Dracula: Prince Of Darkness

Dracula: Prince Of Darkness (1966)

Dir. Terence Fisher

Written by Jimmy Sangster

Starring Christopher Lee, Andrew Keir, Barbara Shelley, Francis Matthews

It’s easy to be cynical when you see a studio --not necessarily Disney in this hypothetical example, could be anyone-- grinding out completely unnecessary sequels even in the painfully obvious absence of anywhere for the story to go, which, again, not necessarily STAR WARS, could be anything, I could be talking about Hammer studios in the late 1960s for example. Which as luck would have it, I am. Both you and I know that Hammer Productions’ two-decade-long death march of sequels to their era-defining 1958 HORROR OF DRACULA was not exactly inspired by the uncontrollable creative urge, and both you and I know that it ended very, very poorly. But give them credit for this: they managed to hold off six long years since the previous sequel, 1960’s BRIDES OF DRACULA, before finally caving into the obvious opportunity to cash in on a sure-thing franchise installation. Can you imagine Marvel waiting six years between franchise sequels because they didn’t really have a good idea? Hell no. So credit Hammer for that, at least.

That’s probably the most surprising and the most artistically laudable aspect of 1966’s DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS, but the movie’s also more respectable than I had feared going in. It’s pretty well made, confident, and focused on delivering the goods; it’s just that those goods are of a distinctly familiar tenor. The good and bad thing about D:PoD is that it’s basically a lightly re-skinned remake of HORROR OF DRACULA. Not a lot of new ground covered here. But if we must trek through thoroughly familiar and well-mapped territory, at least the scenery is nice.

We begin with two British couples -- Charles (Francis Matthews, CORRIDORS OF BLOOD) and his wife Diana (Suzan Farmer, DIE MONSTER DIE), and Alan (Bud Tingwell, THE DISH) and his wife Helen (Barbara Shelley, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED)-- on a nice vacation in Germany. Or, actually, we begin slightly before we meet this charming quartet: we begin in the German countryside, where superstitious peasants are interrupting a funeral because they want to stake the corpse through the heart, just in case. In rides action monk Father Sandor (Andrew Keir, who assumed the role of Quatermass in QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, rather less memorably than cranky drunk Brian Donlevy did in the first two films) to chide them for their actions and tell them that as a genuine expert on vampirism, they should take his word for it and leave the poor dead girl alone. But also vampires are real. Just not this particular one. He seems pretty crazy, but he speaks with such authority that he seems to win them over, although I notice he doesn’t stick around to make sure the mob doesn’t get jittery again before they get the unfortunate corpse in the ground.

Keir was something of a Hammer staple (you remember him from BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB), but his boisterous, eccentric performance in this role is almost certainly his most memorable for the studio, creating a character who --dare I say it-- is actually a more fun and charismatic foil for Dracula than Cushing’s Dr. Van Helsing ever was. I love Cushing, of course,* but Hammer never really figured out anything interesting for the character to do, and in fact now that I’m thinking about it, the problem may just be the character itself. Seriously, every Dracula adaptation knows to cast a real classy actor as Van Helsing --Cushing, Anthony Hopkins, Herbert Lom, Laurence Olivier, Rutger Hauer, Christopher Plummer, Peter Fonda, Hugh Jackman, Mel Brooks-- but think back, in all those adaptations, does the character ever actually seem all that interesting? BRIDES OF DRACULA actually puts something of a test to this hypothesis by leaving Dracula out altogether and focusing on the continuing exploits of Van Helsing. It’s a pretty fun romp, but is it because the character is just so classic we can’t resist him? I’ll give you a hint: the only other movie I can think of that foregrounds him is VAN HELSING. That didn’t go so well in my opinion. Somebody should consider giving Father Sandor another chance.

Anyway, Sandor shows up at the Unwelcoming Superstitious Village Inn (which, judging from these Hammer films, must be a hugely successful chain) where our oblivious English duet of couples is staying. While cheerfully warming his ass by the fire, he explains to them that yes, vampires are real, and also, on a related note, don’t go to Karlsbad, and if you absolutely must, at least don’t spend the night at the mysterious and obviously sinister castle along the way, where all the villagers are afraid to go, anyway, well, good to meet you all. So naturally, guess what our heroes end up doing almost immediately.

