31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 9: Daughters of Darkness

Day 9: Daughters of Darkness (1971), dir. by Harry Kümel

Streaming Availability: Tubi

The Seventies are when the vampire gets weird. We saw how Hammer Horror tried to keep Count Dracula relevant after the cultural revolutions of the Sixties, and they failed. With Dracula fading, any number of new and strange vampires could take his place. This coming run of the next five movies will all be pushing the boundaries of this species of horror to new, transgressive, and maybe even more terrifying places.

We start with Daughters of Darkness, a return to the queerness of vampires. Now, we have seen vampire movies that teased lesbian themes before. Dracula’s Daughter can easily be read as a battle in a woman’s heart between sexualities. But those were themes, maybe not subtle subtext, however still hiding between the lines. Forty years later, explicit sexuality is far less taboo on screen. While homosexuality in 1971 was maybe not yet something you can talk to your grandma about at the dinner table, it was fully a Thing that was allowed to happen on screen. If your lady vampire wants to fuck other ladies, nobody needs to wink about it anymore. 

This is also the era of “classy” European erotic art films, so a sexy lesbian vampire fits right into a decadent horny strain of cinema. There was a whole subgenre of lesbo vampos in this decade including movies like Vampyres, Alucarda, and the wonderfully-titled Vampyros Lesbos. Sadly, I cannot cover all of them. I do not even know if I picked the best one, I just went for the one that looked the prettiest.

Daughters of Darkness is the least horror of all the movies we’ve covered so far. There are vampires in it, but it's more the a story of a beautiful young woman’s terrible honeymoon in Belgium at winter. This marriage is not gonna work, vampires or not. Our heroine is Valerie (Danielle Ouimet), who has married her aristocratic boyfriend, Stefan (John Karlen). They seem happy enough, fucking merrily on a train on their way to a seaside resort hotel. The problem is that Stefan has a recurring fascination with sadism. The bigger problem is that he refuses to tell his “mother” back in England that her little boy has tied the knot. 

Meanwhile, a mysterious older woman, Countess Elizabeth Báthory (Delphine Seyrig) checks into the hotel with her young boyish “secretary”, Ilona (Andrea Rau). The movie then becomes a sexual chess match between Elizabeth and Stefan to win the heart of Valerie. Oh, the bellman immediately recognizes Elizabeth as an immortal who has not aged a day, and despite her protestations, she remembers his name. And, yeah, it is not a coincidence that she shares a name with one of the most notorious serial killers in history. That might just related to a few murders happening in nearby Bruges. Young women are getting drained of blood.

The movie is less interested in that than I'd like, frankly. There are only three actual death scenes, not one shot of fangs. Instead, most of Daughters of Darkness is more fascinated about a kind of wealthy class of people who have never done an honest day of work in their lives, and probably have never done a dishonest one either. Yeah, we could see murders, or we could see the empty luxuries and chic fashion in a lovely corner of Europe. The movie does look great for 1971, with none of the dull shabbiness I associate with Seventies fashion.

Stefan gets a striking look with his red leather jacket and metal-rimmed sunglasses. Ilona is killing it with a naughty schoolgirl outfit and possibly the only attractive bowl cut in human history. Báthory never gets a single iconic “look”, going from either a silver cocktail dress to a Cruella Deville veil to an ironic use of a Bela Lugosi cape. Yeah, she's fabulous, but I wish they had settled on one appearance as the most iconic so any one of them could be memorable. Yes, people are dying, but the camera is more interested in lounges, teal cocktails, and the elegant headlights on a classic Bristol.

Oh, the Countess tosses her drink into a flower pot. She doesn’t drink... grasshoppers.

We do get a few horrible moments. Probably the creepiest single one is when Báthory all but admits she’s the same woman from Hungarian legend that murdered hundreds of virgin girls. She joins with Stefan in an intense embrace, both enraptured by recounting the outrageous stories of torture and torment. (Which are probably massive exaggerations from the murky truth of what the real Báthory actually did, but don't let me spoil your fun, Daughters of Darkness.)

