Terence Fisher's "Horror of Dracula" 1958

Count Dracula was resurrected once again in 1958, to commence yet another  extremely successful and prolific cycle of horror films, this time across the Atlantic at Britain's Hammer Studios.

Titled Dracula in Britain and released as The Horror of Dracula in the United States, I shall refer to the film as The Horror of Dracula from here on in, because the copy I have used was the so titled US release, and also as a matter of convenience, to distinguish it from two of the other films I have written about - Dracula (1931) and Dracula (1979). Timing was critically important for the success of The Horror of Dracula (1958), where social factors directed both the film makers' capacity for and the public response to a dramatically changed reinterpretation and production of the familiar story.

 David Pirie in his book The Vampire Cinema[1] sets out a cultural history of the factors leading up Hammer Studios production of its first vampire film, The Horror of Dracula and the subsequent cycle of horror that followed. According to Pirie, the move in Britain towards a successful production studio dedicated to a graphic revamping of gothic horror's old themes of sexual perversion, disease and violence (and capable of withstanding the expected public criticism in a way that Hollywood never was and arguably never will be), can be traced back  to a BBC television series called The Quatermass Experiment.

 

Directed by Rudolph Cartier and written by Nigel Kneale, the series consisted of  six episodes and was televised in 1953. The plot concerns a failed space exploration mission that returned one survivor to earth, a survivor who was transformed into a monster. The series was commissioned by the BBC, capitalising on a post-war wave of science fiction writing. This element is crucial in the eventual revamping (please excuse the pun) of the Dracula story, as the familiar role of science as a credible, paternal, authoritative figurehead within the plot was turned on its head as a result of changing social discourses.

 

The building of the atomic bomb by scientists and the damage it caused during World War Two changed the public's perception of the role of science, as was reflected in the consequent science fiction boom, where authors like HG Wells and (scientists) Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke wrote of a future where humans suffer the abuses of science, like the atomic genie which could not be stuffed back into the bottle.

 The Quatermass Experiment proved a vital link between this paradigm in science fiction and gothic horror, the man-monster character reminiscent of the Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, even his name 'Victor' echoing the Dr Frankenstein whose Promethean science produced such appalling results. The Quatermass Experiment had a gothic flavour in mis-en-scene also, filmed in part in Westmister Abbey. Hammer Films, hoping to capitalise on the series' success on TV, released the film version, entitled The Quatermass Xperiment in 1954. The "X" eagerly predicted it's X rating, and obviously sought to capitalise on the anticipated publicity.

 

The box office results were far better than expected, and Hammer followed it up with X the Unknown (1956) in which the fusion of gothic and science fiction genres was further emphasised.  The next film from Hammer started production in that same year, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) in which the classic creature of the Shelley novel and the Universal cycle of horror was reincarnated in a newly bloody and gory manner. Whilst the science fiction element of Hammer Films' recent successes was minimised, the discourse of science and the consequences of its immoral use for evil purposes remained. The Curse of Frankenstein also brought together for the first time the Hammer team of director Terence Fisher, screen writer Jimmy Sangster and actors Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

 Following the international triumph of The Curse of Frankenstein, Columbia Pictures contracted Hammer Films to make three films a year. When Universal Studios decided not to cash in on the growing public interest in horror films, and instead turn over the copyright on all its horror films to be remade by Hammer who would be more single-minded in purpose, the next logical step for Hammer was to reincarnate the creature that had so successfully partnered Frankenstein's monster through the Universal cycle: Dracula.

 Another social factor which would prove significant in the 1958 reinterpretation of the Dracula story was the marketing phenonmenon relating to youth. Hammer Films was naturally aware of the boom in 'teen flicks' in the United States which produced such box office smashes as Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Rock Around the Clock (1956), Tammy and the Bachelor (1957), Pat Boone hits Bernadine (1957) and April Love (1957) and King Creole (1958).

 

S.S. Prawer, in Caligari's Children, his book on horror films, notes the policy of Hammer Films to engage a youthful audience in what he calls "…a Britain newly orientated towards youth"[2], an re-orientation primarily built on the development of rock and roll culture and the disposable income of teenagers and young adults. Peter Cushing as the familiar figure of Van Helsing for example tells us that "the victims consciously detest being dominated by vampirism, but are unable to relinquish the practice, similar to the addiction to drugs" putting into the foreground a cultural preoccupation that was very much perceived to be related to youth.