They’re morons, of course, but they’re a surprisingly charming group to spend time with, if we absolutely had to do it. It must be said: Hammer just does so much better with adult actors (like these four) than the usual pretty bland kids; while we might reasonably question the wisdom of taking a sinister driverless carriage up to an obviously evil castle which they had just been admonished to avoid, and then deciding what the heck, why not spend the night? We can still enjoy their cheerful British obliviousness, particularly because the script sets up a pretty funny dynamic between them. You see, Helen is already established as a gigantic stick-in-the-mud, one of those Karl Pilkington characters who really never wanted to leave England in the first place and is constantly fretting and complaining about anywhere which is not her particular neighborhood in London. Now, she happens to be extremely justified in her concern about the evil castle they’re staying in currently, but since she’s been whining the whole trip you can totally understand why everyone else ignores her. Obviously in real life I’m 100% on the pro let’s-stay-in-this-haunted-castle side of this debate. But we also know this movie is called DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS, so there’s some reasonable cause for caution. Helen’s been wrong about everything so far… but she does happen to be right about this. Shelley --something of a Scream Queen of the period-- works hard to make Helen kind of likable despite being such a whiny wet blanket, and settles on the right Cassandra tone here to provide some fun tension about if she’ll be able to warn everyone in time (spoiler: no). She gets rewarded for her efforts in the second half of the film, where she gets to indulge in a very different kind of performance.

Our heroes have barely settled in before they encounter an evil butler (Philip Latham, FORCE 10 FROM NAVARONE) with a plan to resurrect… well, I shan't spoil it, except to say that this movie is called DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS. And actually that still might not completely ruin it, because the last one was called BRIDES OF DRACULA and if you’ll recall, it delivered neither brides nor Dracula. But everyone is having a fun, charming time until HOLY SHIT DID THEY JUST SLIT THAT GUY’S THROAT AND DRAIN HIS BLOOD? Shit went fuckin’ HOSTEL here. This movie may be a bit predictable, but it’s definitely playing for keeps. A very wet murder scene, a gruesome discovery of a body, and a woman-on-woman vampire sequence so absolutely dripping with lesbian subtext that it might as well just call itself text -- are shocking enough to retain a little edge even today, and in 1966 must have been absolutely brain-melting.  And once Drac finally shows up, Lee plays him with even more animalistic intensity than before (with no dialogue, to the movie’s benefit), escalating his focus on making the character a malevolent, physically imposing predator. There’s something startlingly inhuman and demonic about Lee’s portrayal --and particularly this version of the Count-- which just isn’t present in the majority of Drac adaptations where the title character is more of a gentlemanly romantic. Kinski’s turn in NOSFERATU might be the only one in the same ballpark, but I doubt even he would slice his chest open and force a hypnotized woman to drink his blood.** That shit’s intense. It’s potent enough that even when our heroes escape the Count’s castle and retreat to civilization, his predacious presence continues to haunt the film. He really seems like a force which is impossible to escape from.

Now, what you may be noticing here is that while none of this is specifically the plot of Dracula, it turns out to be functionally identical. Again, we have protagonists who arrive at Drac’s castle unaware of the danger their mysterious host poses, and again, for the second half Drac goes on the offensive, traveling to a new location to pursue the young wife of our hero, and they must eventually chase him back to his lair with the help of a seasoned vampire hunter. We have another uncomfortable dinner scene at the castle, we have another Vampiric bride, we even get a Renfield (thinly disguised under the pseudonym “Ludwig” and portrayed by the redoubtably broad Thorley Walters of FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED). All of that is as by-the-book for Dracula adaptations at they come; in fact, despite all the cosmetic changes this is probably still a more faithful adaptation of Stoker’s novel than many a screen version.

That seems to be a sticking point for some people, but it didn’t bother me. There’s enough spice here to make it at least a welcome comfort, if not exactly a revelation. But if you are the sort of person who would be bothered by a thinly veiled remake made for purely monetary reasons by many of the same people less than a decade later, I would not recommend this movie. I would usually recommend that instead you read my THE FORCE AWAKENS review, except in this case it would just reveal what a gigantic hypocrite I am for giving Hammer a pass here. At least PRINCE OF DARKNESS has the dignity to be ashamed of being a hacky remake and not draw attention to it with a bunch of lame references.

