Kiss of Dracula

THE KISS OF THE VAMPIRE (1963)
KISS OF EVIL (1966)
COUNTESS DRACULA (1971)

Isobel Black as Tania in THE KISS OF THE VAMPIRE. Her first feature, the Edinburgh-born actress shifts effortlessly between beguiling and malevolence; as Tim Lucas notes in his Video Watchdog review, "[Tania] is never shown biting anyone out of hunger, but rather to indulge a childlike, yet severe, streak of sadism."

DON Sharp's THE KISS OF THE VAMPIRE is a Hammer vampire film without Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee, but well worth investing your time. Shot with a colourful Gothic angle by Alan Hume, the setting is an isolated area of Bavaria, 1910. Honeymoon couple the Harcourts - Gerald (Edward de Souza) and Marianne (Jennifer Daniel) - experience car trouble and are forced to stay in the unfortunately named Grand Hotel, whose only other guest is reclusive alcoholic Professor Zimmer (Clifford Evans). Doctor Ravna (Noel Willman) - owner of the chateau that sits imposingly above the locale - invites them to dinner and their association with his seemingly charming family grow. When the pair attend a masked ball, however, they discover that Ravna is the head of a vampire cult. Zimmer performs a ceremony known as the Corpus Diabolo Levitum which forces "evil to destroy itself"; with the ritual taking the form of a swarm of vampire bats (apparently props purchased from Slough and Maidenhead branches of Woolworths), they smother Ravna and his gowned disciples.

THE KISS OF THE VAMPIRE develops themes from Terence Fisher's magisterial BRIDES OF DRACULA. Teenage cult member Tania (Isobel Black) imitates Greta from the earlier film by trying to coax a newly buried initiate from the grave; Zimmer extrudes a bite similar to Cushing's branding iron scene; and Anthony Hinds' script also explores vampirism as a social disease/order. Additionally, there are direct transfers from dropped BRIDE sequences: Zimmer interrupting his own daughter's funeral to throw a spade through the coffin lid, and the climactic bat attack (a scene vetoed by Cushing on the grounds that Van Helsing would never evoke evil himself). But Sharp's film has attractions of its own, notably Black's performance: in one scene, Tania tears open the shirt of our hero, scoring her fingernails down his chest, upon which our quick-thinking leading man smears the blood in the form of a crucifix. 

Ingrid Pitt and Sandor Eles star in COUNTESS DRACULA.

Released with the tagline "Shocking! - Horrifying! - Macabre!" THE KISS OF THE VAMPIRE was less so when NBC acquired the film from Universal in 1966. Considered too brazen for television viewing as it stood, most of the quirky erotica - and Zimmer's pre-credits shovel scene - was cut and replaced by specially shot footage in Los Angeles by Irving J. Moore, a director who would become synonymous with episodes of DALLAS and DYNASTY. Now titled KISS OF EVIL, these new, bland insertions - totalling around fifteen minutes to fill a two hour slot - tell of a local couple whose teenage daughter rebels when they attempt to prevent her attending the masked ball. The most interesting thing about the TV version is the casting: the mother is played by Virginia Gregg, who gained fame by voicing Mrs Bates in PSYCHO, while the daughter is portrayed by Sheilah Wells, once flatmate of Sharon Tate.

COUNTESS DRACULA is Hammer's pedestrian take on the legend of Elizabeth Báthory, a countess of Hungarian nobility who allegedly killed and bathed in the blood of young virgins to retain her beauty. Made by two Hungarian émigrés working in England - producer Alexander Paal and director Peter Sasdy - it tells of Countess Elisabeth Nádasdy (a robust but dubbed Ingrid Pitt), who discovers that her youth and libido can be temporarily restored if she bathes in the blood of young, virgin women. Her steward and lover Captain Dobi (Nigel Green) kidnaps and murders local girls, whilst she pursues Imre Toth (Sandor Eles), a young soldier. As a cover for her crimes while in her rejuvenated state she takes the identity of her own daughter, a plan that is complicated when her actual daughter Ilona (Lesley-Anne Down) returns home. Despite Báthory's blood-drenched legacy, the production is more historical drama/fairy tale, as Jeremy Paul's script focuses on the aging, widowed Countess. The handsome sets and costumes - inherited from ANNE OF A THOUSAND DAYS - give the film a splendid tableaux, but Sasdy's theme of the disintegrating family unit was much more successful in TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA.

