Taste The Blood Of Dracula

 

Taste The Blood Of Dracula (1970)

Dir. Peter Sasdy

Written by Anthony Hinds (under the named “John Elder” and theoretically based on one character created by Bram Stoker

Starring Christopher Lee, Linda Hayden, Geoffrey Keen, John Carson, Pater Sallis

There are only so many vintage Hammer Studios movies, and since I've now seen the vast majority of them, I've been trying to parcel out the DRACULAs once a year to make them last. In this way, I hope to gradually, over many years, convince myself that Hammer movies were actually never that good to begin with and it's no big deal that there aren't any more new ones, because the thing the series is perhaps most known for is perfectly charting the arc of Hammer’s rise and fall, from the bold highs in the late 50’s to the dismal, misguided wretchedness of its final years before it closed its doors for good* following its final film production in 1979.

We're not there yet, though. TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA is definitely well past the point of diminishing returns for the franchise, but not a complete waste yet. That point is on the horizon, though. You can feel them getting a little desperate already. For starters, this one (technically the fifth Hammer DRACULA film, but who's counting?) feels decidedly more contemporary than its predecessors, with some handheld camera, a little hip camera experimentation (there's a "heartbeat" effect where the camera zooms in and out), and some swinging youth culture stuff (a blue-hair punk chick who dances with a snake in a exotic boudoir run by a mincing gay guy). It's not ruinously bad yet, but you can certainly see the hopeless attempt to chase the youth market into whatever the head honchos at Hammer believed to be the latest trend was at the moment. And you can certainly see it already not working. That has an immediate deleterious effect, if only a small one in this case: the hipper it's attempting to be, the less gothic and atmospheric it is, and the result is a film quite a bit blander-looking than the previous entries, and little able to, or interested in, conjuring any real striking images.

A lack of luxurious gothic atmosphere isn’t necessarily a death blow, but if you were counting on a finely-honed unshakably gripping plot to save it, well, I appreciate your optimism this late in the game, but at some point optimism becomes denial. So it is no surprise that the story again feels pretty blatantly slapdash. It takes way too long to get going (Dracula doesn't appear until 45 minutes in, absent the recycled footage from the end of DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE that opens the thing) and if you want to actually see Dracula DO stuff, ho ho, yeah, by this point Lee wasn't going to do anything more strenuous than stand there looking haughty and vaguely annoyed. But at least there's a fresh hook this time: three venal businessmen (Goeffrey Keen [Bond's boss 1977-1987], Pater Sallis [The voice of Wallace in Wallace and Gromit[!!]], John Carson [PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES]), sold on a HELLRAISER-type come-on that reviving Dracula is the ultimate rush, do in fact revive him only to discover that not only do they not have raging hard-ons as promised, but now there's a killer vampire (Dracula) after them (this is the kind of thing we used to have to deal with all the time before Viagra). So then they have to cover their tracks, unaware that Drac is stalking them and recruiting their teenage daughters (most notably Linda Hayden, BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW, THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL) to use against them.

This premise at least has the spice of being vaguely sleazy and disreputable (there's a whorehouse visit early on which was probably pretty scandalous for the time, particularly the blue-haired snake-dancer and the openly gay-coded "madam," though today it just looks rather cheap and desperate) but the problem is that the three businessmen never really emerge as interesting characters. Sure, their motive is clear enough: when the simple, old-fashioned transgressive pleasure of hanging out in an opulent cathouse become stale, they turn for advice to instigator Lord Courtley (Ralph Bates, LUST FOR A VAMPIRE), a man even more more debauched than themselves. They're ready for headier fare, and think he might be able to suggest some (his immediate go-to is "let's revive Dracula!' and they immediately see the wisdom in this). Fair enough, but these dudes just never seem perverse enough to get so easily sold on this plan. They go from sitting around (fully clothed) with half-nude women to wanting to drink human blood and sell their soul to Satan within the course of a supper, and I just don’t quite buy it. Particularly since Bates is not exactly an irresistibly seductive salesman; more like the smuggest, richest D&D nerd you've ever met. Apparently the original plan was to let poor whiny Christopher Lee off the hook for this one, and just have Bates turn into a vampire and continue the series. This would make a lot more sense narratively, since as it stands it’s rather odd that Courtley shows up to initiate this boondoogle and then vanishes from the plot and then for some reason Dracula shows up to get revenge for him, even though they’ve never met. But Bates is simply grating and foppish – a character you definitely hate, but not in a fun way—so I, for one, am glad they chickened out and dragged Lee back for yet another miserable outing (and, presumably, yet another addition on his house).  

