “not as good as it sounds” list.

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(1)Curiously, this film also assigns an extremely unlikely co-writing credit to Edmond T. Gréville, the Anglo-French director best remembered for 1960’s ‘Beat Girl’. Quite how he got involved, god only knows, but I think it's fair to say that the finished script feels far more like Gastaldi's work than anyone else's, to the extent that I'm comfortable with naming him as the primary author. 

(Pure speculation here on my part here, but, given that Christopher Lee also appeared in ‘Beat Girl’, and also boasted an Anglo-French background, perhaps he and Gréville were friends? Perhaps Lee brought him in to do some rewrites, or perhaps Gréville just threw in some ideas over dinner which were then brought to the production by Lee, or something? Who knows...)

Pointless List Making / October Horrors # 14: Hammer Vampire Movies, in order.

Happy Halloween / All Hallows / Samhain / whatever everybody! I’m sorry that I’ve fallen behind on my self-imposed one-post-every-two-days October schedule over the past week or so. I was confident I could stick to it so long as I didn’t get to busy in real life, and provided nothing too unexpected or time-consuming happened... but guess what?

Anyway, having re-watched a few of Hammer’s vampire films recently, I thought it would be fun as an act of pure self-indulgence this October to rank them all in the order in which I like them, and to knock out some quick text to show my workings. The results are below, and I would like to think there are a few CONTROVERSIAL choices, so hang on to your suitably gothic hats, Hammer fans!

1. Brides of Dracula (1960)

Having not watched this one for a few years, I’d started to suspect it might actually be a bit over-rated, but revisiting it recently soon set me straight. [NOTE FOR NERDS: I finally acquired a version of the film sourced from the old Region One U.S. DVD which, unlike subsequent Blu Ray editions, is framed correctly at 1.66 and to my eyes still looks very nice – recommended.]

‘Brides..’ remains a masterpiece of gothic horror, especially during its opening half hour. Not only for its magnificent photography and production design, or for the brooding atmosphere of decadence and dread conjured by Terrence Fisher’s flawlessly classical direction, but also with regard to more down-to-earth matters of narrative and character drama. To my surprise, the story here remains gripping for a modern audience, and genuinely horrific in its implications. The script is rich with beautifully turned, evocative dialogue, and the entire supporting cast do fantastic work in bringing it all to life, with every single character who appears on screen enriching the proceedings in one way or another; far too many to list here, but to pick just one example, even the bloke manning the stable at the girls’ school gets to use his one minute of screen-time to deliver an evocative soliloquy about his collection of horse brasses reminding him of the seasons of the year.

It’s a shame then that things go a bit silly in the last few minutes – inaugurating not only Hammer’s long-running tradition of killing off vampires in really stupid, anticlimactic ways, but also of ineffectual vampire brides who dither about the place doing absolutely nothing – but until that point at least, this is Hammer Horror at its absolute finest, arguably the text-book example of the heights the studio could scale in their Bray-era heyday.

2. Twins of Evil (1972)

From October 2017: “Tudor Gates’ ultra-pulpy script drives things way over the edge of self-parody (perhaps the reason I’ve underrated the film in the past?), but the chaps in charge of production design, cinematography etc don’t seem to have noticed the shift in tone, instead delivering one of the best-looking and most atmospheric (not to mention most violent and erotically charged) films Hammer produced during the ‘70s. The result is a film that is really funny (the almost ‘South Park’-like antics of Cushing’s puritan witch-burning club), slyly subversive of the Hammer formula (no moral black & whites to be found here), and an exceptional example of straight up, late period gothic horror all round.”

3. Vampire Circus (1971)

One of the darkest (in both sense of the word) films to ever carry the Hammer name, ‘Vampire Circus’ goes off-brand in pretty hair-raising fashion, adding a brooding, Eastern European flavour to its grimly relentless and exceptionally gory reinvention of familiar “sins of the father” gothic tropes. With vampires who look like depraved ‘70s rock stars, disturbing intimations of paedophilia and nods to Camus’s ‘The Plague’ (and/or Poe’s ‘Masque of the Red Death’ – take your pick), this is a heady brew by anyone’s standards, and Robert Young directs with an intensity that sometimes boils over into a nigh-on visionary fervour, lending a hellish, hallucinatory feel to the film’s intense and spell-binding horror set pieces.

Patriarchal authority – aided by John Moulder-Brown from ‘Deep End’ as one of Hammer’s best ever juvenile leads - may win out in the end as tradition demands, but it takes one hell of a battering along the way, making for a pyrrhic victory that leaves ‘Vampire Circus’ feeling like an unlikely cousin to the nihilistic, post-Romero horror films that genre historians like to tell us were making Hammer’s efforts look old hat by the early ‘70s.

4. Taste The Blood of Dracula (1970)

Not only my favourite of the brace of ribald Victorian London movies Hammer made in the early ‘70s, but by far the best of the Christopher Lee Dracula films, ‘Taste the Blood..’ finds relatively young n’ fiery director Peter Sasdy breathing new life into the franchise, not just through the imaginatively rendered new setting, but by delivering what is arguably the only instalment in the series since the 1958 original to have been made with serious dramatic intent (the Dracula-free ‘Brides..’ notwithstanding).