Full of Secrets

THE SKULL (1965)
TORTURE GARDEN (1967)
THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1970)

"Welcome to the Club!"; Ingrid Pitt plays leading lady Carla in The Cloak segment of THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD.

TORTURE GARDEN and THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD are two of seven horror anthologies produced by Amicus, and both have tales adapted from his own stories by Robert Block. A low-budget operation which was the most serious rival to Hammer during the 1960s and early 1970s, Amicus were officially a British company founded in 1961 by two Americans, creative force Milton Subotsky and financier Max J. Rosenberg. Amicus may mean friend in Latin, but by the time the company was dissolved in 1975, the relationship between the two producers was far from amicable. The biggest irony is that Subotsky and Rosenberg were indirectly responsible for Hammer making their breakthrough THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN in 1957, ushering in a generation of Technicolor horrors; Subotsky had written a script for a colour Frankenstein, which was bought by James Carreras and allegedly re-written by Jimmy Sangster.

A prime reason for Amicus to be lodged as a British company can be traced to the advantages of the Eady Levy, a government incentive passed in the 1950s to stimulate film production by which producers were paid a subsidy on percentage of box office. Not only is there conjecture of how British the company actually was, there is also the notion that Amicus didn't really make horror films per se; their softer outlook seems to tie in more with Subotsky's love of fantasy. The distinct Amicus character lays in Subotsky himself, who possessed a child-like innocence at odds with the cynicism of the film industry. Although the company milked the British connection in terms of actors, directors and technicians, their reliance on American material (such as the controversial EC Comics for TALES FROM THE CRYPT and THE VAULT OF HORROR) and use of contemporary settings distanced the product from homegrown Gothique.

Directed by Peter Duffell, THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD benefits from strong performances by Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Denholm Elliott.

Yet TORTURE GARDEN and particularly THE SKULL provide such a footing. TORTURE GARDEN is the name of a sideshow where Dr Diablo (Burgess Meredith) invites patrons backstage for further excitement. As each customer stares into the shears of fate held by Atropos (Clytie Jessop) - a fortune-telling mannequin - they become hypnotised and glimpse their ultimate fate. Four stories are revealed: the first, Enoch, sees a nephew (Michael Bryant) demanding to know where his uncle's stash of gold coins are hidden; the second, Terror Over Hollywood, has a struggling actress stymieing her roommate's date to meet a prominent Hollywood producer; the third, Mr Steinway, is about a killer piano; and in The Man Who Collected Poe, Jack Palance and Peter Cushing play competing Edgar Allan Poe fanatics.

Directed by Freddie Francis, TORTURE GARDEN is a turgid affair. Bloch had proposed that the film be called HORRORSCOPE, an effective moniker more apt than the redundant one chosen: Torture Garden comes from the decadent novel by French anarchist Octave Mirabeau published in 1898, a fact that irritated Bloch up until his death. The middle two stories are simply embarrassing: not only are we subjected to the most laughable Hollywood nightclub set, it is difficult to see how any filmmaker could successfully bring to screen a story where a woman is murdered by a piano. However Enoch is atmospheric, and The Man Who Collected Poe is a mini-masterpiece; the final revelation that Poe himself (Hedger Wallace) is lovingly preserved in a cobwebbed vault underneath Cushing's private museum presents Amicus with its most lasting Gothic image.

"Look deeply into the Shears of Fate!" A promotional gimmick for the film was to give away sachets of "fright seeds" so audiences could go home and plant their own TORTURE GARDEN.