When it comes time for deaths, the movie uses strange, almost slapstick physics. Poor Ilona slips out of the shower with Stefan (possibly weakened by the vampire's allergy to running water, but that’s not clear). Then she grabs a straight razor in her hand, and somehow slips onto it, stabbing herself in the back. Is this the Countess’s dark arts creating Final Destination kills or... just clumsiness? The Countess dies in a car accident at the very end of the movie, by equally random circumstances. That kill at least is sick as shit, with the Countess impaled on a tree branch and set on fire.

There’s just a lot that’s left unexplained and unsatisfying here for me. Not ambiguous and intriguing, rather unfinished. Stefan’s domineering mother, the Lady Chilton, is revealed to us to actually be some older man (Fons Rademakers). So, is Stefan an imposter or some kind of boytoy to a rich nobleman or is this actually his mother who is a trans woman? This thread is never examined further. There’s a retired policeman character following the heroes who never reaches the main plot. Stefan begins beating Valerie with very little prompting. I can understand how his character got here, yet there’s definitely a beat or shot missing explaining his state of mind. He ceases to be a character and is just a figure representing the worst of all men.

The feminist statement is a bit muddled too. The Countess’s criticisms of Stefan, that he wants to make Valerie “a slave, a thing, an object of pleasure” is exactly what Báthory has done to Ilona and will do to her next victim. I guess just stay away from horny rich Europeans regardless of gender.

Is Daughters of Darkness scary? No. It is only rarely creepy or disturbing. We just do not learn enough about most of the characters, which is frustrating since the movie’s pace is also far too slow. It feels like a long movie but also one missing scenes. Is Daughters of Darkness a fashionable and legitimately sexy experience? Oh yes, it is extremely that. Everybody is one flavor or another of smoking hot from Báthory’s wicked Disney villain to Ilona’s debauched innocence. So, if you just want hot people being awful and horny in a gorgeous setting, Daughters of Darkness is a mixed but enjoyable experience.

Next Time: we've had far too many Whitulas, I want a Blacula.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 8: The Last Man on Earth

Day 8: The Last Man on Earth (1964), dir. by Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow

Streaming Availability: Public Domain! You can find it legally anywhere, they even have the full movie uploaded on its Wikipedia page

Ever notice that vampires and zombies are basically the same thing? They’re both undead humans risen from the grave that feast on the living. You do not want to get bitten by either of them. The difference really comes down to basically RPG rules of your chosen ghoulish Job Class. Vampires are much more intelligent, sexually enticing, and capable of dark magic, but have dozens of weaknesses. Zombies meanwhile are usually little more than shambling corpses, but are practically indestructible, so actually are far more successful at actually wiping out humanity in fiction.

Vampire fiction goes back centuries. But the modern zombie, as we understand them, is less than sixty years old, going back to George A. Romero’s classic, Night of the Living Dead. “Zombie” as a word is inspired by Haitian Voodoo folklore, but those creatures are mindless slaves created by dark necromancers. There were plenty of (frankly racist) films made in the early 20th century about that legend. The moaning creatures shuffling through malls that make for ironic statements on modern capitalism are a different breed.

All flavors of the undead are just shades of the same universal human fear of death and the uncleanliness of corpses, spiritually and otherwise. The Romero Zombie traces its origins as much from Haiti as it does vampire fiction. In fact, everything in the zombie movie genre was anticipated in our movie tonight, which came out a few years before Night of the Living Dead. It's a movie about isolation, a chilling world without us, and a battle for the very definition of "human". This is the classic post-apocalyptic film, The Last Man on Earth.

So far, every vampire movie we've seen has depicted a loser. Prof./Dr. Van Helsing or some stand-in always saves the world before the vampire problem gets worse than a handful of monsters. But what if they failed completely? What if vampires took over the Earth?

