In the mid-1970s, Spanish director José Ramón Larraz decamped from his home in Barcelona for the unlikely climes of Tunbridge Wells and made a trio of horror films – Scream… and Die! (1973), Symptoms (1974) and this erotic vampire chiller that pushed the boundaries of sex and violence as far as the censors of the day would allow – too far in fact as it suffered numerous cuts at the hands of the British Board of Film Censors.

Lovers Fran (Marianne Morris) and Miriam (Anulka Dziubinska, credited here simply as Anulka) are gunned down by a never identified assailant in their bedroom. Sometime later they return as vampires, luring passing male motorists back to their rambling country mansion where they first drain them sexually then of their blood. Fran seems to grow attached to her latest victim, Ted (Murray Brown), who a local hotelier seems to recognise though he’s never stayed there before (a ply thread that is never developed) and he manages to survive her attentions for several knights. Meanwhile, John (Brian Deacon) and Harriet (Sally Faulkner). a young couple on a motoring holiday, pitch up in the fields near the house and Harriet becomes increasingly concerned about the women and the strange things that seem to be going on at the house. Ted escapes, leading the vampires to John and Harriet’s caravan when he seeks shelter and he was the next morning in his car, no sign of the couple or the two vampires.

The film is extraordinarily frank for its day in matters of both sex and violence. The killings are veritable bloodbaths as the women are reduced to feral creatures tearing at the flesh of their victims and the sex scenes are a lot more explicit than most British genre films were attempting. The whole endeavour, from its emphasis on lesbianism to the oneiric pacing and the unrestrained attitude towards gore and bloodletting betray the director’s European roots.

Away from the bloodshed, Larraz pulls off some nicely spooky touches – time seems to stand still in and around the house, the vampires lurk moodily in the woods and cemeteries, striding eerily around the autumnal landscapes, Miriam in Dracula-style cloak, Fran sporting the sort of flowing black dress that a few years later any self-respecting Goth would kill for. Both Dziubinska and Morris are notably dubbed but probably weren’t hired so much for their voices as for their willingness to disrobe and engage enthusiastically in the sex scenes. And there’s certainly no doubting that enthusiasm – Dziubinska had already posed naked for a 1972 Playboy spread (and incongruously turned up three years later as a Russian teenage telepath in hit children’s television series The Tomorrow People (1973-1979)) and although Morris would wait a couple of years before appearing in British softcore magazine Mayfair, she’d already turned up in the sex comedies Lovebox (1972) and Percy’s Progress (1974) and would make another the same year as Vampyres, The Over-Amorous Artist).

They may not be the most skilled or nuanced of actresses, but they do exactly what Larraz needed them to and the film has made them cult favourites. They’re particularly effective in the animalistic attacks on their victims – in his book Vampyres: A Tribute to the Ultimate in Erotic Horror Cinema, Tim Greaves quotes Larraz as saying  “I imagine my vampires turn almost to cannibalism, to eat somebody, to take the blood from anywhere, no matter if it is on the arm or on the balls!” and that goes some way to explaining the extraordinary mess they make when finishing off their victims.

It’s hard to see what glamorous undead like Fran and Miriam see in the men they pick up at the roadside (presumably beggars can’t be choosers) and lure their doom in the gloomy old mansion – they’re like a cross between the Sirens of Greek mythology and the mother and daughter-in-law in Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (1964). Karl Lanchbury has the youthful looks but the dowdy Brown is glum and unappealing and Michael Byrne’s unnamed “playboy” is such a know-it-all blowhard, ludicrously pleased with himself for supposedly being able to identify any wine by taste alone, that it’s a genuine pleasure to see the back of him. Brian Deacon and, particularly, Sally Faulkner do well to flesh out their paper thin characters – she gets one of the film’s most enigmatic moments when she encounters the vampires in the wood and Fran marks her, telling her “I always knew we’d find each other – by this sign I’ll recognise you” and one of the most unsettling, exploring the basement of the house where the vampires lurk in a post-feeding stupor, unaware of the rotting remains chained to the wall behind her.

Larraz and his cast and crew moved into Hammer’s old stamping ground at Oakley Court, alternating shooting at Harefield Grove at Denham (where he’d shot Symptoms) for the spooky old mansion at the heart of the film. Along with veteran director of photography Harry Waxman and art director Ken Bridgeman, Larraz gets plenty of Gothic mileage from the settings, the savagery of the violence and the frankness of the sex seemingly all the more eye-popping for the respectable surroundings. Viewers were treated to some brief behind the scenes footage of the crew at work in action at Harefield Grove in the BBC documentary Tuesday Documentary: The Dracula Business, first broadcast on 6 August 1974. The film itself wouldn’t turn up on British screens for another couple of years, doing the rounds on a double bill with The Devil’s Rain (1975) in 1976 by which time the BBFC had had its pound of flesh.

Vampyres may unfold at a snail’s pace and the dubbed dialogue is often distracting and not even remotely convincing (Larraz credited his British-born wife “D.” (Diana) Daubeney but she didn’t write any of it and is credited solely to help the film meet British quota requirements) but it’s a frequently haunting, dreamlike film with bursts of still impressive nastiness. On completion of Vampyres, Larraz returned home to Barcelona for the drama where he made several more horror films (Emma, puertas oscuras/Dark Doors (1974), Estigma/Stigma (1980), La momia nacional (1981), Los ritos sexuales del diablo/Black Candles (1982), Al filo del hacha/Edge of the Axe (1988) and Deadly Manor (1990)) none of which were a patch on the films he made in the UK. Vampyres was remade in Spain by Víctor Matellano in 2015 with small roles for genre veterans Lone Fleming, May Heatherly and Caroline Munro.