Anyway, the central premise with the three business pervs just never quite adds up. We either needed to understand the utter depths of these men's corruption, or we needed to see some kind of folly which pushes them further than they'd ordinarily be willing to go -- them egging each other on or something. Having them be just regular gross old dudes who are definitely assholes but probably not really villains feels like a missed opportunity to leverage some actual drama out of this scenario; they feel purely like a plot device, rather than actual characters who behave in a way we understand and which has its own internally compelling drama. They (SPOILERS) don't even die in a dramatically meaningful order -- the guy we start with, who seems like the ringleader, dies first, leaving us with his far-less-developed companions, who then also die without really developing in any way. It's a workable setup, but it never quite gets around to working, because we never really get a good sense of who these dumbasses are. They could be filthy villains who get what’s coming to them, or they could be sympathetic, flawed old fools who must pay a steep price for their moral transgressions; either one would work, but the movie doesn’t settle on either course, and consequently just leaves any sense of narrative drama sitting there on the table, untouched.

Which is a problem, because they're as close as we're going to get to any kind of main characters, leaving a big hole where the film’s conflict should be. Lee is in maybe 15 minutes of footage total, and the standard-issue Hammer Pretty White Boys don't even know what's going on until the very end (even though the lead HPWB, Paul,** played by Anthony Corlan, is certainly less bland and more pretty than most. Woah, he plays one of the Nazis in RAIDERS!), so although they're on hand to save the day (since Hammer was certainly not going to let the women save themselves) they're basically nonentities. The young ladies fare better (and Hayden is at least a little spunky and distinct-looking, with her sad eyes and soft features); getting recruited to do most of Dracula's dirty work like a satanic Charlie's Angels looks like a fun gig, but of course they don't exactly have an arc either. I do kind of like the tragic dimension of their desire to please an openly disinterested "Master," which plays into the climax at least a little and definitely illustrates just what a dick Dracula is. But it's pretty half-formed, another idea -- like the pervert business guys-- which feels like it could have made for an interesting dramatic core had the script decided to delve into it a little rather than haul it out strictly as a plot device.

That all leaves TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA altogether too shapeless and unfocused to hit like it ought to, though by the end it gets vicious and nihilistic enough (SPOILERS - nearly everyone dies; no redemption for these pervy business dudes I guess!) that it works up a little bit of spunk. But just when it seems like it’s kicking in, it suffers another disappointing anti-climax, which really seems to be a theme with this series, perhaps in an attempt to be faithful to the weird anticlimax of the original Dracula novel.*** (SPOILERS AHEAD) Sure, they probably weren't going to top the Count’s impalement-by-cross from the last movie, but the way he dies THIS time (imagines a church, passes out and dies all by himself, without anyone doing anything) is probably his second-lamest death, after that time he just slipped on the ice and drowned. This is, like, the fourth time he's died like a chump seemingly within hours of being laboriously revived. Just how bad can he really be?

Oh yeah, I guess we saw with that lame Lord Courtley character just how lame the villains in this universe are capable of being, so maybe we should count our blessings that at least it’s still Christopher Lee taking the fall. TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (which, I should say, is a surprisingly accurate title; that’s how they revive the bastard!) isn’t nearly the bottom of the barrel, although it may well be the tipping point where the bad starts to outweigh the good. See you next year when we discover how much worse we can get!

RIPPER REPORT: Michael Ripper plays a pretty funny police inspector who does not seem particularly motivated to, you know, inspect anything, despite his condescending demeanor. Good stuff!

*Although I enjoy seeing the name on-screen again, the 2010’s Hammer revival is obviously not the same thing, though it produced at least a few worthy horror flicks.