Despite its lurid title, THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD is relatively anaemic. Following the disappearance of its current occupant - horror film star Paul Henderson (Jon Pertwee) - Inspector Holloway (John Bennett) discovers that the three previous owners of a house in the Home Counties have all come to unpleasant ends. The first story - Method For Murder - sees horror writer Charles Hillyer (Denholm Elliott) move into the house with his young wife to finish his latest novel. He is very proud of his creation - a psychotic strangler named Dominick - but becomes increasingly unnerved as he begins to see the killer making appearances in his everyday life. The second - Waxworks - has Philip Grayson (Peter Cushing) haunted by memories of the woman whom he loved and lost many years before. Sweets To The Sweet tells of stiff-backed disciplinarian John Reid (Christopher Lee), a father who is terrified that his small daughter Jane (Chloë Franks) may have inherited her dead mother's unsavoury hobbies, and in the final tale - the light-hearted The Cloak - Henderson arrives at the house as he prepares to appear in his latest film opus. Irritated at the low production values, the self-important actor declines the moth-eaten garment he is offered for his costume and insists on obtaining one of his own. Visiting an obscure costumier, he acquires a much more convincing item.

The four tales have differing tones that make the film entertaining but hackneyed. Elliott gives a bravura performance in the opening segment, and the unpredictable introductions of the grinning Dominick are genuinely unsettling. Waxworks is an overtly thin entry raised by Cushing's controlled evocation of loss and jealousy, Sweets to the Sweet is an effective family drama, and The Cloak is more amusing in outline than on screen.

For THE SKULL, director Freddie Francis and cameraman John Wilcox filmed the POV shots with a large prop cranium mounted in front of the lens, a trick Francis would repeat for THE CREEPING FLESH.

Based on Bloch's The Skull of the Marquis de Sade (published in the September 1945 issue of Weird Tales), THE SKULL is the crowning achievement of Amicus and the most accomplished of the many horror films directed by cinematographer Francis, as well as being the finest of the Cushing/Lee team-ups since their Hammer breakthroughs. The lengthy pre-credits sequence is set in the early 19th century, where a French phrenologist (Maurice Good) steals the head of the Marquis de Sade from his grave, intending to study its formation to prove that de Sade was not insane but rather possessed by an evil spirit. Jumping forward to modern day, against the advice of fellow collector Sir Matthew Phillips (Lee), occult writer Christopher Maitland (Cushing) adds the skull of de Sade to his collection, acquiring the item from seedy supplier Marco (Patrick Wymark). It is also ironic that with this film it was Amicus - rather than the risible Hammer attempts DRACULA, A.D. 1972 and THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA - that succeeded in transposing Gothic horror to the present.

An exceptionally downbeat movie, THE SKULL portrays Maitland, Marco and Phillips living suffocating lives; neither Maitland or Phillips are practising students of the black arts, more armchair occultists cocooned in their own dark academia. Unusually - especially for the straight-laced Amicus - THE SKULL experiments with form: the third act is virtually silent, there is a surreal nightmare sequence, and shots are shown from the Skull's subjective point of view (actions viewed through hollow sockets, with inner bone aglow with an unnatural green hue). This fluid nature was imposed on Francis by trying to provide a feature-length film from a meagre Subotsky script only 53 pages in length, but the result is a marvel of production design and ingenuity.

Lust of Evil

THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970)
LUST FOR A VAMPIRE (1971)
TWINS OF EVIL (1972)

Hammer starlet Madeline Smith in THE VAMPIRE LOVERS.

WITH an absence of fresh avenues for their monsters to explore, and a relaxation of censorship, Hammer turned to J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. A curious mix of traditional vampirism and Irish folklore, the novella overtly uses lesbianism to heighten tension and to symbolise abnormality, and was a major influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. By adding this explicit frisson to their already luridly realised baronial halls, village taverns and moonlit woods, the studio’s Karnstein Trilogy - all scripted by Tudor Gates - suggests a more obvious deviance and desire, and a recognised stage in which the drama could be played out.

