Blood Of The Vampire

Blood of the Vampire (1958)

Dir. Henry Cass

Written by Jimmy Sangster

Starring Vincent Ball, Donald Wolfit, Barbara Shelley, Victor Maddern

            In “Transylvania, 1874,” as the opening credits dubiously explain, “The most loathsome scourge ever to afflict the earth was that of the vampire. Nourishing itself on warm living blood, the only known method of ending a vampire’s reign of terror was to drive a wooden stake through its heart.” This little bit of trivia seems extremely pertinent almost immediately, as the movie opens with a stake driven through a shroud-wrapped body by a burly masked man, while a priest or authority figure or something looks on approvingly. And later, when some wall-eyed hunchbacked weirdo (Victor Maddern, CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG) sneaks up to murder the gravediggers and steal the corpse, you would be forgiven for assuming that this movie called BLOOD OF THE VAMPIRE, which is set in Transylvania and begins with a bunch of text about vampires, was about vampires.

            Alas, you’d be wrong. While the most loathsome scourge to ever afflict the earth may well be the vampire, this movie will be dealing with, at most, the second most loathsome scourge ever to afflict the Earth, and to be perfectly honest, considering the small scale and relative local impact, if the source we’re dealing with here is even in the top ten most loathsome ever to afflict the earth, we’ve actually had a pretty easy go of it. I even have my doubts about if it’s the most loathsome scourge to ever afflict Transylvania in 1874, given that all the characters have a weird mix of German, British, and Latin names. Maybe there’s a lesser-known Transylvania in Germany?

Anyway, wherever the scourge may fall in the all-time rankings of loathsomeness, it’s certainly loathsome enough that I’m against it. And the person who’s going to discover it the hard way is one Dr. John Pierre (Vincent Ball, small roles in WHERE EAGLES DARE, A TOWN LIKE ALICE, MURIEL’S WEDDING, along with a lot of TV), a forward-thinking doctor who’s just been tried in “Carlstadt” * for murder, following a failed last-ditch attempt at a blood transfusion on a dying patient. The ignorant locals consider this basically one step down from witchcraft, and when his last-minute attempt to get a respected colleague to corroborate the medical necessity of his actions is strangely answered with condemnation, he’s packed off to the Penal Institute on Comboat (?) Island. This institution, as it turns out, is run by a sinister warden/mad scientist named Callistratus (Donald Wolfit, BECKETT[!], LAWRENCE OF ARABIA [!!]) who happens to have great need of a man with exactly Pierre’s skillset. Pressed into work in Callistratus’ secret basement laboratory, he quickly begins to suspect something sinister is afoot, especially when his fellow prisoners start to mysteriously disappear. OK, not so mysteriously; everyone knows Callistratus is killing them in his diabolical experiments. But can Pierre foil the dastardly villain and clear his name before he, or his devoted fiancé (Barbara Shelley, the original VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED and various Hammer productions) become the next victims of the madman?

1958 was still the very, very dawn of British horror cinema; CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, which touched off the movement, was only a year old, and its follow-up, THE HORROR OF DRACULA, was barely even out of theaters by the time BLOOD OF THE VAMPIRE came calling. But producers and longtime low-budget hustlers Monty Berman and Robert Baker of the also-also-also** ran Brit grindhouse studios Eros Films and Tempean Films (THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS, THE TROLLENBERG TERROR aka THE CRAWLING EYE) already saw something of a formula brewing, and hired FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA scribe Jimmy Sangster pretty much immediately after DRACULA proved that its predecessor’s success was no fluke.

Sangster had only two produced screenplays when DRACULA premiered, but was already in hot demand: he had six produced screenplays in 1958 alone, which might explain why he was running a little low on ideas when he wrote BLOOD OF THE VAMPIRE. I mean, I guess there’s a certain smirking cleverness to the idea that the “vampire” of the title here is not a supernatural bloodsucker, but rather a mad scientist who steals blood for medical transfusions to combat his rare blood disease. That is, however, more a matter of title semantics than a plot point the movie makes much of --or, in fact, comments on at all-- and alas, the movie is otherwise strictly standard mad science fare, with a castle, laboratory, hunchback, etc. In fact, despite the “Vampire” in the title, it differs in no particular from the Hammer FRANKENSTEIN movies that Sangster also wrote (there’s even a hunchback named “Carl”!), with the exception that even the lowest-rent FRANKENSTEIN film had at least some aspirations towards a high concept premise. BLOOD is more of a prison movie, where it matters less exactly that the doctor is up to (just trying to develop a treatment for his own blood disease) than that our hero escapes from him.

And to that end, it’s actually a pretty good story, as far as it goes! The fiendish  Doctor’s machinations are mostly unimaginative, but respectably diabolical (one might even say loathsome!), and our hero’s situation looks suitably hopeless. The script does a perfectly proficient job of methodically establishing the specific obstacles he must overcome to clear his name and defeat the villain, and consistently rolls out new complications to keep things from getting too repetitive. The hero himself is dull as dishwater, but at least the circumstances of the story lend themselves well to a nicely-build prison-escape-thriller. And the cast is proficient enough; Ball isn’t exactly explosively charismatic, but he imparts a prickly sense of contemptuous umbrage upon the character, which at least gives him more definition than the litany of bland pretty boys Hammer insisted on shoehorning into their movies for the next few decades. Wolfit is basically doing a low-level Bela Lugosi impression without the accent, which is fine enough, because after all, he’s quite right, this movie would be better if Bela Lugosi was playing the villain. Interestingly, the two least important characters are the ones who are actively good here: Hammer scream queen Shelley brings vastly more intelligence and agency to her role than is strictly required (Sangster, who does not exactly have a great history of writing meaty female roles, at least gets her directly involved in the action here, and Shelley runs with it every inch as far as the boilerplate damsel-in-distress trope will possibly allow her), and Maddern, through his one real eye, does a surprising and impressive amount of work to instill his non-speaking hunchback sidekick stereotype with some inner life. It’s hard to know what he’s thinking, exactly, and the screenplay offers very little that would help one guess, but it’s definitely clear from his performance that he is thinking, that he’s taking all this in and pondering it.