The Last Man on Earth is an adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, I Am Legend. (You probably know it better by the title, since Will Smith starred in a 2007 remake that following the trends of the time, switched out vampires for zombies.) This is our first true B-movie, an independent production, cheaply made, and still shot in black and white even into the Sixties. This was filmed around Rome, since Italy was a cheap place to shoot at the time. This does give the movie a lot of production value. They were able to find some grandiose modernist spaces leftover from Benito Mussolini’s regime, and as backdrops, they look great. If you’re going to make a B-movie in the Sixties, you’ll need the King of the B-Movie, Vincent Price. A good two-thirds of this movie is Price alone on set, accompanied only by his voice-over narration. 

If you can only get one actor for most scenes, might as well be an absolute legend of a performer with an unforgettable and distinct voice.

The film is set in 1968, four years into the future, after a mass plague has wiped out humanity. Dr. Robert Morgan (Price) believes himself to be the titular Last Man. In flashbacks, we learn that Morgan was one of the scientists trying to stop the epidemic, but one who refused to believe stories of the dead coming back to life. We see trucks full of bodies being dumped off to be burned. Then the disease comes to Morgan’s own home, first daughter goes blind and succumbs, then his wife, Virginia (Emma Danieli) falls next. Morgan tried to save his daughter from the pits, only to be gravely pushed off by soldiers burning their own children. Not wanting to see another loved one tossed into the flames, Morgan secretly buries his wife. But then that night there’s a knocking on his door... with an incredible scare on the other side.

Most of the film is about Morgan struggling to maintain his sanity in a hopeless world. His house is a mess of boarded-up windows, scribbled notes on the walls, and a million kinds of junk. Interestingly though, the outside world is immaculate. Morgan can walk through the supermarkets without being overwhelmed with rotting food, or he can pick up a Ford Sedan off the lot which is still perfect and without a spec of dust. The most they do is decorate the roads a bit with some old Fiats parked messily with open doors. Even so, the sheer emptiness of the otherwise spotless city is creepy in its own right. And the difference between Morgan’s ruined life and the peace outside is fitting with the overall theme of the film.

Though The Last Man on Earth is a prototype for the future zombie genre. The undead gather in masses around Morgan house every night. Their bodies are limp and weak, so Vincent Price easily pushes them down. Their minds are slow, so at best they can moan or call out Morgan’s name as they bang impotently against his windows. Yet, these are still vampires. Morgan decorates his home with wreaths of garlic and mirrors (in this version, vampires have reflections but cannot stand to look at them). He meticulously works his way through the streets, staking sleeping people.

The Last Man on Earth is one of the first films to dare imagine that vampires are not monsters but human. Morgan calls himself the “the last man”, screaming that all the others are “freaks”. Yet humanity is not dead, it has merely changed. Morgan, like a Japanese Imperial soldier turned bandit in the jungles of the Pacific, is fighting a war he lost years ago. The movie does not dwell much on the enormity of Morgan’s crimes, it does not quite admit to calling him the villain of the tale, yet he's left much closer to a quixotic antihero. We see, in spite of him, a world recovering. There are vampire children. In a world full of the undead, the remaining mortal is the monster.

Still this movie is old and the budget is limited. The Last Man on Earth is cheesy in a number of ways, right down to the wavy dissolve and harp noise to tell us Vincent Price is entering a flashback. I still think this movie fucking rules. It’s basically a long Twilight Zone episode and would have been one of the best ones. This is one of Vincent Price’s very best performances, as a vulnerable man desperate for any hope. Also, it is better than the Will Smith remake, mostly thanks to not succumbing to an utterly bullshit ending.

Next Time: After so much time with vampires inspired by Vlad the Impaler, we have yet to meet the other great vampire of historical legend, Elizabeth Bathory. Let's fix that in Daughters of Darkness.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 7: The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires

Day 7: The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974), dir. by Roy Ward Baker and Chang Cheh

Streaming Availability: N/A (You may want to try a certain Tube)

By the mid-Seventies, Hammer Film Productions was in terminal decline. Their brand of horror had aged and lost its edge. Their flaw was fundamental to their very identity. While they updated the classic Universal monsters with more sex appeal and more blood, those movies were ultimately still retro throw-backs even in their own time. Dracula A.D. 1972 was seen as a pathetic poser film for a reason.