Far stronger meat the any of the earlier sequels, ‘Taste the Blood..’ pre-empts the aforementioned ‘Twins of Evil’ by pushing back hard against the patriarchal authority and Manichean certainties of earlier Hammer horrors, introducing a transgressive note of moral ambiguity as its nightgown-clad young ingénues (Linda Hayden amongst them) find themselves pushed into a perilous spiritual interzone, forced the choose between the seductive and exotic evil of Dracula and the equally predatory depredations of their own morally bankrupt fathers - a cabal of depraved big-wigs and aristos whose private pursuit of perversion not only allows the Prince of Darkness an entry-point into the ‘modern’ era, but makes his no nonsense Satanic evil seem positively sympathetic in comparison to their own sweaty, corrupt and very British hypocrisy. (Heaven knows, there are certainly a few contemporary power-brokers viewers might enjoy super-imposing onto these sorry specimens as they face their grisly comeuppance…)

5. The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

Ok, I know that production difficulties, cross-cultural confusion and general creative desperation may have prevented this one from being quite as earth-shattering as the full scale Hammer horror / Shaw Bros kung-fu crossover of our dreams, but it’s still at least 75% as good as the one in my dreams, so that’s something right? In fact, the very fact this film exists at all fills my soul with joy each time I think of it, just as the sight of Peter Cushing getting busy alongside David Chiang and Szu Shih in the middle of a chaotic, Chang Cheh directed vampire kung fu brawl does each time I watch it.

I also love the crazy, proto-‘Black Magic’ Hong Kong horror type shit going down here as the genuinely horrid, cadaverous, golden masked vampires chain down writhing naked virgins in the lair and drain their blood into a bubbling cauldron; I love witnessing the exultant return of wild, expressionistic gel lighting and moth-eaten, cobweb shrouded sets to the hammer universe (Shaw Bros certainly didn’t mess around when it came to ensuring their horror movies looked the part), and I love the way the British scriptwriters seem to keep trying to rip off ‘The Seven Samurai’ during the big, climactic save-the-village battle scene (was it the only Asian film they dredge up from the memories to use as a reference point?) – yep, there’s a lot to love here, that's for sure.

What I love somewhat less however is the fact that the filmmakers were forced to crowbar Dracula into the story at the behest of Warner Bros (who then never even bothered releasing the damn thing), necessitating the last minute employment of some truly hopeless geezer to play him in Lee’s absence (no disrespect intended to the late John Forbes-Robertson, for turns out it is he, but seriously, W and indeed TF). Also, Dracula’s presence here raises a question that has long haunted me in the dark hours of the night: if, as the prologue makes clear, Dracula upped sticks and buggered off to China one hundred years before the events of this film take place, then who the hell has Van Helsing spent his life traipsing across Europe fighting..? I’ve never quite figured that one out.

6. The Vampire Lovers (1970)

From May 2013: “Delivering pretty much exactly what you’d expect in terms of lavish Victoriana, nocturnal cemetery hi-jinks, furtive hints of lesbianism and craggy-faced puritanical ass-kicking, Roy Ward Barker’s initial take on the Carmilla mythos essentially defines the agenda for the ‘70s Euro-vampire movie, setting a bar that the continent’s other purveyors of such material could proceed to soar above or mambo under as they saw fit. Although it never really achieves anything exceptional (beyond a gentle bit of first-time-in-a-British-horror same sex petting), ‘..Lovers’ is solid as a brick shithouse - as generic and satisfying as horror movies get.”

7. Kiss of the Vampire (1962)

AKA, the one everybody always forgets, this modest production is another splendid piece of ‘60s gothic horror, its atmosphere of brooding decadence very much in keeping with ‘Brides..’ two years earlier. Though perhaps a tad over-lit in places, the scenes in the castle and at the masque ball nonetheless feature some striking, proto-psychedelic photography, whilst the plight of our honeymooning lead couple is actually quite affecting, and Noel Willman and Isobel Black are wicked sinister as members of the predatory vampire family. I’m also pretty sure this must be one of the first films to have ever directly connected vampirism with Satanism and black magic, and the latter element plays directly into a bat-shit crazy climax (no pun intended) which must be seen to be believed. Fantastic stuff.

8. The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)

Notorious for playing out more like a ‘70s pulp spy novel or an ITC action show than a traditional vampire movie, this tale of the diabolical Count using a Satanic coven as a front for manipulating a gaggle of weak-willed politicians and scientists into providing him with enough super-charged bubonic plague to blackmail the entire globe is…. well, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher, to be honest. It certainly left me happily confused when I videoed it off late night TV as a teenager, that’s for sure, but you’d be hard-pressed not to find it one hell of a lot of fun too. In retrospect, it’s wild tonal inconsistencies and cavalier approach to genre expectations kind of reminds me more than anything of Gordon Hessler & Chris Wickings’ wonderfully bizarre Scream and Scream Again from a few year earlier.

Cushing in particular plays a blinder here, proving once again that he could lend gravitas to an outer space volleyball match should the need arise, and, as I mentioned in the comments on this blog just a few months back, the scene he shares where the late Freddie Jones – playing a tormented bacteriologist – is a real highlight, a tour de force of thespian muscle, with a few fistfuls of ominous dialogue helping out too. Likewise, the desk-bound confrontation between Van Helsing and Dracula is great, perhaps reigniting some of the fire of their original ’58 face-off for a stranger new age.