Indeed, while over the next decade or so Sangster’s scripts and plotting would sometimes get a bit loose (even the next years’ THE MUMMY and BRIDES OF DRACULA struggle with some basic narrative structure), BLOOD OF THE VAMPIRE sports a perfectly sturdy construction. It’s a perfectly fine yarn, told perfectly adequately. And yet, for all that, it packs very little punch compared to its British horror contemporaries. Despite its gothic horror trappings (the “prison” might as well be a castle, it even has a drawbridge, towers, and posh living quarters), it feels much more akin to the mad science films of the 1950s than the burgeoning horror films which would define the 60s and 70s. Partly this comes from the somewhat anachronistic story itself, which is set up in every imaginable way to resemble something like THE DEVIL COMMANDS (1941) or, hell, even ISLAND OF LOST SOULS from 20+ years prior. But a bigger part is the production, led by director Henry Cass (THE GLASS MOUNTAIN), which is every bit as stagy and stodgy as the early Hammer films were vital and audacious. With its lengthy medium shots, drowsy editing, hammy theatricality, and corny under-dressed castle sets, it resembles the low-budget movies of twenty years prior more than their descendants just a few years later. Cass demonstrates not a whit of understanding about why the Hammer films were such a monumental leap forward in modern British filmmaking, and seems perfectly content recycling the same style as the films at the beginning of his career in the late 30’s. Even the addition of color film --Hammer was notorious for using the medium for bright red blood splatter-- makes no difference to a films whose primary palette consists of dirty grays and faded browns.

With a more forward-thinking production and a little more ambition, I think the film could have mustered more bite and been a little better. But ultimately not much better. Bottom line is, although it’s a competently assembled little tale, its most damning flaw is that it utterly lacks in anything remotely exotic or exciting. It’s about as standard as they come, hitting virtually every cliché in the book without building off a single element in any kind of new or imaginative way. Even its mild nods to actual science (the protagonists study blood types and discuss transfusions) were a half-century old by the time the movie came out (though, in fairness, they would have brand new in the movie’s 1880 setting***). Other than the need to crank out a sixth horror script in a single year and to prominently feature the word "vampire" in the title, I can't think of much reason why anyone would have thought this was a tale especially worth telling. It’s fine as far as it goes, but without a little more imagination, “fine” was all it was ever going to be.

*Presumably they mean Karlstadt, Germany, a town about an hour East of Frankfurt, not Carlstadt, New Jersey. There’s also a Carlstadt which is a borough of Dusseldorf, though if that’s what they mean it seems unnecessarily specific. The only other potential contender is the Croatian city of Karlovac, which, apparently, is rendered in German as “Carlstadt.” Either way, none of these are anywhere close to Romania. It’s over 1,500 miles from Karlstadt to Transylvania, which is a 16 hour journey any way you slice it today, by car.

** Standard wisdom is that Hammer > Amicus > Tigon > Tempean > Harry Alan Towers, although there is certainly some variability movie to movie.

*** The opening takes place in 1874, everything else takes place “six years later.” I looked it up to be sure Sangster wasn’t incorporating new medical knowledge ripped from the headlines, but blood types were first discovered in 1900. That made me wonder if this was actually vaguely based on a true story, but if Nobel-prize winning biologist and physician Karl Landsteiner got the idea while being unjustly imprisoned by a imperious madman, they don’t mention it in his wikipedia page. Landsteiner made his discovery in 1900 and 1901 and got his Nobel for it in 1930, so even that was almost three decades old when Sangster wrote this script.

You can really see why they thought this image would bring in the kids.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

           

TAGLINE	NO WOMAN IS SAFE from the MOST FRIGHTENING FIEND IN THE HISTORY OF HORROR! Which is blatantly a lie on a whole cornucopia of levels, most notably in that almost every woman is safe, since the FRIGHTENING FIEND runs an all-male prison and the inmates are his primary victims. He does kill his maid, though, and threatens Dr. Pierre’s girlfriend, so those particular two women are not safe from THE MOST FRIGHTENING FIEND IN THE HISTORY OF HORROR. And yeah, about that last part...
TITLE ACCURACY	Technically vaguely true if you’re willing to accept that a guy who steals blood to transfuse it for medical purposes can reasonably be called a “vampire.” But blood definitely does play a key role here.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	England
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Mad Science, arguably vampire
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Jimmy Sangster
NUDITY?	None, though Berman and Baker would become notorious for inserting random scenes of nudity into their later movies, as we discuss in THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yes, poor Barbara Shelley gets assaulted by this one asshole, though she’s saved before things get too out of hand. And, thankfully, the movie agrees that the guy who did it is scum who deserved to get strangled by a Hunchback.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Yes, there is a pack of vicious dobermans who are trained to kill anyone who displeases Dr. Callistratus or his sadistic guards.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Just mad science
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None.
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	Never practice cutting-edge medicine in Carlstadt.