The Kiss of the Vampire was Hammer’s first non-Dracula/Van Helsing vampire film though it had its roots in Anthony Hinds’ abandoned Dracula III script which Hinds repurposed here, using his usual pseudonym John Elder, and co-opted an opening scene written for The Brides of Dracula (1960) by Jimmy Sangster but not used as well as rescuing the original ending of the that film that Peter Cushing had felt was inappropriate.
Hammer certainly knew how to do an arresting opening scene and here we have that rescued Sangster moment where a tearful Professor Zimmer (a terrific performance from Clifford Evans) striding up to the funeral of his vampirised daughter and driving a spade into the coffin from which issues a frightful scream and a gush of blood. The bulk of the story follows newly-weds Gerald (Edward de Souza) and Marianne Harcourt (Jennifer Daniel) who are pootling about Europe on their honeymoon aboard their new-fangled motor car. When they run out of petrol, they finds themselves stranded in a small town where the vampire Dr Ravna (Noel Willman) and his acolytes are terrorising the locals. Ravna sets his sights on Marianne and invites the couple to a masked ball where the other guests including his family, are all vampires, After getting Harcourt drunk they abduct Marianne and prepare to induct her into their coven of the undead. Harcourt turns for help from the heavy-drinking Zimmer who prepares to unleash a swarm of bats from Hell itself as Harcourt rushes to retrieve Marianne before her induction ceremony can be completed.
The Kiss of the Vampire was an early attempt by Hammer to ring the changes when it comes to vampirism. Though the vampire still feed on blood, and spread their curse though the traditional bite, the origins of Ravna and his family are slightly muddied. It takes its cue from a brief remark in The Brides of Dracula about vampirism being linked to lifestyle choices, something akin to both a sexually and socially transmitted disease. “She was riddled with disease,” Zimmer says of his daughter after she returned to him following a dalliance with Ravna and his acolytes, “and she was a vampire.” There’s also a throwaway line from Ravna about a failed experiment that isn’t picked up on or developed.
As well as the bits of business referenced above, The Kiss of the Vampire owes other debts to The Brides of Dracula, including a scene where Ravna’s young recruit Tania (Isobel Black) coos soothingly to Zimmer’s daughter in her grave (“why have you not been to see us my sweet? You must know how much we’ve missed you”) and is only prevented from removing the restraining shaft of the spade when Zimmer suddenly turns up. He then has to cauterise the wound on his suddenly very rubbery forearm by setting it alight after Tania sinks her fangs into it, just as Cushing had to burn the infection out of his neck in the earlier film. Evans is great as the doomy, Welsh-accented savant and makes for a fine Van Helsing stand in, resourceful, knowledgeable and almost as scary in his intensity as Ravna – to be fair, Noel Willman’s vampire lord is a rather lethargic representative of the undead.
Indeed if there’s a fault here, it’s that Ravna and his followers are a disappointingly dreary and unmemorable bunch, except for Isobel Black who makes for one of Hammer’s most ferocious and sexually charged vampires. To compensate Edward de Souza and Jennifer Daniel are stronger young leads than usual, de Souza making the most of the brief touch of The Lady Vanishes (1938) about his frantic search for his wife that no-one accepts existed. There are some lovely supporting performances too, especially those from Vera Cook and Peter Madden as the grieving hotel keepers who we learn are Tania’s heart-broken parents.
Behind the camera, Hammer newcomer Don Sharp (he later did The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964) and Rasputin the Mad Monk (1966) for them) brings some nicely inventive touches to his direction, like the cut from Anna the landlady’s tear-stained face to a torrential downpour outside. And his staging of the death-by-swarm-of-bats finale is terrific. The bats, both animated and physical, are crudely realised (like all Hammer bats, these have the ability to hover over potential victims, something their swift moving real-life counterparts aren’t exactly known for) but the scene still packs a hell of a punch. The massacre of an entire coven is so much better than the killing of Meinster a couple of vampire brides would have been, so it was fortuitous that Cushing objected so strongly and allowed the scene to be transplanted here. Bernard Robinson again worked wonders on a limited budget to create some gorgeous sets that serve to emphasise the decadence of Ravna and his followers and the film is sumptuously shot Alan Hume who was taking a break with Hammer from the work on the Carry On series – he later helped to emulate the Hammer look in Carry on Screaming! (1966).
For American television, two of Hammer’s early 60s films were padded out with new material and had some of the violence and sexuality drastically toned down. The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) would suffer the same fate, but The Kiss of the Vampire probably came off worse. The film was needlessly retitled Kiss of Evil, and Carl Esmond, Virginia Gregg, Horst Ebersberg, Sheilah Wells and Walter Friedel appeared in newly minted footage as the Stangher family and friends who spend their time bickering, discussing the events of the story, and sewing ceremonial robes for Ravna and his coven without ever once of course interacting wit any of the rest of the character. This bowdlerised version which removes almost every trace of blood and reduces the climactic bat attack to a single shot of the swarm descending on the castle, showed up on British television too in the early 1970s.
The Kiss of the Vampire is a fine early experiment from Hammer, showing that they didn’t need to rely solely on Dracula for their vampire thrills. They wouldn’t make another Dracula-free vampire film for another seven years, until they released The Vampire Lovers (1970) but Kiss laid the foundations that the company would build on far more in the 1970s.
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