DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1966)
Director Terence Fisher revives Christopher Lee’s Dracula for Hammer’s lush, atmospheric sequel.
Released on a double-bill with another highly regarded Hammer classic, Plague of the Zombies (1966), Dracula Prince of Darkness was one of a package of films that Hammer produced in association with 20th Century Fox, Associated British and Seven-Arts. This recently signed combined contract ensured that Hammer remained in production throughout 1965 and 1966. Fox would release the films in the American market while the deal with Associated British would see Hammer product released through their ABC chain of cinemas. In the summer of 1965, with Elstree unavailable, Hammer’s four films were squeezed into the modest stages of Bray Studios, keeping the facility busy at a time when it was becoming increasingly expensive to run.
Producer Anthony Nelson Keys wisely saw the economic sense of making Dracula Prince of Darkness back to back, from late Spring to mid-Summer, with Rasputin — The Mad Monk, using the same sets and a repertory company of actors in both films. Similarly two lower budget films, Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile, both filmed during the late summer of 1965, shared the redressed sets and several actors. Hammer had experimented with double-bills for some time, making profitable use of standing sets for a number of productions. The box office success, in 1964, of their last double-bill The Gorgon and The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb indicated that the approach could still pay dividends while saving money. (1)
As Hammer’s first proper sequel to the phenomenally successful Dracula (1958), in that it featured Christopher Lee returning to play the title character, Dracula Prince of Darkness had its origins in writer Jimmy Sangster’s original sequel The Revenge of Dracula (aka Dracula the Damned), written shortly after the success of his adaptation of Dracula in 1958. According to Sangster he was paid for the script but it was shelved primarily because of Lee’s continuing reluctance to play the part again and with producer Anthony Hinds unaware that “Lee was playing even harder to get than Tony thought.” (2).
Some elements of Sangster’s script found their way into Brides of Dracula (1960), a sequel of sorts that didn’t feature Lee or Dracula per se and focused on vampire hunter Van Helsing. It was co-written by Peter Bryan, Edward Percy, an uncredited Anthony Hinds, and allegedly with input from lead actor Peter Cushing. The screenplay for Dracula Prince of Darkness is credited to John Sansom, Sangster using his pen name as way of distancing himself from the Gothic horror he was already “fed up with” after a fruitful period of writing Hammer’s psychological thrillers, and John Elder, the pseudonym of producer-writer Anthony Hinds. (3) Hinds had, according to David Pirie, cooked up a suitable story for a sequel and Hammer offered Sangster £3,000 to develop the script. (4)
“I was going through a form of nervous breakdown.”
Lee was eventually persuaded to return to the role after seven years for a number of related reasons. A three year tax-exile in Switzerland hadn’t proved quite as lucrative as he’d thought and despite completing a number of European productions and making the journey back to Hammer to occasionally co-star in the likes of The Pirates of Blood River (1962), The Gorgon (1964) and She (1965), he decided to return to England on a permanent basis in 1965. Lee commented at the time: “it appeared that what little I had gained was being thrown away by the restrictions on my freedom to work. I was going through a form of nervous breakdown.” (5) Hammer also promised him a substantial star vehicle as recompense for agreeing to risk further typecasting as the Count and that was the offer to take the eponymous role in Rasputin — The Mad Monk when he arrived at Bray in April 1965 to start shooting.