In fact, Lee gets some considerably more interesting stuff to do here than in most of the previous Dracula instalments, what with the Count passing himself off as some kind of reclusive Eastern European billionaire, more like a blood-drinking Bond villain than anything else, with the genuinely horrifying prospect of Count Dracula presiding over a global plague pandemic inadvertently returning the figure of the vampire to the rat-like death-bringer of Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’, perhaps.

Elsewhere meanwhile, we’ve got, oh, I dunno – motorcycle stunts, shoot-outs and moody, hirsute cops running around, loads of campy Satanic hoo-hah, plus a few moments of startling, mean-spirited gore and…. Joanna Lumley being consumed by the Sapphic attentions of the chained up vampire brides…?! Good lord.

It’s a shame the whole thing culminates in the most egregious you’ve-gotta-be-fuckin-kidding-me ending of any film on this list (hawthorne bushes, I ask you), but… that in itself was almost a tradition by this point, I suppose.

9. Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)

Oh, man…. I mean, what can you say? I mean, as bad as ‘1972 AD’ undoubtedly is, I don’t know if there’s a single fan of British horror who could refuse to unconditionally love it on some level. If you’re reading this, you know the score, I’m sure. Stoneground performing ‘Alligator Man’! Reversed tape recordings and Caroline Munro getting blood all over her cleavage at Johnny Alucard’s swinging Black Mass! And how about that opening prologue with Dracula getting a cart-wheel where the sun don’t shine? Beat THAT, Terrence Fisher!

10. Dracula (1958)

A bit of a shocker I realise, but, despite the impossibly vast scale of this film’s influence on genre cinema, as a stand-alone viewing experience, it’s never really clicked with me, despite numerous attempts to go back to it with a fresh eye.

Moreso than any of the other early Hammer horrors, ‘Dracula’ strikes me as having dated really badly, making it difficult to dredge up much contemporary relevance from it. All of the scenes that don’t directly involve Dracula feel dry and tedious, suffocated by those plush, Gainsborough interiors and formal, stiff upper lip acting styles. The dismissive treatment of the female characters within the film meanwhile plays as flat-out comical to modern audiences (even more-so than in Stoker’s novel, where Lucy and Mina are allowed at least a certain amount of agency), and, personally, I’ve always found the make-up and hair-styling in this one to be pretty disastrous too.

On the plus side however, marvellous performances from Cushing and Lee, obviously, and the final confrontation between Dracula and Van Helsing is impossible to fuck with – an immortal and historic scene, still exhilerating to this day, without which this film would likely be languishing even further down this list, despite it’s having directly fathered all of the other entries.

FUN TRIVIA: I know everyone has heard this story before, but my dad was working in a regional cinema in South Wales when ‘Dracula’ was released, and he actually did once tell me that he remembered people screaming and fainting in the aisles, and complaining to the management that they hadn’t been able to sleep for a week etc. after seeing it. Imagine that! Incredible to reflect upon how thoroughly our senses must have been blasted over the subsequent six decades, given that this film is now barely able to keep most modern viewers awake, to be perfectly honest.

11. Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (1968)

The boilerplate script for this ho-hum ‘Dracula’ sequel may be thoroughly uninspired, but I nonetheless have a soft spot for the film, based largely on the extravagant, fairy tale-like production design overseen and quite beautifully captured by master cinematographer turned uneven horror director Freddie Francis. Never has mittel-European fantasyland of pre-1970 Hammer looked as richly colourful and unreal as it does here, with the entire movie seemingly taking place inside some dark recess of Tim Burton’s fevered childhood brain, where he keeps the long-supressed good stuff. The climax, which as I recall sees Dracula impaled upon a massive stone cross on a windswept mountainside as lightning flashes above him, is pretty cool too.

12. Countess Dracula (1971)

Hungarian director Peter Sasdy’s under-stated take on the Countess Bathory mythos is a perfectly creditable historical drama, with fine performances from Nigel Green and Sandor Elès, but its dour formalism and pointed refusal to dish out the horror / exploitation goods soon becomes a drag. Despite her top billing, Ingrid Pitt has very little to do here, whilst the special effects brought in for her brief supernatural scenes feel silly and incongruous, and the sketchy vampire component has all too obviously been grafted onto the script for the sake of commercial necessity, creating a ruinous disjuncture between the film promised by Hammer’s marketing, and the one which Sasdy actually delivered.

13. Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)

Like a number of films on the lower reaches of this list, ‘Prince of Darkness’ has always struck me as simply playing like a realisation of the Hammer back office’s idea of what a bog standard, utilitarian vampire movie should look like. No spark, no invention, and certainly no unnecessary expense; just eighty-something minutes of the same old stuff, assembled in the customary order to appease the market. You’ve got some coaches rumbling through the woods, a big ol’ pasteboard castle, a few rubber bats, some bits with Dracula popping up in ladies’ bedrooms and rather comically enfolding them in his cloak… what more do you want, blood? (Sorry.)

I dunno – am I missing something here? I remain eternally disappointed that the Fisher / Sangster / Robinson dream team turned in a picture this uninspired. Basically the only things which really stick in my memory are Dracula’s initial resurrection scene (which is pretty damn cool), and Andrew Keir as the priest, warming his arse on the fire in the tavern.

14. Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974)

I know this one has its fans, so I’ll throw in a “I’ve only seen it once, quite a while ago” disclaimer, but I remember being decidedly underwhelmed by this one. In theory, the idea of letting Brian Clemens re-invent the Hammer vampire film as a swash-buckling, action-adventure type franchise sounds like a brilliant one, but sadly I recall the result delivering precious little action and a total lack of adventure. Perhaps budgetary constraints and production difficulties were to blame, who knows, but Horst Janson is certainly wooden as a box of stakes in the title role, little of interest happens in the script, and basically the cast just seem to spent half the movie half-heartedly trudging around in a patch of woods and some out-buildings. On the plus side, well…. Caroline Munro. That’s all I’ve got. Perhaps I should give this one another try some time?

15. Lust for a Vampire (1971)

The story of how Jimmy Sangster made the transition from an incisive and inspired scriptwriter to a frankly terrible director, crassly attempting to reinvent Hammer’s most iconic franchises as low-brow, self-parodic comic capers, may have been told many times, but you’ll get to revisionism from me on this score. ‘Lust for a Vampire’ is witless, embarrassing guff which can’t even seem to get the simple business of being sexy right, replacing the genuine eroticism of ‘The Vampire Lovers’ with woeful, sub-Benny Hill type tomfoolery. I’ll confess, I happily sat through this one a few times on late night TV back in the day and wasn’t too appalled, but woe betide anyone who tries to watch it sober.

16. Scars of Dracula (1970)

I think my review from last year’s October Horrors marathon probably already did a pretty good job of setting out the extent to which I hated this one. Let’s just say that it gets my vote as Hammer’s absolute worst (‘Holiday On The Buses’ possibly notwithstanding) and leave it at that.

October Horrors # 11: The Creeping Flesh (Freddie Francis, 1973)

Although I can’t 100% confirm that this is an accurate memory, I seem to recall that, long ago in the distant past, my initial viewing of a VHS copy of ‘The Creeping Flesh’ might well have marked the point at which my interest in old British horror films first surpassed the level of idle, time-killing curiosity, prompting me to think, “my god, these things are amazing – I think I should probably try to watch as many of them as possible”.

Revisiting the film all these years later, it’s easy to see why my response was so favourable – in a profound sense, it really does the business. Whereas contemporary productions such as Amicus’s And Now The Screaming Starts and Don Sharp’s ‘Dark Places’ appeared to show the British gothic horror tradition on its last legs, exhaustedly dragging itself toward its own grave, ‘The Creeping Flesh’ by contrast is an exuberant, imaginative and confidently realised production, seemingly inheriting a sense of joie de vivre (and, it must be said, a few plot details) from Cushing & Lee’s previous assignment, the equally wonderful ‘Horror Express’.

Although this co-production between Tigon and the utilitarian-sounding World Film Services may not have been planned as an epitaph for this particular strain of British cinema, it was certainly amongst the last batch of such titles to enjoy widespread distribution, and in retrospect, it can’t help but feel like an attempt to give the classical approach to the genre the all-guns-blazing send-off it deserved. (1)

Whilst the film makes a point of evoking as many of the tropes that had helped define the legacy of the preceding fifteen years as possible though, imbuing proceedings with a warm feeling of tried-and-tested familiarity in the process, it also engages intelligently with the more psychological / visceral approach which was already beginning to twist the genre into weird new shapes as budgets plummeted and declining audiences began to demand harder-edged exploitation content (perhaps taking a few notes from Hammer’s envelope-pushing ‘Hands of the Ripper’ (’71) and ‘Demons of the Mind’ (’72)) – a cake-having / cake-eating combo, which, against all the odds, works brilliantly.

An introductory framing narrative features an infirm and unhinged looking Peter Cushing in his lab, ranting about the nature of good and evil and the grave responsibility he holds for saving humanity from a plague of darkness, and so on. As he begins relating his sorry tale to a younger doctor who has apparently turned up to assist him, we move into ‘flashback’ mode as the story proper begins with a scenario akin to what might have happened had Cushing’s character from ‘Horror Express’ managed to return home without incident, and with his crated up specimen still intact.

Upon arrival at his isolated country home, Dr Emmanuel Hildern (for such is Cushing’s character name) is immediately reacquainted with his devoted daughter Penelope (Lorna Heilbron), whom he has left alone at the house during his costly and arduous expedition to the wilds of New Guinea. Naturally enough, Penelope declares her wish to catch up with her beloved father over tea and toast, but Dr Hildern has other priorities, immediately retreating to his laboratory to unpack his big crate.

Excitedly filling his assistant (George Benson) in on the results of his trip, Hildern reveals his prize discovery – a gnarly-looking, giant sized skeleton of some ancient, previously unknown species of hominid, whose very existence throws conventional theories of human evolution into disarray!

Consulting his surprisingly extensive library of work on “the spiritual beliefs of the New Guinea primitives”, Dr Hildern is subsequently inspired to make some even more earth-shattering claims concerning the veracity of his discovery, including the suggestion that it in fact belongs to an ancient race of “evil giants” who once went to war against the people of the islands – and his speculations become even more far-fetched after an attempt to clean the skeleton reveals that the dead bones are capable of actually regrowing their living flesh when exposed to water.

Soon thereafter, Hildern makes the astounding declaration that the blood samples he has taken from this freshly-grown flesh actually contain the essence of pure evil, determining that he and his assistant must get straight to work preparing a prototype vaccine from it, which I suppose in theory should function to rid mankind of all its negative impulses?! (Whoa, back up there Doc, one thing at a time please...)