The film has some other issues too, the biggest being that even given an opportunity to re-write the anticlimactic ending of Stoker’s novel which has hobbled so many other adaptations, the makers of D:PoD somehow manage to find an even lamer way to dispatch the Count. Man, for all the talk of being indestructible unstoppable supernatural forces, it turns out fucking everything kills vampires. As Father Sandor explains with some degree of unintentional comedy, there’s no way to kill these undead fiends. Well, except fire. Or drowning, that would do it. Or cutting off the head. Or stabbing through the heart, or anything made of silver, or garlic, or crosses, or anything which even superficially resembles a cross, or holy water, or sunlight. So, basically everything which would kill a normal human, plus a few other things. But other than those things and a few others, fucking unkillable. The final chase is exciting anyway, though, because at least the Count isn’t fleeing, he’s trying to beat them back to his place to win himself a new honey. That gives it a little more tension than Stoker’s version, where Dracula is already in full retreat by the time he’s dispatched. But there’s no way around it, the actual dispatching is pretty bogus.

That having been said, most of the movie is pretty legit, particularly for a third sequel to a film which probably didn’t need any sequels. Compared to the third FRANKENSTEIN sequel (the abysmal EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN) it’s positively terrific, sporting a typically excellent Gothic Horror atmosphere (indeed, it’s one of the few Hammer films which is not distractingly overlit), well-paced direction (by Hammer staple Terence Fisher), a strong score (by series regular composer James Bernard), solid performances, and a perfectly workable --if not exactly poetic-- script by go-to Hammer scribe Jimmy Sangster.

This last part is a matter of some dispute, and perhaps the thing the film is most known for. Lee, who almost immediately seems to have resented the role that made him a star, is on record claiming that his lack of dialogue in this film is because he refused to speak the lines he was given. Sangster, for his part, has disputed this, claiming that he never wrote any lines for the vampire in the first place. Both claims seem pretty suspect -- unless his lines were vastly worse than anything else in the finished movie, I know for a fact that Lee has obediently spoken much, much dumber dialogue than is on display here, and if fact would do so only two years later in the sequel to this very movie. Plus he already had two Fu Manchu movies under his belt by this time, and would finish out the decade with two more Fu Manchu movies directed by Jesus Franco, which is just about as dire a pitch as you can find in the annals of cinema. For fuck’s sake, he was in a goddam POLICE ACADEMY sequel, and not even an early one. So his case that the silent Count was the result of his unflinching artistic integrity is a bit suspect, to say the least. But then again, Sangster wrote the first two Dracula films, which definitely feature an antagonist who, if not exactly chatty, certainly speaks. It would be pretty weird for him to suddenly imagine the character as a mute, out of the blue, in his third screen appearance. So I’m honestly not sure who’s telling the truth here. But whoever had the idea, it was a good one; a silent Dracula is one which foregrounds his inhuman side, and it works to make the movie more intense and frightening, as well as somewhat unique among the many, many cinematic takes on the character.

Granted, it’s one of the only things to make it unique. But I guess that’s not such a crime when the fundamentals are as strong as this. As the series continued, we’d get progressively stranger premises in order to keep things fresh, and look where that got us. It got us goddam DRACULA: AD 1972, that’s where it got us. So maybe sticking to what you’re good at was not as bad a plan for Hammer as it might appear. DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS doesn’t offer anything essential, but it’s a pretty solid helping of more of the same. Its brisk and eventful 90 minutes give you exactly what you’d expect --in some of its strongest iterations-- though admittedly it offers very little else. But of course, what else do you really need?   

*Although I saw him recently in a big budget studio movie which was bold enough to cast him some 22 years after his death, and I decided that zombiefication isn’t his best look.

** Although fair's fair -- that scene, shocking as it is, is adapted pretty directly from the original 1897 novel. It's one of several bits in PRINCE OF DARKNESS where the movie seems to imagine itself something of a repository for sequences from the novel which weren't included in HORROR OF DRACULA, the other notable examples being the film's final chase sequence, which is far more faithful to the book than the original ending to HORROR, and the inclusion of a very Renfield-like character (shockingly omitted from the 1958 version).