Various stories circulate as to why Dracula, and therefore Lee, has no dialogue throughout the entire film. Lee maintained that the dialogue was so bad that he refused to perform it and it was removed from the script entirely, whereas Sangster, in his memoirs states that: “I didn’t write him any dialogue. Chris Lee has claimed that he refused to speak the lines he was given. Or you can take my word for it. I didn’t write any.” (6) However, according to the BFI’s Screenonline, another reason for the lack of lines was mooted as “internal memos show his agreement to record a TV trailer for the production with extremely poor lines, suggesting that the decision to play the part silent was taken by Fisher.” (7) While the television ad does give Lee several lines, it was actually shot at Bray in December 1965, many months after the film had completed shooting, so this notion doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny. Fisher indeed confirmed that Lee was never given any dialogue in the film in the first place and “said that giving the Count no dialogue conferred a screen presence that would be destroyed if he spoke.” (8)
After Fisher had read the script and approved a few changes with Hinds and Sangster, as per usual Hammer was required to submit their script in March 1965 to the BBFC, prior to shooting. Their relationship with the censor had soured considerably during the making of The Curse of the Werewolf (1961). Hammer had struggled to get the film accepted by the Board and were awarded an X rating after it demanded heavy cuts to the film’s violence and gore. The film remained in a trimmed version until these sequences were eventually restored for a 1994 BBC television broadcast. Producer Nelson Keys sent the script of Dracula Prince of Darkness for approval, seeking an X certificate and commented to the BBFC, “I think I have borne in mind all your past comments about our scripts. I have made a point of keeping out any sex and violence.” (9)
BBFC reader Frank Crofts dismissed the script as “a silly piece of cack”, and snootily upbraided Hammer for inconsistencies in their use of vampire mythology, claiming of the titular vampire “once destroyed he cannot be revived.”(10) Secretary of the Board John Trevelyan informed producer Nelson Keys that it would need to take great care about a number of scenes in the film. He wrote to Hammer with his concerns about the film’s much vaunted ritual murder that revives Dracula (a decapitation in the original script was eventually dropped but Keys asked “I hope you will have no objection to him hanging upside down”); the use of screams and excessive blood; Dracula’s throttling of one of the other male characters; a character eating live flies (the Renfield-like Ludwig played by Thorley Walters) and the staking of Helen, played by Barbara Shelley. Although it was lifted from Bram Stoker’s original novel, he was also concerned about a “sadistic and quite disgusting” scene, where Dracula seduces Diana (Suzan Farmer) into drinking his blood from a self-inflicted wound in his chest, and wanted it removed entirely. (11) Keys assured Trevelyan about his objections and most of the scenes were toned down.
Barbara Shelley swallowed one of her fangs.
Budgeted at £102,669, Dracula Prince of Darkness commenced a six week shoot at Bray on 26 April 1965 under the working title of Dracula 3 with director Terence Fisher shooting on four stages for the interiors and on the backlot, where production designer Bernard Robinson erected the front of Castle Dracula and the connecting bridge. Fisher was back at Hammer after the commercial failure of his Phantom of the Opera (1962) and he had since made The Gorgon (1964) there. In the interim he completed Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962), written by The Wolf Man’s Curt Siodmak, in Germany with Christopher Lee, and the low budget British science fiction B-movie The Earth Dies Screaming (1964). He had realised “creating Gothic horror… was where he felt most at home.” (12)
The final two weeks of the schedule was occupied by the location shoot in Black Park and Bray and was completed at the beginning of June. This allowed the production designers Bernard Robinson and Don Mingaye to transform the studio backlot and sets for the 4 June start of shooting on Rasputin. Actor Francis Matthews recalled: “when we got off the interior sets, they’d change the curtains and pictures… and make it into the Winter Palace while we were doing Dracula on the outside.” (13)
Filming certainly had its fair share of hazards. During a pivotal scene where Helen is staked through the heart, Barbara Shelley swallowed one of her fangs and was forced to recover it. Shelley “went and drank some salted water and we got the fang back” because it was the only set of fangs the make-up department had specially fitted for her. (14) While completing the filming of the Count’s demise on the ice covered moat of Castle Dracula, an enthusiastic Matthews injured his back and Lee lost one of his red contact lenses on the salt covered set only for make up man Roy Ashton to retrieve it, refit it to the actor and inadvertently end up getting salt into his eye. Lee’s stunt double Eddie Powell almost drowned during the making of the sequence when, as Dracula, he disappeared under the fake ice into ten feet of water and couldn’t find the air bottle he needed to allow him to breathe underwater during the take.