Whilst begrudgingly taking a break to partake in that aforementioned familial breakfast meanwhile, Dr Hildern gets stuck into his years’ worth of unanswered correspondence, and swiftly learns that his wife, who had been committed to an asylum many years previously, has passed away during his absence. Significantly, it transpires that he had lied to Penelope about her mother’s fate, telling her that she had died whilst she was still a child – so now of course, he must stick to his story and hide his grief from his daughter.

Even more awkwardly for Dr Hildern, the proprietor of his friendly local asylum is none other than his half-brother James, played by Christopher Lee (I suppose the “half” has been appended to the script to account for their obvious lack of family resemblance). Another scientist of questionable propriety, this younger Dr Hildern is soon revealed to be an ice-cold authoritarian who manages his mental hospital with an approach to patient well-being seemingly inspired by Torquemada, whilst spending his spare time engaging in his own Frankensteinian experiments (you know, hand-crank generated electrical charges applied to severed arms in tanks of formaldehyde – all that kind of good stuff).

Clearly there is no love lost between the brothers. Apparently suffering from a severe case of sibling rivalry, James lords his superior wealth and public standing over the grief-stricken and destitute Emmanuel, announcing straight off the bat that he will refuse to subsidise any of his brother’s foolish expeditions, and furthermore declaring that he intends to go head-to-head against Emmanuel to win the much-coveted Richter Prize!

As you’d rather imagine, Emmanuel’s frantic and rather sloppy attempts to knock up a vaccine against Original Sin, Penelope’s calamitous discovery of the truth about her mother (it turns out she was a former Parisian night club performer who allegedly succumbed to a form of hereditary insanity!) and James’s attempts at scientific espionage add up to a whole heap of trouble for all concerned -- especially when you factor in an escaped lunatic rampaging around the place and a big, gnarly skeleton which threatens to turn into an atavistic remnant of a lost race of pre-human destroyers as soon as it’s left out in the rain.

And, as life in the Hildern house becomes ever more dysfunctional, the older Dr Hildern’s extremely bad decision to test out his vaccine on his beloved daughter (I mean, it’s only injecting a solution made from the blood of an ancient evil giant into the blood-stream of an emotionally unstable teenage girl…. what could possibly go wrong?) is basically the last straw that tips the whole thing into complete chaos.

With Cushing and Lee as rival mad scientists, a hot-house gothic house melodrama with overtones of sexual repression and parental abandonment, an ancient, atavistic supernatural menace and a lurid Victorian milieu of hellish asylums, riotous taverns and buxom wenches, ‘The Creeping Flesh’ delivers everything a gothic horror fan could possibly wish for, but, rather than merely coming across as a mega-mix of Brit horror clichés, Peter Spenceley & Jonathan Rumbold’s admirably ambitious screenplay actually succeeds in incorporating all this stuff into an example of that rarest and most valuable of horror movie virtues – a good story, well told.(2)

Critics of the film have tended to draw attention to the unlikelihood of Dr Hildern’s extraordinary leap of logic in determining that he has extracted ‘the essence of pure evil’ from his pet skeleton, and have taken a dim view of the film’s apparent endorsement of the grimly puritanical, Manichean worldview this implies – especially once the injection of the botched ‘evil’ vaccine into Penelope appears to provide the catalyst for her catastrophic sexual awakening. Rarely, it seems, has a horror movie’s “sex = evil = death” message been so explicitly spelled out, and even given scientific credence, no less.

What is easy to overlook on first viewing however is that what we are seeing here is the story as recounted in flashback by Dr Hildern himself – an unreliable narrator to say the least. Whilst the supernatural nature of the creature he has unearthed remains unquestioned, we are never actually given any verifiable proof that the Doctor’s babbling about ancient mythology and good and evil has any basis in fact. Indeed, Spenceley & Rumbold’s script subtly undermines the doctor’s reactionary assumptions at every turn, clearly implying a far more mundane, psychological explanation for the tragedies which plague his family life.

Although Dr Hildern is a genial, sympathetic figure when we first meet him, as the film goes on it becomes increasingly clear that his problems run far deeper than mere bumbling absent-mindedness and nutty-professor style eccentricity. Beyond all of the mad science and monster movie hi-jinks which result from his sloppy professional practice, the clear implication here is that the malady which sends Penelope out on the town in a scarlet dress is the exact same one which drove her mother to the asylum -- and that Emmanuel himself is chiefly responsible for it, irrespective of any botched vaccine injections and vague talk of hereditary insanity.

Through his insistence that his wife and daughter remain closeted from the outside world, and through his failure to understand their needs or to return their affection, Emmanuel has inadvertently destroyed the lives of the two women he loves, and his transition from a lovable bumbler to a tragic, ruined lost soul is, of course, brilliantly realised by Cushing, adding yet another variation to the gallery of morally tormented patriarchs he had previously essayed in films as varied as The Flesh & The Fiends, ‘Cash on Demand’ and The Gorgon. Working here just a few months after his return to active service following the devastating loss of his wife, it is spiriting to see him firing on all cylinders, bringing energy, commitment and emotional nuance to a demanding lead role.