 

** Weird that this is the second DRACULA in a row to feature a Hammer Pretty White Boy named Paul. Is this supposed to be the same character? I see no evidence that this is the case, but I also don’t see how writer Anthony Hinds (as “John Elder”) could have missed the fact that he gave the protagonist in both films –just two years apart!—the same name! Strange stuff.

 

*** Though the fact that Hammer improves upon that climax immeasurably in HORROR OF DRACULA makes it clear they’re capable of doing better when they bother to try.

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)

Dracula Has Risen From the Grave

Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968)

Dir. Freddie Francis

Written by Anthony Hinds, using the name "John Elder"

Starring Chirstopher Lee, Rupert Davies, Veronica Carlson, Barbara Ewing

 

The bad news first: DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE --Hammer's third sequel to their studio-defining 1958 DRACULA (aka HORROR OF DRACULA), second with Christopher Lee, and second which Lee openly did not want to be a part of-- is broadly more interested in the character drama than the horror. That is a highly questionable decision for a movie called DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE to make, and probably reason enough for most folks to just ignore it entirely and focus on genre movies that would actually like to, you know, do genre movie stuff.

 

The good news, though, is that for those who stick around, that character drama is surprisingly tolerable. Which is not to say that it’s an overwhelming good story; or even much of a story at all: this time Dracula gets revived after a uptight Monsignor (Rupert Davies, WITCHFINDER GENERAL, CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTER, winner or the inaugural Pipe Smoker Of The Year Award [yes, really]) decides that even though Dracula is already dead (having drowned like a chump at the end of DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS) he should not leave well enough alone and instead should march up to Dracula's Castle and exorcise it. In the process, a dorky local priest (Ewan Hooper, KINKY BOOTS) manages to fall down and hit his head and the blood flows into a nearby body of water (implied in the last movie to be far from Dracula's Castle, but no good ever came of trying to parse the continuity between these movies) which happens to be the very short-term resting place of our titular character, so of course that brings Drac right back, to get up to his old tricks. And if those old tricks (i.e., visiting the bedrooms of virginal maidens to gradually vampirize them) happen to coincide with getting revenge on the Monsignor who exorcised his castle (even if he did revive the Count in the process) because the victim is the old codger's niece, well, so much the better. 

The odd thing is, although that is the plot you'd have to summarize if you were, say, trying to write a review of DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM HIS GRAVE, it doesn't really accurately describe the movie. All that business with Dracula and the Monsignor and the nocturnal visits and all that makes up a relatively small portion of the runtime. Mostly, the movie chronicles the lives of various denizens of a local inn, one of whom (a fellow named Paul, played by Barry Andrews, BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW) happens to be the boyfriend of said virginal Monsignor's niece. They all notice some strange goings-on, and eventually begin to fall prey to Dracula's depredations, but a lot of the time is simply spent hanging out at the workplace, or dealing with the tension caused by the uptight Monsignor's extreme displeasure at the prospect of having his niece date anyone, least of all a --gasp-- hunky atheist like our handsome generic white boy™ Paul. 

As I mentioned above, you'd have every right to doubt that this focus would prove as fruitful as doing something crazy like centering your movie with DRACULA in the title around, you know, Dracula. But it turns out to be a surprisingly charming time. In fact, basically every major role is more interesting and better played than you’d have any right to expect. The script, by Anthony Hinds (alias: John Elder, THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF, THE REPTILE, and the next two DRACULA films, replacing previous series scribe Jimmy Sangster, whose script had so displeased Lee last time around) contributes to this by making each character and their corresponding web of relationships more complex and multi-dimensional than they need to be, and the actors across the board respond by giving spirited, lively performances. OK, so the main victim girl (Veronica Carlson, far better in FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED) is pretty boring, another naive, virginal damsel, so innocent she sleeps with a doll. But that’s to be expected; when was the last time Hammer had a young male lead who seems as vivacious as Andrews makes Paul, or who looked kind of like Roger Daltrey? Rarely if ever. And he's surrounded by a whole crew of able character actors who do their part to make these stock types feel distinct. I'm particularly taken with Zena (Barbara Ewing, TORTURE GARDEN, MUTE, EYE OF THE NEEDLE), Paul's fellow bar-worker, a bawdy, worldly lady with her own unrequited affection for the young man, who brings a world-weary melancholy to her poor doomed role. But honestly everyone is doing good work; even the stodgy old Monsignor --who has a complex, not-quite-romantic relationship with his widowed sister-in-law-- proves to be a little more interesting and worth spending time with than you'd suppose.      