The heart and soul of these films are painfully conservative. No matter what horrors may appear, in the end the rational minds of well-mannered White Men of Authority will overcome them. Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing is unemotional, dignified, and more chaste than a nun. Even for audiences fifty years ago, this was too old-fashioned. Hammer could not compete with the new wave of more diverse, more transgressive, and more exploitative competition. Every huge hit of the late-Sixties and Seventies like Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and Halloween were more nails hammered into Hammer’s coffin.

If the Seventies were too modern for them, Hammer would not last a minute in the Eighties. And they didn’t. Their last movie came out in 1979, and the doors closed on the Hammer brand name for thirty years.

Fortunately for us, when a studio is dying, they start rolling the dice in pretty wild ways. Hammer was desperate by 1974 to figure out any way to make their horror franchises feel relevant. Somebody looked around and thought “hmm, Hong Kong fung-fu cinema is becoming popular, why not a kung-fu Dracula movie?” To my immense joy, nobody in the boardroom responded with “that’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard, it doesn’t make any sense”. Therefore, Hammer Films teamed up with the legendary Hong Kong studio, Shaw Brothers, to create the final movie in their Dracula series, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires.

Needless to say, this did not save Hammer. In another universe, this would have launched an entire sub-genre of martial arts horror. Bruce Lee vs Frankenstein is a movie we deserved to see. Instead, this seems to have been a flop on both continents. Director Roy Ward Baker called it “a failure, an absolute failure”. Luckily, Baker only directed half the movie, maybe even less than half.

Personally, I’m so happy this thing exists. I cannot say this is a masterpiece of either martial arts or gothic horror. Mixing those things together on paper sounds as appetizing as mixing together soy sauce and cream cheese. But can’t knock it until you try it.

One of the issues Hammer seemed to have with these Dracula updates is that they’ll bring Dracula to new and fantastic places, but they refuse to let Dracula out of his bubble. Dracula does not karate chop anybody here. We open the movie in 1804 Transylvania, where an evil Chinese priest, Kah (Chan Shen) begs Dracula for help. His native vampires (the Chinese Vampire being a whole tradition separate from the European legends) have all been defeated, and he hopes to revive them with Dracula’s power. Dracula – disappointingly not played by Christopher Lee but instead John Forbes-Robertson – kills Kah, steals his body, and goes off to China to set up shop. He builds an evil castle with, as the title implies, seven golden vampires as his servants, kidnapping half-naked women for some vague reason. Dracula then sits out the rest of the movie, until he’s the Final Boss.

We cut to 1904, where Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing is visiting Chongqing, China to investigate stories of vampirism. You might remember that our last movie stated clearly that Van Helsing and Dracula both died in 1872 and you might be wondering that if Dracula has been in China for 100 years, when did Van Helsing battle him before? Just put those thoughts aside. Solid continuity was not a concern in cinema back then.

Van Helsing and his handsome son Leyland (Robin Stewart) run into first the beautiful Norwegian blonde, Vanessa (Julie Ege), and then the beautiful action lead of the movie, Hsi Ching (Hong Kong superstar, David Chiang). Hsi Ching leads a band of seven brothers all with their own special Job Class completely with a signature weapon. This crew then marches off to Dracula’s Castle and the next hour of the movie is immense action spectacles. Just big set pieces with lots of heroes fighting lots of ghouls and various other nonsense.

There is something hilarious about how this movie brings Peter Cushing, this great classically trained actor, and mostly uses him to stand around watching kung-fu. Cushing looks so out of his element in these scenes, especially since he was over sixty-years-old and always was as skinny as a twig. Remarkably, later in the movie, Cushing actually does do some fighting with vampires. And in a shocking moment, Cushing falls nearly face-first into a firepit. This had to be a dangerous mistake that could have gone very wrong, yet they kept it in the movie. 