Roy Ward Baker's THE VAMPIRE LOVERS is historically remarkable for being the first (and only) co-production of Hammer Films and American International Pictures. While this combination looks promising on paper, the result is an uneven attempt to bring the studio into the late 1960s marketplace by revelling in lesbian couplings and graphic decapitations. In early 19th Century Styria, Carmilla Karnstein (Ingrid Pitt) is insinuated into the household of General Spielsdorf (Peter Cushing), and the death of his niece soon follows. When Emma Morton (Madeline Smith) begins to suffer from fatigue and anaemia, her fate rests in the hands of her young suitor (Jon Finch) and the vengeful fathers of Carmilla’s previous victims. While too mature and earthy to make an ideal Carmilla – Le Fanu wrote her as a young creature unaware of her destructive effects – Pitt nevertheless displays some memorable vampiric anger, including the panting seduction of a governess played by Kate O'Mara. The central theme of the film is the battle between Carmilla’s brood and the repressed, brutal vampire hunters – Cushing’s General and Douglas Wilmer’s Baron Hartog make suitably grim-faced avengers - reinforcing the question of who represents the greater threat; the uninhibited vampires, or the sadistic authority figures.

LUST FOR A VAMPIRE’s lesbian focus is blurred by its heterosexual romance between Mircalla and the writer turned schoolmaster LeStrange (Michael Johnson, the part a fictional representation of Le Fanu himself). This piece of narrative is appropriately centrepiece in this attractive promotional poster.

The hastily conceived LUST FOR A VAMPIRE never raises above a schoolboy level of eroticism, but this mongrel entry has earned a reputation as a Hammer fan’s guilty pleasure. Here, Carmilla Karnstein is reincarnated as Mircalla (Yutte Stensgaard), a luscious seductress who is enrolled at an exclusive girl’s school. The Danish actress is everything a traditional vampire is not: blonde, blue-eyed and with a cleft chin, but she is also enigmatic, mannequin-like and ethereal, with a forbiddingly cold core. The shot of Mircalla sitting upright in her coffin, her bare breasts drenched in the blood of a sacrificial victim, was the company’s most shocking image since Christopher Lee’s entrance in DRACULA. Stensgaard does not possess Pitt’s burning intensity, but her serene, blank-faced detachment is strangely effective.

The final film of the trilogy – TWINS OF EVIL – is, in fact, set 150 years before its predecessors, and is one of the most brutal and brilliant of Hammer’s latter-day oeuvre. Heavily influenced by WITCHFINDER GENERAL, the film substitutes the exploitation of flesh for an intensity and chilling sense of purpose rare in British horror. Madeleine and Mary Collinson, duly cast as titular Frieda and Maria Gelhorn, stay with their puritanical uncle Gustav Weil (Peter Cushing) in conservative middle Europe, where Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas) is pitted against Weil’s witch-hunting sect. Cushing gives one of his finest screen characterisations – unwilling guardian to his wayward nieces by day, and ritually seeking out and burning young girls by night. Weil is blind in his devotion to duty, with his interpretation of good nothing more than an alternate evil to that being woven by Karnstein. His death scene – plunging from the Count’s balcony to the stone staircase below, surrounded by his black-clad brethren - provides one of the most memorable of all climactic tableaux.

Peter Cushing in TWINS OF EVIL. The film went into production nine weeks after the death of the actor’s wife, and his performance bears the unmistakable signs of this bereavement. Consequently, a character that easily could have been no more than a religious zealot is transformed into something much more resonant.

Horror is not an obvious genre for locating positive representatives of women, based as they are in the misogynist mythology of the female as either virgin or whore; in spite of the presence of numerous female vampires, the cinematic representation of predatory women is invariably a negative one. Victorian vampire literature reveals a belief in the vulnerability of young girls to the temptation of the flesh, and vampire cinema merely gives this notion a contemporary spin. A young woman, one bitten, will become shamelessly promiscuous and a threat to decent society. Patriarchal control in the form of fathers, husbands, vampire hunters or witchfinders, can reign in transgressional impulses but when all else fails, death is the only solution. Within the society of the undead, the usual rules apply.