Dracula Prince of Darkness opened at a trade and press screening on 17 December 1965 and went on general release with Plague of the Zombies on 9 January 1966. It was a success and became one of the top ten box office hits of the year. There were mixed critical reactions. The People thought it was “Hokum… but acted with great competence and produced with great skill.” For Allen Eyles, in Films and Filming, “Christopher Lee, bloodshot and speechless, makes a powerful figure out of Dracula” but he concluded “the story here is routine and dull even though Terence Fisher’s staging is more than competent.” Finally, Monthly Film Bulletin put the stake in with “this is the same old hash as before” and “the interiors are quite tastefully decorated, but script, direction and acting (except for Philip Latham’s sinister butler, and Andrew Keir’s forthright Father Sandor) leave much to be desired.” The double bill was a hit in America and became one of Fox’s most profitable films for the year, sold to audiences with gimmicks including plastic vampire teeth and cardboard zombie eyes.
“an Anti-Christ ceremony.”
The film opens with a recap of Dracula’s death in 1958’s Dracula, lent a voice over from Andrew Keir, cast as the ‘vampire expert’ Father Sandor in the new film. As the Back to Black documentary on StudioCanal’s Blu-ray release reveals, the 1958 footage, shot in a completely different ratio to the Techniscope that Fisher was using on Dracula Prince of Darkness, had to be masked with smoke effects to disguise its origins. Payments were also made to Peter Cushing for the reuse of his appearance in the flashback and, according to Wayne Kinsey, this covered the cost of a new roof for the Cushings. (15) Incidentally, the end result suggests the viewer has entered a waking dream, a rather fitting opening to what is in effect an adult fairy tale of a film.
After an introductory scene for Keir’s Sandor in which he establishes his credentials as the Van Helsing savant figure by rescuing an innocent young woman from the superstitious rituals of the local villagers, the film seems to settle into a formula, as identified by both Marcus Hearn and Mark Gatiss in the documentary, which essentially involves a group of English travellers, the couples Charles (Francis Matthews) and Diana (Suzan Farmer), Helen (Barbara Shelley) and Alan (Charles Tingwell), finding themselves abandoned at Castle Dracula.
The film then establishes the first of many often convoluted methods of reviving the Count and devising ingenious ways of despatching him by the closing reel, after having ruffled the feathers of the repressed tourists visiting his castle or, in the case of Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969), revealing the hypocrisies of Victorian society itself. As Peter Hutchings observes, “this is a minimal, stripped down version of the Hammer formula” (16) and one that would inspire the standard structure that Hammer would apply to most of its Dracula cycle where, in a series of diminishing returns, Lee was a brooding evil figure with little or no dialogue. Yet, this figure could be seen closer in relation to the more animalistic qualities of Bram Stoker’s original character.
However, Fisher at least inaugurates this cycle with a great deal of style and panache in Dracula Prince of Darkness. His camera glides around the beautifully lit interiors of Castle Dracula, generating a great deal of tension as the English couples spend a very disturbed night under the Count’s roof. There’s some understated humour too. When Dracula’s manservant Klove (a suitably unsettling Philip Latham) makes his presence felt and serves the travellers their dinner, Charles asks the whereabouts of his master and is reliably informed that he is dead and that “my master died without issue, sir… In the accepted sense of the term.”
He’s without issue for at least fifty minutes of the film until, in a moment of delicious Grand Guignol that caused something of an outrage on release, Klove murders Alan, hangs him upside down (symbolising the inverted cross) over the scattered ashes of his master and then slits his throat. Fisher builds the tension through a precise and methodical approach, appeases the censor and still manages to make the scene one of the grisliest in a Hammer film, and brings it all to a climax with the Count’s hand scrabbling up out of a mist-enshrouded sarcophagus.
As Fisher noted: “the scene could have been played in quite different ways. Klove could have played it with speed and triumph — he cannot wait to see Dracula again — or he could have played it almost weeping and overcome with emotion, causing perhaps bungling and uncertain movement. I chose to play it slowly and ritualistically, in the same way a priest would administer the Sacrament: an Anti-Christ ceremony.” (17) An interesting reading of this ritual and its aftermath is offered by David Pirie: “Alan becomes Dracula; the mild, pompous Victorian is transformed into the wildly sensual voracious anti-hero who immediately claims Alan’s wife Helen as his first victim.” (18)
“Dracula has unlocked the buried forces already inside her.”
