The worldwide success of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) gave Hammer Films pause for thought. A sequel, then titled Blood of Frankenstein (later retitled The Revenge of Frankenstein) was put into production almost straight away and almost all of their planned non-horror projects were shelved. The company had hit the motherlode and moved quickly to capitalise on their newfound success with Gothic horror. A letter from Hammer’s chairman James Carreras to Eliot Hyman of the company’s then American financiers Associated Artists Productions about the forthcoming release of Frankenstein ended with “p.s. Dracula?” That was in July 1957 and by early November the team behind The Curse of Frankenstein – director Terence Fisher, writer Jimmy Sangster, photographer Jack Asher, designer Bernard Robinson and stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (composer James Bernard and editor James Needs would be added in due course) – were back at Bray Studios working on their new adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel.
From the very first shot, of blood spattering in glorious Technicolor across Dracula’s sarcophagus, Hammer were signalling that this would be a very take on Dracula from the stodgy Universal version. Sangster’s script makes enough changes to the novel to rattle the cages of particularly sensitive purists, but his stripped-down, no-nonsense take pares down action to Hammer’s now familiar version of the Carpathians that looks, feels and sounds just like the Home Countries. In 1885, Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) travels to up a new post as librarian to Count Dracula (Lee). Arriving at the Count’s castle, he’s startled to find a terrified young woman (Valerie Gaunt) begging for help. Dracula eventually greets Harker, unaware that he isn’t a librarian at all but rather a vampire slayer come to destroy the Count. When the frightened woman later turns out also be a vampire, Harker narrowly escapes being bitten but isn’t so lucky when he tracks Dracula and his bride to their tomb and hesitates too long before staking the woman. A few days later, Harker’s associate Doctor Van Helsing (Cushing) arrives in the nearby town of Klausenburg looking for him and finds that Dracula has left his castle, en route to Harker’s hometown of Karlstadt where he sets his sights on Harker’s fiancée Lucy Holmwood (Carol Marsh). Despite the best efforts of Van Helsing, Arthur Holmwood (Michael Gough) and his wife Mina (Melissa Stribling), Lucy is bitten by Dracula and returns as a vampire. And now, Dracula turns his attentions to Mina…
The stripped back simplicity of Sangster’s script keeps things barrelling along nicely. He keeps only the barest bones of Stoker’s original, switching characters around (there’s no room for Renfield in this version, Harker becomes an undercover accomplice of Van Helsing’s, posing as a librarian to get close to Dracula and the three vampire brides are stripped down to just one, but Valerie Gaunt’s performance is so wonderfully sensuous you just won’t care) and leaving out all the backwards and forwards between Whitby, Hampstead and the continent.
This new dynamism works to the benefit of the two leads, reunited from The Curse of Frankenstein and proving to even more memorable here than in the earlier film. Lee is simply magnificent in the title role and for many of us he remains the definitive screen Dracula, his Count alternately charming and raging. He brought a brooding sensuality to the role, female victims swooning before him as much from desire as terror yet switching from literally hypnotic seducer to feral monster in the blink of an eye. His sudden appearance in a doorway, blood smeared around his snarling mouth, as he finds the vampire woman attempting to bite Harker is one of the key moments in the Hammer filmography, as startling a shock as any in their long filmography. Lee’s physicality is used to remarkable effect throughout. When Harker first arrives at the castle, Dracula takes him to his room, the 6ft 4in Lee towers over him, gliding up the stairs two at a time carrying his visitor’s luggage and leaving the notably shorter Harker to scurry along in his wake.
He’s matched scene for scene by Peter Cushing as a more athletic and assertive Van Helsing than we were perhaps used to. Unlike Edward Van Sloan’s rather fusty old academic in the Tod Browning film, this Van Helsing is a man of science, likening vampirism to drug addiction, dismissing as myth the ability of the vampire to transform into a bat (though this is soundly ignored in the sequels) and recording his thoughts on new-fangled phonographic rolls. Obsessive and driven, he can often seem almost as disquieting as his adversary though he’s also very human – his reaction to Dracula’s climactic meltdown in the dawn’s rays is as horrified as the audiences. He’s resourceful too, not needing the gaggle of assistants he had in the book and the Universal film – after Harker is disposed of, he’s more or less a one-man band with only Michael Gough’s wet blanket Arthur on hand to assist, and seems to be able to deal with Dracula quite well on his own.
The iconic ending was thanks in no small part to Cushing who had grown tired of Van Helsing magicking up another crucifix from the pockets of his coat and suggested the unforgettable finale, Van Helsing haring along a table, leaping onto the curtains, tearing them down and forcing an agonised Dracula back into the deadly rays of the morning sun with an improvised cross fashioned from a pair of candlesticks. The pairing of Lee and Cushing proved as popular as it had in The Curse of Frankenstein though they weren’t together for the first of Hammer’s sequels to Dracula, the even better The Brides of Dracula (1960) (David Peel is Lee’s replacement). Lee returned, without Cushing, for Dracula Prince of Darkness (1966), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969) and Scars of Dracula (1970) before they were reunited for Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973). Cushing went it alone for the horror/martial arts hybrid The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) with James Forbes-Robertson making a poor stand-in for Lee.
Hammer’s Dracula signalled a break from the conventions of the past and built on the foundations laid by The Curse of Frankenstein to completely revamp the public’s perception of screen horror and to worry away at the edges of what was acceptable to the British Board of Film Censors. This was a Dracula as erotic as he was terrifying, alternately icily appealing and terrifyingly ferocious. It established Lee and Cushgin as the era’s pre-eminent horror stars and proved that Fisher’s masterly direction of Frankenstein had been no one-off fluke – here was a director who seemed to be in his element, creating a Gothic fairy tale world from next to nothing (though Universal stumped up more money for Dracula than they’d lavished on The Curse of Frankenstein it was still a measly amount quite belied by the film’s gorgeous sets and photography.)
For many years a slightly longer cut was talked about in hushed tones by fans and historians, an alternate version supposedly created for the more lenient Japanese market. In truth what happened was that Hammer shot their version and the BBFC snipped footage out that the Japanese were allowed to see unmolested. Over the years the censored British cut became the default version and the uncut version became the stuff of legend. But in March 2009, Simon Rowson and his wife Michiko tracked down a slightly damaged Japanese print in The National Film Centre in Tokyo and many of the cut scenes – often very short though the restoration of Dracula’s death is a real eye-opener – were restored for blu-ray release.
The EOFFTV Review 