In fact, the only person who doesn’t seem to be trying very hard is Christopher Lee, who is not really bothering to hide how much he doesn’t care by this point. He speaks again, after his controversial mute turn in the previous film... but it’s probably only four or five unimportant lines, and he’d be better off staying quiet. They also have this dumb effect where they make his eyes all bloodshot, which just makes him look high and distracts from Lee’s naturally cold, imperious gaze. It's hard to say if the script gives him short shrift, or if Lee was being such a baby about returning to the role that they just tried to write a movie around him doing as little as possible, but the end result is that he is almost comically inactive here. He simply doesn’t do that much, and the stuff he does is just recycled from the last couple films (basically, just menacingly visit an innocent virgin in her bedroom a few times). But at least director Freddie Francis (TALES FROM THE CRYPT, TROG) knows how to shoot him so he looks cool and imposing; even a totally coasting Lee can hardly look otherwise, but having the movie shoot him like a total boss certainly helps make the case that Dracula is in some way important to this Dracula movie. And he does get a real hum-dinger of a death, almost certainly the best he's ever going to get, and a real significant upgrade from the lame watery demise he met last time. And again, Francis (who had won an Oscar for best Cinematography back in 1960 for SONS AND LOVERS, and would win another for GLORY in 1989, though he's working as director in this case with Arthur Grant [QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED] behind the camera) gives it the epic framing it deserves.In fact, it’s one of the nicest-looking Hammer pictures, full of cool sets and some of the most intense abstract lighting I’ve ever seen in a British movie, coming within shooting distance of what Bava was up to in Italy around the time he was making KILL BABY KILL and THE WHIP AND THE BODY. Francis and Grant also use some kind of odd prismatic lens which creates an iris effect, with the edges of the screen glowing red and orange. It’s a cool effect which might benefit from a little more restraint than is shown here, but when it works it’s pretty baller. 

The ultimate result is a movie which is more amiable than terrifying, and more handsome than consequential, but that's still enough to qualify as a pleasant surprise, given that this is the third sequel to a movie which arguably didn't need any sequels. It does not make one particularly confident that this series should continue for another five more entries, but for those who appreciate that special Hammer vibe, it's a tolerable, if very inessential, way to spend 90 minutes. I mean, Michael Ripper plays a drunken innkeeper, for heaven's sake. And who could resist that poster?

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)

The Vampire Lovers

 

The Vampire Lovers (1970)

Dir. Roy Ward Baker

Written by Tudor Gates, "adapted by" Harry Fine, Tudor Gates, Michael Style, from the novella by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Starring Ingrid Pitt, Madeline Smith, Kate O’Mara, Peter Cushing

 

I threw this on thinking I was going to be getting some kind of Jean Rollin-style Euro-sleaze thing. Turns out to have a marginally more prestigious pedigree: it's actually an AIP/ Hammer co-production, with a role for Peter Cushing, no less!

 

In retrospect, I actually knew all this; though I didn’t immediately recognize the somewhat generic title, I was already aware of Hammer’s so-called “Karnstein trilogy,” which has the reputation as marking the point where a floundering Hammer, unable to compete with the boundary-pushing violence of the horror imports from Italy and America, shifted its business model from producing classy gothic horror to tawdry softcore with a thin veneer of classy gothic horror. 