HAMMER’S DRACULA SERIES:

1: THE HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)

2: THE BRIDES OF DRACULA (1960)

3: DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1966)

4: DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968)

5: TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1970)

6: SCARS OF DRACULA (1970)

7: DRACULA A.D. 1972 (1972)

8: THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA (1973)

9: THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES (1974)

(see also: Hammer’s FRANKENSTEIN series)

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	The World’s Most Evil Vampire Lives Again! And various derivations therof.
TITLE ACCURACY	Dracula is definitely in this one, though I have no idea what a “Prince of Darkness” is
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Based very loosely on one character created by Bram Stoker.
SEQUEL?	Third sequel in Hammer’s nine-movie cycle.
REMAKE?	There’s a 2013 film called DRACULA: THE DARK PRINCE, but it doesn’t seem to be related. Also seems to have nothing to do with John Carpenter's perpetually underrated PRINCE OF DARKNESS.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	England
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Vampire, Dracula
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Lee, probably Andrew Keir too. And of course, Terence Fisher, Jimmy Sangster, and a bunch of the Hammer regulars here.
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	As always, there’s something sexual about the Count’s interest in women, but it’s not explicit.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No animals, not even a bat transformation or anything. Some asshole horses who are totally working for the count, though.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	Again, Drac uses his Mind Whammy, and we also learn a little more explicitly that “For reasons we cannot yet understand” there are certain humans who are doomed to be the vampire’s loyal servants.
CREEPY DOLLS?	No dolls
EVIL CULT?	There is again a passing mention of Dracula being the head of a “cult” of vampires, but again we see no evidence of this
MADNESS?	Thorley Walters as the Renfield stand-in  “Ludwig”
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Dracula turns from ashes to full human form, and then, subtly, from older to younger as he drinks blood.
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	When someone tells you, “hey, vampires are real, but you’ll totally be OK if you go literally anywhere except this one specific castle in this one specific town,” why not just be extra-careful and adjust your vacation plans accordingly?

Blood From The Mummy's Tomb

Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb (1971)

Dir. Seth Holt, Michael Carreras (uncredited)

Written by Christopher Wicking

Starring Valerie Leon, Andrew Keir, Mark Edwards, James Villiers, Hugh Burden, Aubrey Morris

By the waning days of Hammer in the early 70s, the studio had produced exactly zero Mummy movies of any merit, despite three attempts in 1959, 1964, and 1967. They’re all cosmetically different, but they all feature essentially the same premise, which is, in itself, more or less a hodge-podge of recycled elements from the four Universal Studios sequels to their 1932 film THE MUMMY: Basically, a handful of racist white archeologists uncover a hidden tomb from the good old days, and a fiendish modern-day Egyptian with roots in the ancient traditions revives a guardian-Mummy to punish them for their transgressions. And you know what? None of them are very good. Not the original MUMMY, not THE MUMMY’S HAND, not THE MUMMY’S TOMB, not THE MUMMY’S CURSE, not Hammer’s THE MUMMY (1959), not CURSE OF THE MUMMY’S TOMB, not THE MUMMY’S SHROUD. With a near-zero success rate by 1971, one could only wonder why it was that people couldn’t seem to resist the lure of more Mummy movies. Failure had not seemed much of a deterrent for Hammer up to this point, but with very similar attempts from some of their top talent all ending up in the same middling rehashes, one can hardly help approaching their final Mummy movie, BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB, with a bit of trepidation. Was there really any new ground to cover here?

In fact, this final entry in Hammer’s Mummy series would go a very different route. The first three borrow heavily from the template of mummy fiction pioneered by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his 1892 story Lot No. 249, and used, at least on a fundamental level, in the vast majority of Mummy fiction that followed it, particularly in the cinema (though notably not the 1932 THE MUMMY which brought the character to the screen for the first time). Doyle’s vision of The Mummy as a murderous puppet of vengeance resurrected by a modern-day believer is, in fact, so ubiquitous that you’d be forgiven for assuming it underlied the entire mythos behind the iconic monster. But you’d be wrong.