Robin Stewart and Julie Ege add next to nothing to the movie, meanwhile. They are just here to be generically handsome or to wear a very tight white tank top. However, to 7 Golden Vampire’s credit, it does pair its European and Chinese characters romantically. Lorrimer Van Helsing’s mom may have been from Chongqing.

Also, there is something fascinating about the Chinese take on horror. Their rules of vampirism are vaguer and more magical than what we’ve seen so far. The vampires other than Dracula are these mummified creatures with little beady eyes and golden masks. Surrounding them are zombies and that often look cheesy, sure, but can also be spooky with their exaggerated movements and sheer numbers. The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires actually shoots quite a lot of its scenes at night, not Day for Night, and so the lighting looks great. There’s also a lot of gratuitous nudity. This is not some masterpiece of filthy exploitation horror like The Boxer’s Omen or The Seventh Curse, but it is certainly creepy and unpredictable and a hell of a spectacle.

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires is deeply flawed, deeply confused, often confusing, and something of a mess. But I’m immensely happy it exists. We’re saying goodbye to Classic Dracula for awhile now, and we could not be leaving him behind on a weirder note.

Next Time: Rewinding back to 1966 with Vincent Price in a the vampire apocalypse, The Last Man on Earth.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 6: Dracula A.D. 1972

Day 6: Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), dir. by Alan Gibson

Streaming Availability: HBO Max

We open in the year 1872 A.D. with Dracula (Christopher Lee) in his final battle with his arch-nemesis, Dr. Lawrence Van Helsing (Peter Cushing). (This creates a plot hole because the original movie in the series, Horror of Dracula, was set in 1885, but never mind.) They’re racing on top of an out-of-control carriage somewhere in Hyde Park, London. The battle ends in a glorious double knock-out, Van Helsing destroying the creature Dracula seemingly forever, yet giving his life in the process. 

Or it ends in a fumbling awkward wrestling match, where Dracula has gotten his shoulder somehow wedged inside a wooden wheel. Dignified conclusion or not, London is freed from the vampire menace for an entire century.

A century later and it is the Year of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, 1972, and hippie kids are getting their kicks freaking out the squares at a party they've crashed. Having fully popped all available monocles, our hot young Boomer crew is ready to find a new high. A Satanic high. Their leader, Johnny (Christopher Neame) invites them to a séance in the very abbey which holds Dracula’s final remains. With a goblet of blood and ashes spilled on top of a young woman’s tits, Johnny brings Christopher Lee’s Dracula is back in style. The Count is now accompanied by a thumping Blaxploitation soundtrack. Conveniently, Lawrence Van Helsing’s grandson, Lorrimer looks exactly Peter Cushing. Even more conveniently, his granddaughter, Jessica (Stephanie Beacham) is one of the hippies and right in the path of Dracula’s wrath.

Oh, did I mention Johnny’s last name? Johnny Alucard. It takes Van Helsing 2 about half the movie to figure that anagram out.

I picked Dracula A.D. 1972 and skipped over most of the Hammer Horror Dracula series for a number of reasons. First off, it is on HBO Max so that makes it easily accessible right now, at least until David Zaslav destroys everything good about that service. Secondly, this is the first reunion of Lee’s Dracula and Cushing’s Van Helsings since the 1958 original. And thirdly, the idea of Dracula in Seventies Chelsea preying on go-go dancers and beatniks is just much more fun. Who needs another 19th century cobwebs and castles romp? Even Hammer Films had to realize that after seven Dracula movies, you have to shake things up a bit. And why not shake their hips to the sounds of American rock band, Stoneground?

What's even more fun is that Dracula A.D. 1972 came out the same real as Blacula. I'll cover that movie in a few days, but keep that in mind. We have rival -Aculas coming to the modern party scene. Who wore it better?

As much as I would love to report that Christopher Lee throws on sunglasses and grooves with the hippies, that just doesn’t happen. In fact, you’d assume this was a comedy from the first ten minutes, with such gags as Alucard smashing fine China and a bored hippie chick getting railed under a table. But ultimately, Hammer plays the idea of Dracula in then-modern London entirely straight. This could have so easily been pure camp like Leprechaun 5: In The Hood, but instead it is a 99% serious vampire movie with hippies instead of dandies. Dracula A.D. 1972 is remarkably incapable of winking at its audience.