Lee, for his part, falls back on his tried and tested ‘archly superior, cold-hearted cad’ routine, and I’m sure we all know how great he was at doing that. I’m not sure what his characteristically strident thoughts on this particular production may have been, but he certainly seems to be enjoying the opportunity to indulge in a slightly more refined form of full spectrum villainy than his horror roles usually allowed for.

Meanwhile, the supporting cast is excellent too, with Heilbron (who went on of course to work with Jose Larraz on ‘Symptoms’ the following year) on fine, hysterical form as Penelope, and some great one-scene-wonder bits from a few old favourites too; Michael Ripper as one of the porters who carries Cushing’s crate into the house, Harry Locke improvising wildly as the pub landlord, and Duncan Lamont as a drawling Scottish police inspector. There’s even an extended cameo from Jenny Runacre as Cushing’s late wife during some flashback-within-a-flashback scenes of Parisian debauchery.

(The only disappointment in fact is that the hulking, mute asylum escapee is inexplicably NOT played by Milton Reid. Perhaps he was on his holidays at the time? [Cue mental image of Milton relaxing on a sun-lounger drinking a cocktail with an umbrella in it, as Hawaiian music plays.] Oh well, you can’t have everything I suppose.)

Freddie Francis was always rather uneven in his work as a horror director, but he certainly had his moments, and ‘The Creeping Flesh’ is undoubtedly one of them. In particular, he was always a director who seemed to have a good feel for production design, and the staging, props and set dressing here are indeed all top notch. I don’t know where ‘The Creeping Flesh’ actually sat in budgetary terms, but it certainly looks like one of the more extravagantly realised British horrors of its era, with location shooting taking place both around Thorpe House in Surrey and the London Docklands, whilst the standing sets used for the urban exteriors (identified as such by the film’s entry on the Reel Streets website) are so elaborate that I actually mistook them for genuine streets given a period make-over.

Meanwhile, the special effects used to realise the monster – in both its skeletal and fleshy form - are satisfyingly icky and menacing, especially during the film’s climactic nocturnal coach crash – a genuinely thrilling, beautifully evocative sequence featuring great, blue-tinted nocturnal photography, lashing rain, thunder crash editing and a sense of all-consuming chaos as the newly reconstituted revenant makes its getaway in a sutiably menacing hooded cape.

And, as to the ending, well – oh my gosh, it’s so good. The hooded creature banging at the doctor’s door with its clammy paw is just so ‘Weird Tales’, and the vengeful, sanity-wrecking price it eventually exacts from him is so E.C. Comics – just absolute classic stuff (even if Francis does ill-advisedly revive his “camera inside the skull” gimmick from 1965’s ‘The Skull’ to considerably lessened effect).

As you will have gathered, I like ‘The Creeping Flesh’ rather a lot. For some reason, it seems to have remained a fairly under-rated and infrequently discussed entry in the British gothic cycle over the years, but it really is one of the very best, managing to embody all of the arcane joys which this form of filmmaking represents for its fans, whilst at the same time presenting a solid, serious and exciting tale, compelling enough in its own right to make a perfect ‘gateway drug’ for any British horror neophytes who stumble across it. If for some reason you’ve overlooked it until now, please do make the effort to track it down - you’ll be in for a treat.

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Check out this amazing poster artwork from Italy (title translation: “The Terror From The Rain”(?)), West Germany (“At Night, The Skeleton Awakens”), and Belgium (more or less direct translations of the English title in French and Dutch).

In the UK meanwhile, Tigon put this out on a double-bill with Mario Bava’s ‘A Hatchet For The Honeymoon’ – now THAT’S what I call a good night out!

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(1)An eclectic production outfit to say the least, World Film Services appear to have had a hand in everything from Peter Watkins’ ‘Privilege’ (1967) and Joseph Losey’s ‘Boom!’ and ‘Secret Ceremony’ (both ’68) to the sub-Amicus portmanteau effort ‘Tales That Witness Madness’ (1973), the inexplicable David Niven vampire comedy ‘Vampira’ (1974), and post-E.T. kid’s sci-fi movie ‘D.A.R.Y.L’ (1985).

(2)Given how accomplished their script for ‘The Creeping Flesh’ is, it is surprising to learn that neither Spenceley nor Rumbold had much of a background in the film industry, and nor did they go on to much recognisable success. Spencely worked intermittently as an assistant editor in the UK, whilst Rumbold next popped up in Greece in 1978, directing a film which no one ever seems to have seen, before occasionally contributing script work to a number of low key productions based out of Greece, Yugoslavia and Iceland.

Gothic Originals / October Horrors # 11: Scars of Dracula (Roy Ward Baker, 1970)

Another year, another straggler crossed off the increasingly short list of “Hammer horror films I’ve never seen”. In fact, if we strictly limit things to their period/gothic horror output, I think this might be the very last one to unfold before my tired eyes.

I suppose I’ve previously avoided ‘Scars of Dracula’ due to the general consensus that it is not very good, but I’ve recently noted some people speaking positively about it, and it’s had a re-release on disc, so… I mean, at the end of the day it’s a Christopher Lee Dracula entry with a reputation for gory violence and Roy Ward Baker calling the shots. How bad can it be, really?

The answer, unfortunately, is very bad indeed. Seriously folks, this one is shockingly poor. It is so unapologetically shit in fact that, if I hadn’t already been in my own living room, and if it hadn’t been raining outside, I probably would have walked out in protest.