 Thus Hammer Films had the recipe for success, and The Horror of Dracula gleefully announced itself as a more horrific remake with fashionable appeal. The look of the film from its opening sequence is branded with a new style for the modern audience – gone are the repulsive creature analogies of Nosferatu and antiquated props of Dracula (1931), gone is the staginess of Browning's interpretation and the looming cobwebby monster horror that Bela Lugosi portrayed so well.

 

Instead we are greeted with a smooth and hip Count Dracula, whose style is sleek, elegant and contemporary (a modernity that is epitomised for Nina Auerbach by his "portable white travelling coffin"[3]) and who is most dramatically distinguished from his black and white forerunners in the first few seconds of The Horror of Dracula. Colour was the one thing that Hammer Films could offer that no version of Dracula before had been able to produce, and as if in grisly celebration the blood is a shocking red, brighter than life and splattered across the screen in what was to become Hammer's unashamed trademark of terror.

 

Throughout the film, this brilliant crimson plays an important role in symbolic or metaphoric imagery. Jonathan Harker's diary is highlighted, as are themes of sexuality (Lucy's lips), decadence (Dracula's bloodshot eyes) and blood is seen brightly dripping from vampires' hungry mouths and Van Helsing's sodden hands. Particularly in the film's credit sequence, the splatters of blood (likened by Auerbach to the work of Jackson Pollock[4]) are completely gratuitous and no explanation is made for its presence. It is simply the bold announcement of what colour can do for horror, a promise of things to come.

 With a script written by Jimmy Sangster, this interpretation of the novel is altered in several ways to condense the plot and enhance the horror. Being already the third major reworking of Bram Stoker's novel (not to mention the numerous spin-off films in which the character of Count Dracula was featured in other plots), and appealing largely to what was considered an increasingly media savvy younger generation, it was assumed that most people going in to see the film would already know the basics of vampire lore.

 

It was deemed unnecessary to explain the existence and motivations of Count Dracula to the movie-going audience of 1958, and therefore innappropriate to draw out the revelation  that he is in fact a vampire. The character of Jonathan Harker, in this version is not like the innocent Hutter with whom we journey to Transylvania in Nosferatu, nor the  naïve figure in Dracula (1931).

 

According to Sangster's script, Harker comes to Dracula's castle only ostensibly as a librarian (and therefore in some capacity still a representative of Britain and its culture) but in reality as a vampire hunter, equipped with both the knowledge and the tools to destroy the creature. In keeping with this new interpretation, Harker is older too than the young solicitor of Stoker's novel. However, he is still essentially wishy-washy and ineffectual, and as a result entirely disposable and quickly disposed of.

Sangster's script also makes several other important changes to the methodology of vampire hunting which set the scene for major changes to vampire lore. The success of The Horror of Dracula meant Sangster's rituals were entrenched in the modern day mythology of vampires, particularly in the cinema, and the influence of these changes in seen throughout the Hammer cycle of Dracula films and beyond. We find for example that alongside the usual vampire killing means (like the Catholic rituals emphasised by Bram Stoker, or the superstitions with their origins in ancient Eastern Europe like garlic, or stakes through the heart),  the sun is given in Sangster's script a new significance and becomes Dracula's primary adversary and the most powerful weapon in destroying vampires.

 The oldest vampire lore has always indicated the nocturnal existence of the creature (and its relationship to the bat, who also lies sleeping by day). Stoker's novel remained faithful to this idea, and limited the power of Count Dracula in daylight. (Stoker writes that Dracula can "… direct the elements; the storm, the fog, the thunder; can command the meaner things: the rat and the owl, and the bat…. and he can at times vanish and become unknown"[5], but "… his power ceases, as does that of all evil things, at the coming of the day."[6]).

 

F.W. Murnau's film expanded on this theme and used the sun to kill his vampire Nosferatu, but Max Shreck's dissolution is underplayed. Murnau admittedly was himself limited in the technical options available to him at that time, but the inference is one of a weakened state, of fading, of dissipation. The sun seemed to have even less effect on Bela Lugosi's portrayal of Dracula in Dracula (1931). Mina claims that "the daylight stopped him" from conquering her, but clearly in this Tod Browing / Garrett Fort version daylight is just a resistant force, and the vampire needs to be staked through the heart to be defeated. And even then we are cheated out of the sort of climactic, dramatic demise that The Horror of Dracula finally brought to the screen.