Dracula largely delegates everything out to Johnny Alucard, thus we get much more of Evil Neame than Evil Lee. Luckily, Neame is a solid villain in his own right. He’s young, he’s got messy hair, he’s consciously a sexy dirtbag, there’s an energy here. (His look reminds me a lot of rock star Lestat in Queen of the Damned.) In truth, Buxom counter-culture birds are as much threatened by dangerous young men as they are threatened by stately gentlemen in capes.

Dracula never leaves his abbey, but what Dracula we get is more verbose than the 1958 appearance. In the final battle against Van Helsing, we get this choice quote: “You would play your brains against mine? Against me who has commanded nations?” This is what was missing from Horror of Dracula! Also, it turns out that, no, Van Helsing the Younger’s plan was just to stab the Count with a silver dagger.

Upon release, Dracula A.D. 1972 was lampooned as lame and pandering. Imagine releasing a Dracula movie in 2022 and trying to get-in with the Zoomers by using words like "poggers" or having your vampire do a TikTok dance trend. All that sad humiliation has faded over the decades now, luckily. Early Seventies London feels as much a time of fantasy as 19th century Transylvania. I can’t tell what was cool and what was for posers anymore, to me it is all wonderfully retro.

Regardless of authenticity, A.D. 1972 does have flaws. Jessica Van Helsing, despite her heritage, winds up just another Hammer Horror damsel in distress. They put her in a trance and a sheer white dress with tons of cleavage. This includes a hilarious frame where Jessica’s entire tit is on screen out of focus, sharing the screen with her grandfather’s face. The other problem is that both vampires fail in frankly bumbling fashion. Dracula 1v1s Van Helsing at night, in his lair, with no excuses, and still loses out-right.

Poor Johnny Alucard gets the worst of it. Despite the actor’s charisma, and the character’s sinister planning, Alucard foolishly demands to be made into a vampire. So he gets the same weaknesses as his master. He never vampire-proofed his flat, meaning he’s just a curtain-pull away from the blazing sunlight. Alucard even defeats himself in a bit of physical comedy, falling ass-backwards into his own shower and turning on the water. Unluckily for him, in this franchise, water kills vampires. Since Alucard hasn’t read his Castlevania: Symphony of the Night walkthrough, he never picked up the Holy Symbol, and that’s that.

There would be one more Christopher Lee Dracula movie, the 1973 sequel, The Satanic Rites of Dracula. I’m going to skip that one too. Instead, we’re jumping ahead to the final and probably weirdest Hammer Dracula movie of them all.

That’s The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, where Van Helsing goes to China. Kung-fu vs vampires!

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 5: Horror of Dracula

Day 5: Horror of Dracula (1958), dir. by Terence Fisher

Streaming Availability: HBO Max

Enough of this ancient black and white shit. Enough of your great-grandma's vampires! It is time for a new generation of bloodsucking. Let's check out our grandma's Dracula, with none than the great Christopher Lee. Today we have color. We have red blood. We have big breasts clad in very sheer white dresses. Most importantly, we have FANGS!!

Yeah, amazingly enough, vampires did not have fangs in movies regularly until the Hammer Horror series. Count Orlok in Nosferatu had his two sharp rat-like teeth. But the classic big long canines? The classic look of plastic vampire teeth toys you get from Halloween stores? That does not appear until the 1950s. Fangs don't originate with today's movie Horror of Dracula (AKA, just "Dracula" in its native Britain). However, you could not really have a vampire movie without fangs after this. Finally, the iconic look is completed.