Hammer’s fourth film to feature the word “mummy” in the title adapts a completely different source, the other great fount of the mummy mythos, Bram Stoker’s 1903 novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars. While I can’t help but wonder if Stoker’s wasn’t at least subliminally influenced by Doyle’s mummy tales (particular his earlier 1890 tale The Ring Of Thoth, which posits a very different kind of ancient Egyptian magic -- a curse of eternal life rather than a curse of unnatural resurrection), his take on the material is starkly different in its mechanics, avoiding the template of Lot No 249 and imagining a very distinct species of mummified menace.

Oh I'm sorry, did I break your concentration?

Fundamentally, its horror comes from a totally different place. Instead of threatening us with murder at the hands of a resurrected corpse, Jewel is essentially a possession tale. It concerns a young Englishman named Malcolm, who is caught up in a strange situation when his fiance’s Egyptologist father suffers a mysterious attack which leaves him comatose. Gradually, it becomes clear that the source of the trouble is the (inanimate) mummy of an ancient queen named Tera, who intends to use the offending Englishmen to bring about her resurrection, possibly in the body of Malcolm’s fiance (who has been acting disturbing assertive recently, much to the horror of her male Victorian cohorts).

If that sounds vaguely familiar, why, it’s because we’ve encountered it before, as it was also the basis for the 1980 film THE AWAKENING, which featured none other than Chuck Heston (JEAN CLAUDE VAN DAMME’S THE ORDER) as the recumbent British (?!) Egyptologist. BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB has virtually nothing in common with that one, despite being ostensibly based on the same story, save the very loosest connection to a female mummy with designs on the body of an Egyptologist’s daughter. Other than that, they share not a single specific character or event, except, oddly, a character named “Corbeck” who is a villain here, the hero in the 1980 version, and, splitting the difference, a minor side character in the novel. In fact, the two films are more similar in what they lack: they both curiously minimize (to the point of omission) the main character from Stoker’s story --the barrister Malcolm who serves as a narrator-- and consequently both suffer from a serious lack of protagonist. While it’s true that Malcolm is more of an audience surrogate than a narratively crucial actor in Stoker’s tale, neither movie finds an adequate solution to the fact that both of the more important characters --the Egyptologist and his daughter-- are incapacitated or inactive for long chunks of the narrative, leaving no one around to consistently move the story along.

The Hammer version --the first direct screen adaptation of the story-- does have one advantage over its 1980 successor (and, for my money, the book itself): it’s much more eventful. The novel is almost structured as a stage play, mostly unravelling over one night, in one location (perhaps understandable, as Stoker’s day job was managing the Lyceum Theater in London). It’s a little short on whammy. Much of it is devoted to lengthy flashbacks and exposition, as well as detailed (and, apparently, quite accurate) descriptions of ancient Egyptian culture and artifacts. BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB helpfully adds a kind of slasher structure; the malevolent spirit here has a side goal of killing off everyone possessing one of its purloined artifacts, resulting in a series of grisly murders which give the whole enterprise a little oomph and establish it a little more clearly in the familiar tropes of the horror genre.

But even so, it’s an odd one. For example, it has no mummy in it, which seems kind of bold for a movie with the world “Mummy” right there in the title. At this point in Hammer’s Mummy cycle I admit I’d be willing to try anything, but even so, they usually reserved that level of flagrant false advertising for their posters. There is an ancient Egyptian princess named Tera (Valerie Leon, small roles in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN) recovered from an ancient tomb and everything, but she looks pristine and is not in any way mummified, which is completely understandable because come on, look at those boobs. Are you really gonna mummify those? What kind of monster would hide that from the world?

Of course, it should come as no surprise to you by this point that her discoverer, Dr. Fuchs (Andrew Keir, who replaced Brian Donlevy as Quatermass in QUATERMASS AND THE PIT*), has a beautiful daughter named Margaret (also Valerie Leon) who --you might want to sit down, this is really going to shock you-- looks identical to Tera, even has the same early 70’s hairdo. And, not to belabor this point, but the same amazing boobs, which the movie prominently displays every single second of runtime it can think of a reason to put Leon on-screen.**

Just to illustrate my point, mind you, not because I wanted to make this gif for any prurient reason.