The death of Christopher Lee's Count Dracula is fittingly spectacular, fulfilling the the promise of Hammer Films to create a new, bloody horror from the old tale. With both Lee and Peter Cushing bringing a fresh athleticism and sense of vigorous adventure to the chase, the final confrontation once again emphasises the relationship between Dracula and Van Helsing as worthy opponents. They tussle and struggle, and finally Van Helsing (like most of the popular modern action heroes to follow him in his quest to defeat evil) uses his intelligence and initiative as well. He throws down the drapes and floods the room in sunlight, and Dracula is burned, both by the physicality of what Van Helsing describes as his "allergy" to the light, as well as his replusion to the symbolic meaning of light, that is, its opposition to the evil that this Dracula represents.

The battle between  Van Helsing and Dracula is an aesthetic ballet uniting symbolism with physicality to set in place the new vampire tradition Hammer Films had promised. The legacy of ancient vampire killers remains, as we see Van Helsing for example making the shape of a cross from two candlesticks, and using this to weaken his adversary. More importantly, the scorching, burning death of Dracula harks back to reports of  the earliest recorded vampire hunters such as those described by William of Newburgh (as discussed in my introductory section) as well as creating a new material existence for the vampire which must obey certain physical laws (if not the laws of physics). Nina Auerbach in her book Our Vampires, Ourselves[7] describes this as a "… loss of metaphysical signification… steeping him in a physical empiricism that will define him throughout the century"[8].

 Whilst the novel and past films have acknowledged Van Helsing as a natural opponent to Dracula, the pair representing the polarities of good and evil, of darkness and light, of science and the supernatural and so forth, The Horror of Dracula for the first time builds up Van Helsing as a real action hero - swift, agile and quick thinking. He is younger (again in an appeal to the younger generation of movie-goers that were to catapult this film to such box office success), and a completely revised representative of science and its authority.

 

Neither foreign like Lawrence Olivier's Van Helsing in Dracula (1979) or a father figure as portrayed in Dracula (1931), this Van Helsing has been very much created for the audience to relate to. The representatives of British society and its legal authority (librarian Harker, family man Seward, the ineffectual policeman and the corrupt border guard) are all either too weak or too ignorant to fight the vampire, and completely incapable of commanding the authority that the hero Van Helsing does. In Lucy's tomb, the blood on Van Helsing's hands not only takes a metaphoric responsibility for her death, but is also a bright reminder of his role as the sole vampire killer with the wits, the strength and the courage to do the dirty work himself.  

 The various cinematic representations of Bram Stoker's Dracula as well as the novel itself have invited recurrent complaints from conservative critics of the day regarding sexual taboos. These concern practices outside the socially accepted so-called norm', which through the medium of fantasy the audience are allowed to glimpse. Over time, the vampire in many ways has represented promiscuity, polygamy, homosexuality. Nosferatu alluded to an adulterous, inter-racial liaison which for the audience at that time would have been contemporary social pre-occupation. Dracula (1931) used the inherent sexuality of the act of vampirism to defy the strict Hayes Production Code and hint at homoeroticism and voracious sexual behaviour. The Horror of Dracula, in accordance with its promise to provide a newly horrific revival of the vampire, also gives us the insinuation of more sexual taboos.

 

Lucy is shown as being a female sexual predator, enticing a small child, Tania into the woods, luring her with the promise "I know somewhere nice and quiet where we can play", while the film's audience is perfectly aware that her intentions are for a far more devious and harmful kind of 'play'. Later on, a scene from the Stoker novel is reinterpreted with Lucy approaching not her financee Jonathan but instead her brother Arthur, whispering "let me kiss you". The hero Van Helsing is there on both occasions to preserve the sexual taboo, but nonetheless the inference is that such is the vampiric amorality that she would stop at nothing to have her visceral urges satisfied.

 The theme of disease is worked through in this version of the Dracula story as well, though in a different way from the symbolic analogies to the spread of Plague and venereal diesase as discussed in earlier sections. In The Horror of Dracula the attack of the vampire results in his victim being a bedridden invalid by day, growing sicker and more needy for Dracula's return each night, deprivation causing frantic withdrawals which echo Van Helsing's description of the malady as  "similar to the addiction to drugs". Ultimately, like an addiction to drugs, The Horror of Dracula demonstrates that it is vampirism which attacks the family from the inside, and in doing so challenges the patriarchy whose power exists on the foundations of a family with clearly defined sexual roles.

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[1] Pirie, David: The Vampire Cinema: Galley Press: London, 1977

[2] Prawer, SS: Caligari's Children – The Film as Tale of Terror: De Capo Press: New York, 1980 p246

[3] Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995 p 120

[4] Ibid p120

[5] Stoker, Bram: Dracula: Puffin Books: London, 1986 p 283

[6] Ibid p 287

[7] Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

[8] Ibid p 121