 

Having seen VAMPIRE LOVERS, the first of that trilogy, I can’t exactly take issue with that assessment. Nonetheless, the veneer of classy gothic horror is not quite as pro forma as I had assumed, nor is the tawdry softcore quite so vapid. I knew the trilogy was said to be based upon J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 vampire novella Carmilla, an early bit of vampire fiction which predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by a full 26 years.* No surprise there; much of Hammer’s classic catalog is based on venerable horror literature, at least in theory. What I had not expected is that this first film, at any rate, is actually a surprisingly faithful adaptation, retaining most of the novella’s structure and characters, and acceding to the hoped-for tawdry sex angle only by drawing the already-present lesbian subtext from Le Fanu’s novella ever slightly further into the explicit forefront, about as far as you possibly could in 1970 (which is to say they take their tops off a few times, mostly in a sexy but not directly sexual way). If it’s tawdry --and it is tawdry-- it’s because the source material, an unimpeachably classic bit of Victorian literature, is perfectly tawdry in its own right. (I’m guessing the sequels are of a decidedly less faithful tenor, because VAMPIRE LOVERS covers the entire plot, and doesn’t leave a whole lot of loose ends to sequelize).

 

 

Carmilla is also, I should say, much more than a simple bit of repressed Victorian sublimated erotica; it is a compelling and creepy little yarn, showcasing Le Fanu’s characteristic gift for slow-building tension and uncanny atmosphere. Impressively, THE VAMPIRE LOVERS also marshals these qualities, though with a slightly different bent than the source material, and, I must concede, a rather less sublimated focus on the erotica. Le Fanu’s plot is simple enough: Carmilla (Ingrid Pitt, COUNTESS DRACULA, THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD), a wan and eccentric young woman, arrives at the estate of a wealthy Austrian family and becomes a long-term houseguest, much to the delight of Laura, the lonely teenage daughter of the family. The two women bond immediately, but as Laura’s health declines, some of the men around her begin to suspect that Carmilla may be the source of the problem, eventually discovering the truth about her supernatural nature. Amazingly, VAMPIRE LOVERS has a nearly identical plot, differing only in a few details --including, inexplicably, changing “Laura” to “Emma” (Madeline Smith, THEATER OF BLOOD, FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL)—but otherwise following the same basic arc.

 

This structure means that the story is primarily a slow-burn depiction of what today we would probably call a toxic relationship, as one woman literally sucks the life out of the other. Much of the novella is essentially a relationship drama with sinister implications, which makes for an unusually fit for Hammer, whose movies tended to be action-oriented, male-dominated affairs. Little surprise, then, that the main relationship is something of a wash. Madeline Smith’s wide-eyed innocence is so overblown that she starts to seem like she might be more than a little dense, and Ingrid Pitt seems to be leaning more on hotness and the implicit scandalousness of the material than crafting any kind of specific personality. 

 

Surprisingly, though, the vagueness of the relationship ostensibly at the center of this story doesn’t turn out to be as crippling as you might assume. In fact, despite the obvious tawdry appeal of illicit lesbian seduction, the movie is built around a different conflict. Though we enter the story more or less from Emma’s point-of-view, as her health declines the movie gradually shifts perspectives, and Pitt really starts to come into her own as a compelling anti-hero. By the halfway point, in fact, Emma has more or less entirely ceased to be an active character, and the crux of the drama has refocused around whether an increasingly besieged Carmilla will be able to get away with it. She’s a manipulative villain, but she’s also the most charismatic, active, and intriguing character by an order of magnitude, and as she gradually becomes the indisputable protagonist, we start to, if not side with her, at least invest emotionally in the outcome of her efforts.

 

 Pitt and Smith have very little chemistry together, and Smith is such a nonentity it’s hard to understand why Carmilla is so into her (besides the tits, obviously). But this too turns out to matter less than it should, because ultimately THE VAMPIRE LOVERS isn’t the story of a relationship so much as an obsession. Whatever Carmilla sees in her victim, we’re not privy to it, and --after all-- she’s an ageless supernatural being, and maybe it’s actually more interesting that we can’t entirely understand her motives. An unsourced bit of IMDB trivia, in fact, claims that Pitt said she played the role as asexual, which I can actually sort of believe; whatever she is feeling, it is something not quite so human as simple erotic desire.** But even if we don’t understand specifically what motivates her, we can certainly see that Carmilla’s fixation is genuine; in her own twisted way, she does love her victim, and can’t abandon her even to save her own life. Pitt conveys all this with an underplayed sensitivity that’s surprisingly affecting. She’s an interesting character, flinty and merciless but also with the touch of secret vulnerability that inevitably comes from needing someone. There’s a winning resoluteness in her performance which helps to put us on her side, and that comes through first; she exudes a steely, confident power in her sure-footed canniness and her willingness to lie, murder, and seduce her way to staying by her victim’s bedside. But that strength is tempered by a suppressed sadness, too.*** Hers is a lonely life, and Pitt makes you feel both her desperation for connection, and the impossibility of that dream.

