You have to give producers Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman, perhaps best remembered today for their string of hugely popular television series of the 1960s and 70s (either as a team or individually they made The Saint (1962-1969), The Champions (1968-1969), Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969-1971), Department S (1969-1970), The Persuaders! (1971-1972) and Return of the Saint (1978-1979) among others) – they certainly didn’t hang around when it came to jumping on potentially lucrative bandwagons. Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) had been a huge box office hit and sensing a healthy profit, Baker and Berman signed up that film’s writer, Jimmy Sangster, to write a quickie cash-in that went into production just weeks before Hammer’s follow-up film, the Sangster penned Dracula (1958), also went into production.
Transylvania, 1874. Dr Callistratus (Donald Wolfit) is executed by having a stake driven through his heart. He’s saved by his faithful retainer, the horribly disfigured Carl (Victor Maddern) who retrieves his body and has a drunken doctor (Cameron Hall) perform a heart transplant. Six years later, Callistratus is running a prison for the criminally insane, with Carl still in tow, and is sent a new prisoner, Dr John Pierre (Vincent Ball) convicted of “malpractice leading to manslaughter” following a blood transfusion that went wrong. As Pierre’s fiancée Madeleine (Barbara Shelley) tries to clear his name, Pierre is transferred to Callistratus’s prison where he’s forced to help the mad doctor research into blood types, using blood forcibly extracted from unwilling prisoners. Callistratus survived his transplant but it left him with a rare blood condition and needs frequent transfusions to stay alive.
Blood of the Vampire had the misfortune of reaching the screen after Hammer’s Dracula had cleaned up and under other circumstances the film may have benefited from riding on Hammer’s coattails. Unfortunately the first thing that viewers would have noticed about Blood of the Vampire is that there isn’t actually a vampire in it. Wolfit’s Dr Callistratus may be made up to vaguely resemble the Bela Lugosi-derived stereotype of what a vampire should look like with his pallid demeanour, window’s peak and fearsome eyebrows (and in Wolfit’s case what looks like an inexplicable false nose) and certainly he’s involved in nefarious experiments using blood but he’s certainly not a vampire as audiences then and now would have expected in the wake of Christopher Lee’s masterly portrayal of Dracula.
Callistratus is more of a throwback to the mad scientists of the 1940s and there’s even a touch of an earlier tradition about him, some of the look and barnstorming feel of the Tod Slaughter melodramas of the 1930s. Blood of the Vampire feels more like one of Hammer’s Frankenstein films than the Draculas – understandable really given when it was made – and Sangster recycled some of the component parts of his script for Blood of the Vampire in the first of Hammer’s Frankenstein sequels, The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) and borrowed the name of one of his characters here, Meinster (Henry Vidon), for the villain of the first Dracula sequel, The Brides of Dracula (1960).
Wolfit – who was more at home on the Shakespearean stage at the time than on the screen – is often dismissed as a bit of a ham here but in truth he sees rather disinterested in the whole affair. His half-hearted turn throws Barbara Shelley’s customary much better performance into sharper relief though Vincent Ball makes for a bland hero and poor Victor Maddern is half-hidden under Jimmy Evans’ make-up effects – effects that look impressive in stills but which are less convincing in motion, Carl’s deformed and lifeless eye seeming to roam about his face from one shot to the next.
Cass was a strange choice to direct a film like this. A former actor, he was a journeyman director of solid if unremarkable British B films with no prior genre experience – though he’d directed Castle in the Air (1952) which features a ghost in an otherwise light-hearted romance. He seems as disinterested in the material as Wolfit, dutifully plodding through the script and failing to capture the Gothic atmosphere and sheer energy that Terence fisher had so effortlessly brought to The Curse of Frankenstein. It sorely misses the skills of the team of technicians working over at Bray that made so much out of so little for Hammer. John Elphick’s sets appear cavernous – possibly thanks to the clever photography of Monty Berman – but are sparsely dressed and never feel like anything other than tarted up studio floors. Any exterior shots are clearly stock footage or less-than-convincing matte paintings.
Following Blood of the Vampire Cass made only a handful of further films- including the grim crime thriller The Hand (1960) – before his career sputtered to a halt. Perhaps his failure to engage with the Gothic mood was underpinned in part by his involvement with the British branch of the Campaign for Moral Rearmament (CMR), a faith-based pressure group dismayed by the perceived decline in moral standards around the world. Media standards campaigner Mary Whitehouse was also a member of the organisation before founding the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association in 1965. Quite how the grisly goings-on in Blood of the Vampire sat with Cass’ CMR colleagues remains sadly unrecorded. Baker and Berman – who made many of their films under the Tempean Films banner – went on to make The Trollenberg Terror (1958) and Jack the Ripper (1959), both co-written by Sangster, and the genre spoof What a Carve Up! (1961).
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