Original title: Dracula cerca sangue di vergine … e morì di sete!!!

No sooner had Paul Morrisey finished work on Flesh for Frankenstein than he started work on its companion piece, Blood for Dracula. There would be no 3D this time, no entrails waved in the faces of the audience or internal organs appearing to float out of the screen. In these films, it’s all relative but it’s a more restrained and interesting film than its companion piece. Like Frankenstein, it was given a spurious connection to Morrissey’s associate Andy Warhol (it was released in the States as Andy Warhol’s Dracula though the artist had nothing to do with the film), and once again Antonio Margheriti ended up with his name attached to Italian prints to help with quota regulations (producer Carlo Ponti and Margheriti would end up in court facing accusations of “continued and aggravated fraud against the state” for their skulduggery).

Several cast members return from the earlier film, including Udo Kier who this time plays a sickly, ailing and often quite pathetic Dracula who, in the early 1920s and finding himself in much reduced circumstances, is forced to flee his home in Transylvania to Catholic Italy in search of the increasingly elusive virgin’s blood he needs to survive (the wordy Italian title translates as the surprisingly accurate Dracula is Searching for Virgins’ Blood … and He’s Dying of Thirst!!!. Accompanied by his faithful manservant Anton (Arno Juerging), Dracula is taken in by Il Marchese di Fiore (Vittorio de Sica), a down-at-heel Italian aristocrat who is looking for a nobleman willing to marry one of his four daughters. Unbeknownst to Dracula, di Fiore and his wife La Marchesa (Maxime McKendry), two of the daughters, Saphiria (Dominique Darel) and Rubinia (Stefania Casini) have been paying regular nocturnal visits to horny Marxist handyman Mario (Joe Dallesandro), leaving the supposedly plain Esmeralda (Milena Vukotic) and the 14-year-old Perla (played by 23-year-old Silvia Dionisio) as virgins. Dracula discovers this when he tries to drink the “tainted” blood of Saphiria and Rubinia and has a violent reaction but still enslaves them using his telepathic powers. When Mario realises who Dracula is, he rapes Perla to “protect” her and sets off after Dracula armed with an axe…

From its striking opening shot, of Dracula applying make-up and darkening his hair to restore a semblance of youth, apparently in front of a mirror though the camera pulls back to reveal that he, of course, has no reflection, to the wildly silly climax that anticipates the Black Knight scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Blood for Dracula is a much better crafted film than Flesh for Frankenstein. It still has its florid touches – Dracula regurgitating contaminated blood in the bathroom or his climactic dismemberment for example – but Morrissey displays a way with atmosphere that was almost entirely missing from Frankenstein. In this regard he’s aided immeasurably the sumptuous photography of Luigi Kuveiller and a gorgeous score from Claudio Gizzi, both returning from Flesh for Frankenstein, and by the crumbling environs of the di Fiore home (filmed at Villa Parisi near Rome, which also featured in Elio Scardamaglia’s La lama nel corpo/The Murder Clinic (1966), Mario Bava’s Il rosso segno della follia/Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970), Mario Landi’s Patrick vive ancora/Patrick Still Lives (1980), and many others) which serves as a perfect visual metaphor for the decaying of the family’s fortunes.

It’s also, in many ways, a funnier film than Flesh for Frankenstein. Some of the performances provoke hilarity because they’re so awful, but much of the dialogue is funnier too. There’s nothing here that’s stood the test of time like the oft-misquoted “to know death, Otto, you must fuck life in the gall bladder” but there’s still plenty of genuinely funny dialogue, often the petulant whining of Dracula (“If you really were clever, Anton, you would bring me a virgin from Italy and I wouldn’t have to go”), the inane observations of Anton (“I’m sure they’re religious, they have a nice house”) or the boorish, political diatribes from Mario, amusingly delivered by Dallesandro with no attempt to disguise his American accent.

And yet for all that, there’s a palpable air of melancholy about the proceedings. He may well be a whining, self-pitying misogynistic, but Keir’s enfeebled and increasingly desperate Dracula elicits a surprising amount of sympathy. He is, of course, his own worst enemy but he cuts such a tragic figure that it’s hard not to feel at least a pang of empathy for his situation. Far less sympathetic is Mario who’s rapacious interest in the underage Perla is evident even before he thinks it’s OK to force himself on her in order to keep her from Dracula’s clutches (“I’d like to rape the hell out of her”).

Morrissey later recalled that it was Roman Polanski who suggested that he was the right director to make a 3D Frankenstein film and perhaps to reward him, he casts the director in a small role here, as a manure-spreader Anton meets in the local pub, accompanied by Gérard Brach and Andrew Braunsberg as indeed Polanski invariably was professionally at the time. The other acting director de Sica (credited as Victoria de Sica on some prints) is said to have rewritten his own lines and he certainly relishes them, never more so when trying out Dracula’s name for size and concluding “just the right amount of orient and occident, of reality and fantasy”

Blood for Dracula and Flesh for Frankenstein opened in the same year as Mel Brook’s marvellous Young Frankenstein and were part of a strange little subset of comedies invoking the good names of the “classic monsters” that all appeared within a few years of each other – see also Frankenstein all’italiana/Frankenstein: A Love Story (1974), Vampira (1974), Tendre Dracula (1974), Dracula père et fils/Dracula Father and Son  (1976) and later Love at First Bite (1979). Today the film’s enjoy an understandable cult following though it’s usually the showier, gorier and more – literally – in your face Frankenstein that tends to get most of the love. But Dracula is the more interesting film – better made (not being saddled with the need to wave things at the 3D camera helps), more atmospheric but less offensive and wildly inappropriate.

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