 

These qualities come to a startlingly effective head in her relationship with Emma’s governess, Mademoiselle Perrodot (the superb Kate O’Mara, CORRUPTION, THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN), a surprisingly rich character in her own right. She is Carmilla’s greatest adversary, deeply suspicious of the other woman’s motives and instinctively ready to foil her machinations. Until, that is, Carmilla –somewhat in desperation-- turns her seductive powers on her. And, suddenly, the dam bursts, and Perrodot’s own desperate, vulnerable desire pours out, allowing her to be completely subsumed by the other woman. She has not, I think, been suspicious of Carmilla; she has been jealous of her. O’Mara, utterly independent of the rather superficial script (from, uh, the writer of BARBARELLA) paints a vivid portrait of a deeply closeted lesbian, whose iron-clad self control –born of the vital necessity of hiding her true self—is both the source of her considerable power (she is the only character who manages to mount a credible challenge to Carmilla) and her greatest weakness. While she is redirecting her suppressed desire, she is canny, calculating, a worthy adversary.  Shown even a glimpse of affection, though, and her strident opposition crumbles to nothing and she is entirely, desperately, pathetically in Carmilla’s thrall. Once her defenses waver for even a moment, there is no going back, and she cares about nothing but preserving, through any means necessary, this one sliver of expression of her true self, this one flicker of human contact which is not filtered through self-protective artifice.

 

The irony, though unstated, is absolutely palpable: here is a woman who, unlike the prattling, childlike Emma, legitimately desires Carmilla, and, more to the point, seems like a worthy partner, an equal, perhaps even a kindred spirit, who knows all too well both the isolating, calcifying strain of living a lie, and the disciplined, unsentimental power it can produce. And yet, Carmilla does not want her; she is wholly devoted to the weak-willed Emma, desirous only of completing her morbid downward spiral. Despite her own aching loneliness, Carmilla is completely incapable of seeing Perrodot’s eager devotion as anything but a tool, to be manipulated for her own ends. Their final scene together is emotionally complex and genuinely a little heartbreaking, a descriptor associated with the Hammer oeuvre very rarely indeed. Most of the turbulent emotional content comes from the performances –O’Mara’s wrenching, desperate desire, and Pitt’s coldly calculating demeanor softened only by a hint of regret in her eyes, all the evidence we need to see that she understands as well as we do that she is spurning a chance for a real connection in favor of something more ethereal that she is utterly powerless to resist—but it’s worth noting that Ms. Perrodot and her subplot are entirely a creation of the film, with no obvious parallel in the original novella. It’s also the most explicitly lesbian aspect of the film, and one might be tempted to imagine it’s included merely for titillation, except that we have a interesting point of comparison: there is a subplot about Carmilla’s seduction of the male butler (Harvey Hall, minor roles in all three Karnstein films) which is superficially almost identical, but utterly lacking in the same fraught emotional landscape. Men, in the world of THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, are simple creatures, motivated by simple emotions – lust, anger, placidity. They may prevail in the end (it’s a Hammer movie, so yeah, the men are eventually going to save the day) but that doesn’t mean they understand.

 

I do not, of course, mean to imply that THE VAMPIRE LOVERS is some masterpiece of sensitively observed psychodrama. It’s a Hammer film, and not even one of the more handsomely appointed ones (I never thought much of director Roy Ward Baker [ASYLUM, THE VAULT OF HORROR], who tends to make dull, flat-looking movies with too much turgid chit-chat), and it mostly offers everything you associate with that pedigree; dry ice around gothic castle sets, bright red blood, heaving bosoms, a very committed Peter Cushing performance in a role which doesn’t necessarily turn out to be very interesting, a blandly handsome young man named “Carl” (Jon Finch, Hitchcock’s FRENZY [!]). But there’s enough going on under the surface here to convince me that someone –be that Baker, or screenwriter Tudor Gates (who wrote all three of the “Karnstein trilogy”), or just the actresses themselves—were not completely unaware of the more complex emotional possibilities lurking within the exploitation-ready story.