Both Fuchs and his daughter are experiencing various levels of mind-whammy courtesy of Tera, and spend a lot of time wandering around with lax expressions and a thousand-yard stare, which I’d be tempted to say is probably Leon’s best move as an actor. But that isn’t really fair, she’s actually fine in both her somewhat vague roles, plus, again, boobs. Even so, the script has Keir comatose for most of the movie, and Margaret is stuck in one of those regrettable LORDS OF SALEM type roles where she’s getting increasingly possessed but doesn’t really know why or have anything she can do about it, making her a hoplessly passive protagonist (to the extent she can even be called by that name). 

Recognizing this and perhaps taking a cue from THE MUMMY’S SHROUD, they introduce a villain (James Villiers, ASYLUM, as well as a few early Hammers including THE NANNY and THE DAMNED) to give the proceedings a little structure lost from a lack of a clear central character. It helps a little (though it’s a bit unclear how his plan to reanimate the Mummy is different from Fuch’s plan --which is also to reanimate the Mummy-- even though they seem to hate each other), but actually the film works better when it’s not trying so hard to patch over its inelegantly constructed narrative. The story’s all over the place, piling up characters and meaningless subplots while simultaneously over-explaining and obscuring the mechanics of the supposedly central conflict here, which I guess, gun to my head, I’d have to define as, “who should have control over Margaret’s body?” At the very least, the movie seems to be vaguely constructed to posit as its most tangible conflict, “stopping Tera from doing, you know, whatever." But inexplicably, no character ever emerges who seems to have much interest in doing that, nor any ability to do so in any case. But somehow that doesn’t really hurt the film as much as it should. It should, by all outward appearances, be a frustrating mess. Somehow instead it’s intriguing, disjointed, bizarre and hypnotic. I don’t know that I really “get” it, but I like it.

Director Seth Holt (TASTE OF FEAR, THE NANNY) is, despite his sparse output, often regarded as Hammer’s most adroit director (including by no less an authority on the subject than Christopher Lee), and he amply demonstrates why he deserves that title here, crafting sequences and shots which are subtly stylish and elusively evocative, from the vaguely surreal pre-credits mummification scene onwards. It’s actually quite gorey for a Hammer film (many a throat is graphically ripped out) but it gets more mileage from its mysterious atmosphere (aided by a strong score from Tristram Cary [QUATERMASS AND THE PIT and THE LADYKILLERS]) than its bloodletting.  

Holt seems to be the first director to tackle the subject of The Mummy who gets --at least on some level-- that there’s something to this concept beyond “eeew, it’s dead, and it’s trying to grab me!” which is good, because whatever its flaws (and they are myriad) Jewel of the Seven Stars is definitely a story which is grappling with a lot of anxieties about identity that have nothing to do with marauding ghouls. We’ll delve a little more deeply into the novel in my forthcoming book-length “A Cultural Anthropology of Mummy Fiction,” but for now suffice to say it’s a novel deeply soaked in the anxieties of early 20th-century social upheaval and colonialist angst. The Mummy, at its most obvious symbolic level, is a revenge of the natives against their oppressors; I think it little coincidence that Lot No. 249 was written about ten years into the British armed occupation of Egypt, and Jewel of the Seven Stars about ten years after that.

But while the earlier work is somewhat more literal in its threat of bodily harm done to invaders, Seven Stars is something more existential, a fear that somehow while the colonized may appear comatose, they might just be quietly conspiring to steal our very soul. A rational fear? Of course not, but fears rarely are. I doubt Stoker was ahead of his time enough to realize it, but surely this was the deep, vague paranoia that inevitably comes with rationalizing your way into doing something that you know, on some fundamental level, is as wrong as could be. It’s a paranoid nightmare, but maybe on some level it’s also kind of a comforting fantasy to see the arrogant British getting exactly what’s coming to them, courtesy of a potent symbol of the ancient greatness of a now-oppressed people. And, of course, it serves as a perfect victim-blaming rationale to continue that oppression. It’s egomania delicately balanced with deep-seated self-doubt; the consuming insecurity behind all controlling bullies. Curiously, and perhaps tellingly, Seven Stars contains a chapter --deleted in later editions-- which makes explicit a detail which is almost always studiously ignored by supernatural horror writers: if Queen Tera does manage to outfox the English and use her magic to reincarnate, it doesn’t just mean the English lose, it means they’re wrong. About everything, about their most fundamental assumptions about the universe and their place in it. Most obviously about God -- their conception of Christianity certainly would not allow for ancient God-Queens stealing the bodies of young virgins-- but even more so, about the inherent superiority of their culture and moral worldview. It’s this existential dread about identity which underlies the more traditional possession elements of the novel, and makes it unique and provocative in a way the somewhat turgid narrative doesn’t even come close to.