Hammer Film Productions in the late 1950s picked up the baton dropped by Universal Pictures in the mid-Forties. During these years they would release their version of Frankenstein, The Mummy, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Phantom of the Opera, and most prominent of all, Dracula. There's eight of these Hammer Horror Dracula movies which ran all the way to 1974. I would love to run down the entire franchise with its various ups and downs. These movies are famous for pitting Christopher Lee's Dracula up against the equally impressive Doctor - not Professor - Van Helsing, played by Peter Cushing. The franchise becomes basically a precursor to the Eighties Slasher formula, considering how many ways Dracula dies, and how many ways he comes back. They all have awesome, evocative names like "Dracula Has Risen From the Grave" or "The Satanic Rites of Dracula".

But we can't cover all of them. In fact, I'll only cover three. We only have thirty-one days, you gotta cut somewhere.

The original Horror of Dracula seems to be the one best-remembered, most acclaimed, and also just the one people like the most. It could not open more memorably. After the blood-red opening titles, we pan in on Count Dracula's immense stone sarcophagus, zooming right into the word "D R A C U L A". Then they drizzle bright neon red blood on the name like a baker decorating with powdered sugar. That's how a movie makes a mission statement!

This is also the Hammer movie closest to the original Bram Stoker source material, while still taking multiple liberties. For example, Dracula never makes it to London, instead Van Helsing and company are based out of Bavaria. There is no Renfield character. The characters of Mina (Melissa Stribling) and Lucy (Carol Marsh) are flipped, so this Mina is paired with Arthur (Michael Gough),  not Jonathan. Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) opens the movie in traditional Bram Stoker fashion as a studious young man looking to serve Count Dracula. We even get voice over narration from him which matches the Stoker epistolary structure; the narration is directly from Harker's diary. Then we swerve dramatically off Stoker's map when Harker reveals that he's a double-agent working to kill the Count.

Well, that does not work out, Harker is sucked-in by Dracula's sexy wife, and then gets bitten by Dracula and becomes a vampire himself. After this, he is kinda tags-in for Renfield, if for only one scene. Van Helsing is remarkably quick with mercy killing his best friend. That means Arthur winds up being Helsing's sidekick, desperately trying to save the women in his life from fully transforming into the undead, with frankly very little success. Both actresses get their big spooky turns while under the influence of evil. A fully vampired-out Lucy might even get the most scary scene in the entire movie.

There's a lot about Horror of Dracula that's smoother and more thrilling than the 1931 original. The sets and castles all look quite handsome in full color. All the characters have distinct personalities - except weirdly, the Count himself, but I'll get to that in a moment. Michael Gough and Peter Cushing together are solid heroes with a ton of charisma. And the evil they're facing is more brutal and physically intimidating than any vampire before. 

Christopher Lee was a tall man, and he looks massive in a cape and a domineering position on top of a staircase. There's a truly great effect when Lee first bares his fangs, as he appears with blood gushing down his mouth and bloodshot eyes. (Apparently the contact effects were so irritating to the actor they never used them again.) One of Arthur's maids describes Dracula as looking "like the Devil", and she's not wrong.

The problem for me is that you expect more than just bigness out of Dracula, especially a Christopher Lee Dracula. This version has no dialog at all in the whole second act of the movie. He gives up any illusion of humanity after the first ten minutes. Lee is an amazing actor whose voice is one of his great tools, but he never talks to Van Helsing. These two are supposed to be the great rivals here, maybe they should have a game of wills at some point? Let Saruman use his voice! He's great on the mic! (I'm to understand this doesn't get better in the sequels, including the second movie where Dracula doesn't have even one line.)

Bela Lugosi's Dracula was an evil human with dark powers. This Dracula is a Monster that Walks Like a Man, which is terrifying in its own right. And as mentioned before, the various undead women in the movie do pick up a lot of the slack from a too-often missing Lee.

So certainly Horror of Dracula is not a bad movie. It has most of the hallmarks you'd want in a classic, and its a massive step forward in vampire cinema. The promise given in the opening from that bloody sarcophagus is fully fulfilled.

Next Time: Skipping ahead to the very last Christopher Lee Hammer Dracula movie, Dracula A.D. 1972. What happens when Dracula meets hippies?