Say what you like about Jimmy Sangster’s much-maligned ‘Lust for a Vampire’ and ‘Horror of Frankenstein’ (both of which went into production the same year as this one – ye gods, what on earth was going on over at Hammer House?), at least they were trying to do something a bit different.

‘Scars..’, by contrast embraces the same tone of smirking, half-hearted crappiness, but applies it to a script that is bluntly derivative of earlier entries in the series, barely even summoning the energy to drag itself through the same old clichés one more time.

If you’re feeling charitable (which I tend to be, when it comes to this sort of thing), the two Sangster films could also be excused to a certain extent by the fact that they were helmed by an inexperienced director, trying to bring the blackly humourous aspect of his writing to the screen, with fairly disastrous results.

‘Scars..’ however has no such excuse. Indeed, Baker usually managed to bring some notably superior cinematic chops to the British horror films he directed, sometimes elevating mediocre material to a higher level than it really deserved. Like all work-for-hire directors though, he was at the mercy of what was placed before him by his employers, and it is painfully clear that he has given naff all to work with on ‘Scars..’, whether in terms of budget, scheduling, script, crew or anything else.

The first real warning sign, I think, is the bats. The film opens with the unedifying spectacle of a big, floppy bat-on-a string drooling Kensington gore all over Dracula’s ashes, which are helpfully spread out along with his best cape, on a slab in his mid-European castle at some unspecified point in the fairy tale past (never mind the adventures he had enjoyed in 1890s London in Peter Sasdy’s excellent ‘Taste the Blood of Dracula’ six months earlier). (1)

Admittedly, achieving decent bat effects has always been a problem for gothic horror films, but this one looks particularly onerous, with a sculpted plastic face and an overstuffed body like some giant bluebottle. For a single shot, perhaps we could excuse it, but unfortunately these bats actually go on to play a pretty significant role in the film. Acting as Dracula’s primary avatars, they’re flapping about all over the place, and are central to several of the film’s main horror set-pieces. And yet -- they look absolutely stupid throughout.

The fact that neither Baker nor line producer Aida Young were able to have a quiet word in the ear of one of Hammer’s big-shots to say, look, we’ve got to do something about these bloody bats or the film will be a laughing stock, speaks volumes about how little the company actually cared about the quality of their product at this point in time.

A few years earlier, viewers could have had confidence that even the most mindless horror films Hammer turned out could to some extent be redeemed by their technical accomplishments, proving that a little bit of beautiful photography and classy production design can go a long way. (The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb is a good example.) Those days seem to have been long gone by 1970 though, and ‘Scars of Dracula’ is blandly over-lit throughout, leaving no shadows, no room for atmosphere, and nothing to hide its rather ugly, poverty-stricken sets.

In stark contrast to the attention to detail that used to prevail at Hammer, the props and costuming too are almost unbelievably shoddy here. When Patrick Troughton, playing Dracula’s craven servant Klove, is seen dragging an animal carcass over the back of his horse at the end if a hunting expedition, it looks as if he’s been handed a bedraggled soft toy splashed with red paint and told to make the best of it. I’m not even sure what kind of animal it was supposed to be, to be honest.

Again, I only bring this up as a symptom of the wider malaise affecting every aspect of this production. The fact this scene was filmed and printed, rather than being put on hold whilst the art director was bawled out and some production assistants dispatched to come up with something better before the next tea break, again speaks for itself. (2)

I should make clear that it’s not really my intention to get all high-minded when it comes to assessing the quality of Hammer Dracula movies. I have no desire to echo Christopher Lee’s snooty approach to such things, and I’d be perfectly happy to enjoy a ragged, pulpy Dracula movie full of sex and violence (for such is the reputation of ‘Scars..’ has acquired over the years). But… this damn thing can’t even get being sleazy right.

The bawdy behaviour that comprises much of the first half of the film is pitched strictly at a Benny Hill / pre-‘Confessions of..’ level, with Christopher Matthews as a leering, jack-the-lad type chancer getting his end away with a succession of flirtatious barmaids and the like, but with no actual nudity, and none of the (relatively) grown up eroticism that caused such a stir in Baker’s previous assignment for Hammer, ‘The Vampire Lovers’.

As to violence meanwhile, Baker seems to have realised that his only hope of winning the fans over with this one was to just go for it (I’m reminded of Brian Trenchard Smith’s tales of how he started desperately hacking off limbs and throwing blood around when his budget for 1980’s ‘Turkey Shoot’ was cut in half mid-way through production), and if nothing else, ‘Scars..’ is at least a contender for the goriest film Hammer ever made.

Even here though, things are compromised by those bloody layabouts in the art department. Hammer’s preferred shade of bright scarlet house paint never looked as absurd as it does here in the light of Moray Grant’s remorselessly bland photography, and the resulting parade of rubber bat attacks and lurid close-ups of poorly applied wound make-up achieves the rare distinction of simultaneously feeling both prurient and boring. (3)

One of the more interesting aspects of ‘Scars..’ is its apparent attempt to associate Dracula with bladed weapons. (“Be careful, it’s sharp” is his introductory line, as he walks in on Matthews’ character admiring the obligatory crossed swords mounted on his castle wall.)