The film is dotted with many powerful scenes. The fight between Dracula and Charles and the appearance of the undead Helen is brief but well choreographed on Bernard Robinson’s elaborate sets and is beautifully lit and shot by cinematographer Michael Reed. Barbara Shelley certainly shines in the film, and Paul Leggett notes her ability in the role as “Helen’s prim repressed former self is changed into demonic sexuality.” Helen encapsulates Fisher’s exploration of repression and how “Dracula has unlocked the buried forces already inside her.” (19) This reaches its apotheosis in the contentious but powerful scene at Sandor’s monastery when Helen, now a vampire, is captured by the monks and Sandor stakes her.
Father Sandor, a determined religious man who sets out to demonstrate to Charles the nature of pure evil, epitomises Fisher’s fascination with ritual and how adhering to it can often have its own inherent dangers. Gregory Waller sees Sandor “demonstrating how ritual can become the murderous tool of superstitious ignorance or the means of resurrecting evil.” (20) Shelley is superbly feral in the sequence, physically very strong, but the scene has evoked some mixed critical views.
Hutchings sees the vampire Helen’s struggle as a symbol of female resistance to the male authority figure, a challenge to male characters such as Sandor and his ilk, and as a counter to the passivity of female vampires in Fisher’s Dracula (1958). While Leggett observes, “the writhing, screeching figure at the end bears no resemblance to the original Helen. Her staking, for Fisher, is her purification, her release,” (22) Pirie suggests the scene contains a more complex subtext that asks “which is the real monster? The image that should speak to us of institutionalised good has a latent subversive content; it shows a roomful of males overpowering and symbolically violating a struggling screaming female.” (23)
There are also further borrowings from Bram Stoker present in the film. While Ludwig (Thorley Walters) is a reworking of the Renfield figure, a key scene is Dracula’s seduction of Diana (Farmer), as an analogue to the Count’s similar entrapment of Mina Harker in the original novel. Here, the Count bares his chest, slits open a vein and entreats Diana to suckle at his breast. A powerful scene, sexually very symbolic, it caused the censors no end of consternation back in 1965 and Nelson Keys had to reassure them that they would only show Dracula’s invitation to Diana to lick his blood and not the more sexually provocative act of licking itself.
It isn’t as energetic a film as Fisher’s Dracula and it unfolds at a very sedate pace, taking its time and using the wider Techniscope canvas to create mood and atmosphere, until all the elements come together in a pacier conclusion. For Hutchings this is a less innovative film than Hammer’s Dracula and more of an exercise for Fisher to expand and build upon the mythology and imagery he created in the original film. A striking problem is that the film revives Dracula but then fails to provide him with any motivation. It “reveals all too clearly a lack of clarity about Dracula and in so doing anticipates the increasingly marginal nature of the character in Hammer’s later Dracula films.” (23)
Dracula may been revived by Fisher but the intellectual dimensions of the man have been left behind in 1958’s adaptation. Here, Lee is simply a snarling, hissing symbol of evil but he is at least providing it in one of Hammer’s best looking films, a visual symbol among many others that Fisher marshals to his romantic cause. He’s supported by a superb performance from Barbara Shelley and very capable character sketches from Farmer, Keir, Matthews and Tingwell. Composer James Bernard scores with a thoughtful reinterpretation of themes from Dracula, combining evocative melodies with some theatrically inclined percussion, providing pace and mood in equal measure.
Sources:
(1) Kinsey, Wayne, Hammer Films — The Bray Studios Years, (Reynolds & Hearn, 2002).
(2) Sangster, Jimmy, Inside Hammer: Behind the Scenes at the Legendary Studio, (Reynolds & Hearn, 2001).