 

 “This film was given an R rating by the Motion Picture Association of America due to the vampire bites inflicted on the women's bosoms,” says IMDB, matter-of-factly, which is by itself a full-throated endorsement of the artistic heroism of the film’s creators. That was all it needed, and all I was expecting. That the film also managed to produce one of the very few interesting female characters in the entire Hammer canon was most decidedly not expected, but by the end of the runtime, I confess that I was pondering Carmilla’s mysterious inner life more than her propensity for bosom-biting. I very much doubt that trend will continue with the sequels (LUST OF A VAMPIRE, TWINS OF EVIL – neither of which feature Pitt, who would go on to COUNTESS DRACULA for Hammer, but apparently declined an offer to return as Carmilla), but at least here, briefly, something a little more interesting was able to harmoniously co-exist with the requisite sleaze.

 

 

*Though even setting aside folklore, the vampire had been a consistent character in European fiction since Polidori’s The Vampyre in 1819, though Carmilla has been cited as enormously influential in its own right, particular upon Dracula. Also, while I have you down here, I should mention that Carmilla was first serialized in the literary magazine The Dark Blue starting in 1871, and first published in book form as part of Le Fanu’s collection In A Glass Darkly in 1872, hence various sources differing between 1871 and 1872 as the publishing date.

** The same trivia also proffers: “The director claimed that, after reading the novella Carmilla twice, he didn't get a sense of any lesbian content.” Which, if true, means that he and Jack Sholder from NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2 really need to hang out sometime. But if he really missed the lesbian “subtext” of the book, I feel quite confident that his producers enlightened him to it with some gusto.

*** I’m not sure where else to say this --or even if I should say this in the context we find ourselves in here—but Pitt, born Ingoushka Petrov, was a Holocaust survivor (she was imprisoned at Stutthof concentration camp, where ~65,000 of the 110,000 people who passed through it during the course of the war perished). I don’t feel comfortable speculating whether or not she brought that perspective to this trashy lesbian vampire character, but she does seem to have been pretty open about her wartime experience; in 2011, she was part of a short animated film –supervised by Bill Plympton, no less!—which dramatized her recollection.

 

What, you really though I was gonna be able to resist sneaking a Peter Cushing pic in here?

 

 CHAINSAWNUKAH 2020 CHECKLIST!

The Man Who Queue Too Much

 

TAGLINE	IF YOU DARE… taste the deadly passion of the BLOOD NYMPHS! Good advice.
TITLE ACCURACY	Strictly speaking, there’s a number of grammatical ways to interprepret that title. If we interpret it as multiple vampires who are lovers, it’s not very accurate, as we see only one during the course of the film. If it’s meant to refer to multiple lovers of vampires, that makes a little more sense, but probably most accurately refers to the Hammer execs who couldn’t let their flagship monster die.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla.
SEQUEL?	Followed by two extremely loose sequels which only seem to share a vague vampire-related premise and the name Karnstein.
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	England
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Vampires!
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	No
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Peter Cushing, and to a lesser degree probably Pitt and Roy Ward Baker, and I suppose Le Fanu, who remains well-respected among aficionados of Victorian horror lit, among whom I happily count myself.
NUDITY?	Quite a bit of toplessness from most of the female cast members.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Carmilla’s depredations certainly qualify, though they contrast starkly with the typical sleazy male rape shit that they usually cram into this sort of thing. #Feminism?
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Although there’s not much of a puppet or anything, Carmilla does turn into a giant cat.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No, just vamps
POSSESSION?	Not really, although there is maybe some mild suggestion that Emma is hypnotize or something
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Nah
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Carmilla is implied to transform into a cat, although we don’t really see it
VOYEURISM?	Nothing notable
MORAL OF THE STORY	Houseguests, like fish, will begin to seduce your daughters and drain them of blood after three days