Original title: Ibulong mo sa hangin

Gerardo de León was already a long-serving veteran of Filipino cinema by 1959 when he made the science fiction/horror film Terror Is a Man, often lumped in with the Blood Island films though in truth it’s more of a standalone riff on the theme of The Island of Dr Moreau. Over the next decade or more, sometimes alone, sometimes in collaboration with Eddie Romero, de León directed a string of genre and exploitation films, of which Curse of the Vampires (sometimes known as Blood of the Vampires) is one of the very best. It’s a surprisingly sober Gothic horror with not a mad scientist or mutant jungle-dwelling monster in sight, influenced more by Hammer, the Corman Poes and Mario Bava, that unholy trinity of 60s Gothic cinema.

Aristocratic patriarch Don Enrique Escudero (Johnny Monteiro) is nearing the end of his life but still struggling to keep the terrible family secret – he believes the family to be cursed and is forced to keep the body of his deceased wife (Mary Walter) locked up in the basement because she won’t remain at rest and keeps getting up to attack locals. His efforts to keep the curse under wraps is complicated by the arrival of his adult children, Eduardo (Eddie Garcia) and – spot the Poe influence – Lenore (Amalia Fuentes). They’re horrified to discover what has become of the mother they thought long dead and for Eduardo it gets worse still when she bites him, passing on the curse and transforming him into a vampire. He’s soon gathered a harem of undead local women and murders Don Enrique after he finally runs her through with a stake. As he turns his attentions to Lenore, it’s up to her husband Daniel (Romeo Vasquez) to save her – even if that means returning from the dead as a sword-wilding ghost…

That part of the plot all too readily dismissed as “soap opera” is actually a committed, if not entirely successful, attempt to stir into the mix some elements of a family melodrama in Gothic finery. It’s not treated as something extraneous to the plot, something simply to make up the time and get the film over the feature length line, but an integral part of the plot. That it doesn’t quite work is neither here nor there – it’s treated seriously and with the importance it deserves, not as some “soapy” add-on.

It suffers the usual flaws of a 1960s Filipino horror film – the occasional questionable acting choice, an over-emphatic score that’s often blaring in your face when it needed to be a bit more subtle, an unflattering English dub, certain pacing issues – but it gets more things right than most. It’s beautifully shot and lit by Mike Accion who one suspects had studied Bava’s films particularly closely, skilfully mimicking his characteristic washes of primary colour. De León peppers the story and the sets with a profusion of Catholic icons and symbols, not really a surprise given that the Philippines is such a staunchly Catholic country, and the religion is an important strand in the film, not merely a device with which to defeat the monsters at the climax – in the impressive finals, Eduardo and his vampire brides are trapped in the hacienda by religious iconography and left to burn, Lenore and Daniel reuniting in the afterlife, Wuthering Heights style.

It’s a surprisingly moving film in many respects and that’s largely down to the acting. Garcia in particular is excellent, his reactions to seeing his undead mother rise from her coffin for the first time, or his later transformation into another vampire being highlights in a film full of strong performances (inevitably compromised by the English dub.) And de León and his screenwriters Ben Feleo and Pierre L. Salas go to some lengths to establish that, no matter what kind of monster his wife has become, the grieving and tormented Don Eduardo still loves her deeply and misses the woman she once was. It’s an unexpected nuance that makes the film all the more enjoyable.

You won’t have to look too far to find much better vampire films being made in the 1960s, but Curse of the Vampires is a solid, occasionally very stylish, addition to the Gothic canon though not without its flaws and oddities – in a sign of the times there are characters who turn up for no good reason in black face. But it’s several cuts above the usual standards of Filipino horror and is far and away the best of De León’s genre films. He’d tried out some of the ideas seen here in the energetic and likable Kulay dugo ang gabi/The Blood Drinkers (1964) and the two films would make a fine double bill. Curse of the Vampires is a simpler, more coherent story than that told in its predecessor and is all the better for it. It certainly stands head and shoulders over its US double bill made, Eddie Romero’s concluding chapter in the Blood Island trilogy, Beast of Blood (1970).