This isn’t necessarily a bad idea (and I’m sure Lee would have relished the opportunity for a bit of supernatural swashbuckling), but it is poorly developed here – most notably in an absolutely astonishing scene in which, following an almost shot-for-shot re-tread of the bit in Terrance Fisher’s ‘Dracula’ where The Count reprimands his bride for trying to take a bite of the Harker-surrogate’s throat before him, Dracula here proceeds to punish her by whipping out a butcher’s knife and stabbing her to death.

Aside from the fact that it is entirely unmotivated by the script, this is… very un-vampiric behaviour, to say the least. (If Dracula were to resort to sword-play, surely he’d do so purely for the purposes of pageantry and sadism, rather than hacking away at one of his vassals like some back alley slasher?)

This is basically only a taster though for an even more witless moment later on, when the Lord of the Undead, whose mesmeric powers can crush a man’s soul with a mere glance, apparently resorts to drugging the heroine’s soup. As Jonathan Rigby laments in his review in English Gothic, “what use has Dracula for these pantomime contrivances?”

Anyway – on to positives. There must be some, I suppose?

Well, it’s hard work, but… at least Christopher Lee gets some lines in this one I suppose, with Dracula speaking calmly and assuming his ‘cold but polite host’ role for the first time since Fisher’s 1957 ‘Dracula’, I believe.

Given the voluminous litanies of complaint Lee liked to issue each time he was – ahem – “forced” to appear in another Dracula film, one can only imagine how cheesed off he must have been whilst participating in this particularly shabby instalment, but even if he’s not exactly giving it his all, such are the meagre pleasures offered by ‘Scars..’ that merely hearing Christopher Lee say some things is quite nice.

As always, it’s nice to see Hammer lucky charm Michael Ripper getting a significant role too, appearing here as the world’s least hospitable inn-keeper. He gets quite a lot of screen time in ‘Scars..’, and spends almost all of it ordering people to get out of his inn, refusing to let them in in the first place, or telling them to “go to the devil”. He does though have one lovely moment when he temporarily drops his guard, wistfully telling our lead couple they should enjoy their best years together… shortly before he discovers they’re also would-be vampire hunters and manhandles them out of the front door before they’ve even finished their soup.

As a fan of ‘The Sweeney’, I was delighted too to see a young Dennis Waterman popping up as our ostensible hero, although it’s doubtful that this role did much to help propel him to his later TV fame, as he delivers a veritable master-class on the theme of “ineffectual youth”, despite being thirty two years old at the time.

I also found it interesting that – for some reason – ‘Scars..’ takes the opportunity to include the rarely filmed scene from Stoker’s novel in which Jonathan Harker abseils out of his locked room in Dracula’s castle and find himself trapped in the lower chamber which houses The Count’s coffin. This bit was relatively well done, and provided a welcome break from the remorseless grind of reheated cliché that comprises the rest of the film’s action.

And… that’s about it really.

[Deep sigh.]

In general, I tend to feel a great warmth and fondness for British horror films of all stripes, and for Hammer films in particular. As such, I can usually find a certain amount to enjoy in just about any of them, even if it’s just a bit of period charm and some familiar faces popping in for a scene or two. Even on this basis though, I can’t stress enough just how dispiritingly rubbish I found ‘Scars of Dracula’ to be. It’s really the pits.

Essentially playing out like some cruel, self-reflexive pastiche of the company’s public image, ‘Scars..’ feels less like an actual Hammer film, and more like a realisation of what the closed-minded contemporary critics who wrote horror films off as juvenile trash and never went to see them might have imagined a Hammer film to be like.

By pandering to this kind of Lowest Common Denominator public expectation, the company did themselves a dreadful disservice in ‘70/’71, and this one seems to me to be the absolute nadir of the particularly dodgy patch they seemed to be going through at the time.

At least we can take succour in the fact that they bounced back shortly thereafter with great pictures like ‘Twins of Evil’ and ‘Vampire Circus’, keeping themselves afloat creatively speaking for at least a few more years before the inevitable end arrived in the mid ‘70s. Maybe I should watch one of those again to help take the taste away...

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(I do LOVE some of this foreign language poster artwork for this film though…)

(1) At the risk of sounding like the worst kind of nit-picking fanboy, the fact that ‘Scars of Dracula’ completely blunders the (admittedly loose) sense of chronological continuity established by the other Hammer Draculas just seems to add insult to injury. I mean, after Dracula is defeated in London at the end of ‘Taste the Blood..’, it would seem to set things up perfectly for his resurrection in the same city almost a century later in ‘..AD 1972’ – yet we’ve got this damned mess in the middle, which drags him back to the vague, mittel-european gothic setting we’d previously kissed goodbye to (and frankly had quite enough of) in ‘..Risen from the Grave’ a couple of years earlier!

Is ‘Scars..’ thus non-canonical? Is it a prequel? This being 1970, I’d imagine Tony Hinds and Michael Carreras would have had little to say on the subject beyond, “What the bloody hell are you talking about? Get out of my office!”, but it still irks me.

(2) For further evidence of just how badly put together this movie is, I suggest consulting the unusually extensive list of ‘goofs’ on IMDB.

(3) We should make clear that, after serving a long apprenticeship as a camera operator through the ‘60s, Grant did far better work as DP on ‘The Vampire Lovers’ and ‘Vampire Circus’ amongst others – so again, we can perhaps chalk up the fact that ‘Scars..’ looks as if it was shot under office strip lighting to budget and schedule shortcomings.