Part of its unique strangeness also comes from its unusually (for 1971) bold editing, as you can see here (this is actually two scenes spliced together in the trailer, but the individual cuts are illustrative of the overall style, at least in its most aggressive scenes)

By the premiere of BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB in 1971, things were a little different -- the colonial days were well and truly over, and the days of multiculturalism (or at least less overt racism) were arriving. But there’s still the ghost of that identity anxiety which haunts the script. Writer Christopher Wicking (MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE, TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER) somewhat craftily universalizes the lingering doubts Stoker’s characters had in the absolute correctness of their beliefs, to go beyond the cultural into the philosophical. “Tera is far beyond the laws and dogma of her time -- and of ours!” the villainous Corbeck says. “Beyond good and evil?” asks Margaret. “Love, hate. She’s a law beyond good and evil, and if we could find out how far beyond… how much we can learn.” There’s a certain moral horror there, a sudden, gut-wrenching shift that occurs when the stable ground suddenly and jarringly moves beneath you, destroying your illusions of a constant, comforting reality. The characters can hardly deny that maybe this five-thousand-year-old magical spirit might know better than they do. Who are they to call her “evil” when her understanding of the universe is clearly so much more profound than theirs? No wonder no one seems much able or willing to resist her!

Not that I’m trying to imply BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB is exactly philosophical or that it has a message or anything. Just that at least on some nebulous poetic level, the filmmakers here seem to place the horror somewhere other than simply the throat-ripping ghost jackals (though they gamely include those, too). It’s what gives the whole enterprise the dreamy, unhinged quality it exudes with a surprising, but somewhat implacable, potency. Sometimes its overt  --as in the film’s arguable standout sequence, a frenetically edited and masterfully filmed death in a screaming madhouse-- but other times it’s more subtle, like the skin-crawling voyeurism of sleeping Margaret being surreptitiously watched from across the street by an unknown man. Although their boundary-pushing sex and gore were the catalyst that pushed Hammer to huge popular appeal, I’m inclined to think this fairly late entry is one of the purest iterations of their best impulses. It’s got the boobs and blood you want, but it’s more focused on the eerie gothic atmosphere you need, which is especially remarkable in that it’s a rare modern-set Hammer film.

It’s also almost unbelievable that it came out this well when you realize what a troubled production this one underwent. Production began with reliable old Peter Cushing in the lead role as Fuchs (it would have been his second go-round with a “Mummy,” after starring in Hammer’s 1959 film THE MUMMY); after only a day or two of shooting, however, his wife had taken ill and he had to leave the set. Ten days later she was dead, and an inconsolable Cushing was unable to return to the film (by his next starring role in 1972, his grief had taken such a physical toll on him that he had to be recast from “father” to “grandfather” of an actress only three years younger than Leon was here). Production resumed with Keir in his role, but was thrown off-track again by the untimely death of director Holt, who suffered an on-set of a heart attack, literally collapsing into the arms of actor Audrey Morris (A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, LISZTOMANIA). Holt died five weeks into a six-week shoot, and the film was finished by stalwart Hammer producer and sometimes-director Michael Carreras, who had already directed the tepid CURSE OF THE MUMMY’S TOMB. Carreras is no one’s idea of a classic director (though his oft-overlooked 1963 gimmick killer British giallo MANIAC is actually pretty good) but maybe Queen Tera got to him or something, because he really stepped up his game for this one, even apparently directing the film’s best sequence, the frenzied madhouse murder.

