The blurb on the cover to the DVD release of Horror of Dracula strikes the right cheesy Famous Monsters of Filmland note. "Christopher Lee's fang-tastic first ever performance as the Lord of the Undead," it trumpets alongside the requisite graphic of the man himself holding a suitably buxom victim in his arms.
Recently reissued as part of a Hammer Horror collection (which also contains Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, The Mummy and Taste the Blood of Dracula - but, alas, no Curse of the Werewolf), Horror is the first pic in the British horror film company's long-running Drac series. Along with Curse of Frankenstein, the company's gory remake of Mary Shelley's novel, it ushered in a new brand of monster cinema when it was first released. Colorful and bloody, with brazen full-bodice sexuality, Hammer films were the late fifties' answer to a franchise of monster movies that looked pretty staid at the time. In their day, the Hammers provided a demarcation line for young horror movie fans: between those who thought the films' new relative explicitness were just what the genre needed to keep vital and those who felt the movies a poor substitute for the early moodier black-and-white Universal monster pics.
These days, of course, those trendmaking Hammers look a tad musty themselves: their colorful use of well-placed grue is pretty restrained compared to the buckets o' blood flung about in modern movies, while the acting of established thespians like Peter Cushing (who early had appeared as Osric in Lawrence Olivier's filmization of Hamlet) and Michael Gough (the British Whit Bissell) has a whiff of old-time staginess to it. And though a pic like Horror still looks great - the studio made wonderfully evocative use of deep rich color, particularly in Dracula's castle - it remains a comparatively low-budget affair. This shows in scenes like the climactic battle between Cushing's Van Helsing and Lee's Dracula, which just doesn't come across as dynamic as you'd hope. Or the moment (much more obvious in the DVD than in regular network broadcasting or videotape) when a sultry vampiress' breath can be briefly seen on what must've been a chilly set.
Article comments
1 - Chris Kent
Bill,
As usual, an excellent post on one of Hammer's finest horror films. If memory serves, wasn't this the second Hammer horror film? Curse of Frankenstein coming out the year before?
Christopher Lee has always been my favorite Dracula for numerous reasons, with your definition - "he's an attractive vicious bastard" - being just about as good as it gets. I believe there were seven Lee/Dracula films, and I am quite fond of Dracula Prince of Darkness (#2) and The Scars of Dracula (#5)......both including spectacular death scenes of the Count.
Didn't Christopher Lee also star in an Italian Dracula film outside of the Hammer stable? I believe it was a traditional (though dubbed) version of the Stoker novel? I recall seeing it on the late, late, late show about 100 years ago, and Lee was adorned in mustache and smoking jacket......I haven't seen it since.
2 - Bill Sherman
Yup, Curse of Frankenstein was the first of the all-out Hammer horror pics. Prior to that the company primarily focused on detective pics and other B-pic genre exercises (they did at least one Robin Hood film, for instance), with much of the material being adapted from radio dramas. The company's celebrated Quatermass s-f series, the debut of which predates Curse, had its roots in a radio drama.
I saw the more "traditional" Italian Dracula with Lee on a middle-of-the-night airing, too. Remember it as being pretty stodgy, but perhaps I was just too tired. . .