A still from Cushing's one day on-set. Keir is perfectly fine, but obviously this would have been better.

With a production backstory like that --plus a meager budget of around £200,000 (roughly $2,500,000 dollars today) and a punishing six-week shoot-- it’s pretty miraculous the movie is any damn good at all. It’s not without its problems, of course -- the cast is professional but hardly elevates the material, everything’s a bit overlit, and, more troublingly, the climax itself is clumsily edited and baffling in a less fun way the the rest of the film -- but shit, for a fourth sequel in a series with no previous films which could properly be called “good,” and all that far too late in Hammer’s life for us to reasonably expect anything legitimately worthwhile (DRACULA AD: 1972, possibly the studio’s artistic nadir, would follow the next year)... this is vastly better than it would be at all sane to hope for. It’s one of Hammer’s strangest and most intriguingly nightmarish exercises, but with just enough cheeky fun to keep from being entirely stodgy (they even name the extraneous boyfriend “Tod Browning” -- perhaps the very first instance of a horror character named in tribute to a beloved genre director, a trend which would eventually become inescapable?).

Aside from THE AWAKENING, Jewel of the Seven Stars would be adapted twice more: by Fred Olen Ray as THE TOMB in 1986 (though the fact that the fifth-billed character is “Stripper” suggests that it might be a somewhat loose adaptation) and in 1998 under the inexplicable title BRAM STOKER’S LEGEND OF THE MUMMY starring… Louis Gossett Jr?? I’m just going to go out on a limb here and say that even though I haven’t seen either of those, this is definitively the best film adaptation. It took more than 70 years from the first cinematic Mummy movie, and they even had to lose the title character to pull it off, but for one brief, glorious second, Hammer actually did the impossible and made a pretty durn good movie with the word “Mummy” in its title. The world should have probably gotten together and agreed to let the concept slip away into the abyss on a high note, but you know how these guys are, they never learn. The mummies keep getting older, we stay the same age.

* Much to Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale’s happiness, but to my great annoyance. I get that his original Quatermass is a more classic British weenie, but Donlevy’s abrasive, hard-nosed American take on the character is far and away the most interesting thing about the first two movies. Sensitive, blue-eyed Keir is a fine actor, but a bit more predictable.

** Lest you think it’s just me being pervy here, even the old fuddy-duddys over at Turner Classic Movies use the phrase “admirably ample bosom” in the first sentence of their plot description. At least I waited til you’d eaten your vegetables in the form of painstaking historical context.

COMPENDIUM OF HAMMER'S MUMMY CYCLE:
1959: THE MUMMY
1964: CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB
1967: THE MUMMY'S SHROUD
1971: BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• TAGLINE: A Severed Hand Beckons From An Open Grave!
• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Yes, of Bram Stoker's Jewel of the Seven Stars.
• SEQUEL: Final of four loose sequels which are not really related to each other.
• REMAKE: The novel was adapted into at least three more films, though they're not direct remakes.
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: England
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: I don't know that Holt directed enough films to qualify as beloved. Keir was in a couple Hammer movies, but I dunno.
• BOOBIES: They show absolutely every single inch of flesh other than the nipple.
• MULLETS: None
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Hand lopped off, throat ripped out.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: No
• THE UNDEAD: Mummy! (?)
• POSSESSION: Yes, it's primarily a possession movie.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): No
• EVIL CULT: It seems like Tera had some pretty unorthodox religious ideas even for her time, so I'll say yes in this case. Although, does the fact that she turns out to be completely correct kinda negate the whole "cult" thing?
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: Yes!
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Ancient Egyptian Valerie Leon into Modern Day Valerie Leon. She may also turn into a Jackal or Leopard or something, it's a little vague.
• VOYEURISM: Yes, Corbeck is spying on Margaret from the house across the street.
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Medium, a major release, but from the latter days of Hammer.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: No matter how many bold artistic decisions you make, people are mostly just going to remember the boobs.
• TITLE ACCURACY: While maaaybe technically correct in the loosest possible sense of the words "mummy" "blood" and "tomb," I think it's a little too misleading to completely vindicate. Call it 80%
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.

Margaret/Tera talks with a female archaeologist about herself.