(3) Sangster, Inside Hammer.
(4) Pirie, David, A New Heritage of Horror — The English Gothic Cinema, (I.B. Tauris, 2008)
(5) Rigby, Jonathan, Christopher Lee — The Authorised Screen History, (Reynolds & Hearn, 2001).
(6) Sangster, Inside Hammer.
(7) Moody, Paul, Dracula -Prince of Darkness, BFI Screenonline.
(8) Dalton, Tony, Terence Fisher — Master of Gothic Cinema, (FAB Press, 2021).
(9) Hallenbeck, Bruce G., ‘The Making of Dracula Prince of Darkness’ in Little Shoppe of Horrors #33 (October, 2014).
(10) Hallenbeck, ‘The Making of Dracula Prince of Darkness’.
(11) Kinsey, Hammer Films — The Bray Studios Years.
(12) Dalton, Terence Fisher — Master of Gothic Cinema.
(13) Maxford, Howard, Hammer Complete: The Films, the Personnel, the Company, (McFarland, 2019).
(14) Kinsey, Hammer Films — The Bray Studios Years.
(15) Kinsey, Hammer Films — The Bray Studios Years.
(16) Hutchings, Peter, British Film Makers: Terence Fisher,(Manchester University Press, 2001).
(17) Dalton, Terence Fisher — Master of Gothic Cinema.
(18) Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror — The English Gothic Cinema.
(19) Leggett, Paul, Terence Fisher: Horror, Myth and Religion, (McFarland, 2010)
(20) Waller, Gregory, The Living and the Undead: Slaying Vampires, Exterminating Zombies, (University of Illinois Press, 2010)
(21) Leggett, Terence Fisher: Horror, Myth and Religion.
(22) Pirie (from his 1974 first edition of A Heritage of Horror) quoted in Dixon, Wheeler Winston, The Films of Terence Fisher: Hammer Horror and Beyond,(Auteur, 2017).
(23) Hutchings, British Film Makers: Terence Fisher.
This review was originally of a pre-release check disc supplied to the writer prior to the Blu-ray release of Dracula Prince of Darkness in March 2012. The following added material was included across the two-disc set.
About the transfer
There was some concern upon release about the transfer’s use of DVNR to eliminate film grain during the restoration. At the time Hammer offered that “DNR used on the restoration was very light indeed, only on a handful of scenes, and only when absolutely necessary. We can also state that there were no blanket noise-reduction filters used at any point during restoration.” The concerns about a ‘posterising’ effect and the loss of highlighting grain, even as a result of Hammer’s modest application of DVNR filters, may well remain valid for some. Many scenes look reasonably sharp while others look a little soft and lacking in detail. However, these factors could be a result of restoring a film in Techniscope, a widescreen format that took the standard 35mm frame and halved it to achieve its 2.35:1 ratio. Even under good conditions this format can offer softer, excessively grainy and less detailed images.
Scanned at 2k from the original camera negative, the film looks good in motion, with colour and contrast particularly strong. Primary colours such as reds, yellows, blues and greens are well represented. The interiors of Castle Dracula are vibrant with moody lighting and the Black Park locations look very lush and verdant. Michael Reed’s Techniscope cinematography provides vivid colour and detail in the set dressing and props that decorate designer Bernard Robinson’s magnificent sets. That said, there is a skew to gold and brown in the grade on this 2012 transfer which may not satisfy fans. The mono soundtrack copes well with the bombast and subtleties of James Bernard’s score while also ensuring dialogue is crisp and clear in a sturdy, clean audio presentation.
Special features
- Commentary Ported over from the Anchor Bay DVD of 1998, this features Christopher Lee, Francis Matthews, Suzan Farmer and Barbara Shelley. A chatty, friendly group who clearly had good fun watching the film again and reminiscing about their times at Hammer. Plenty of anecdotes about the production and working with Terence Fisher.
- Back to Black: The Making of Dracula Prince of Darkness (29:34) Marcus Hearn looks back at the making of the film and is joined by Mark Gatiss and Jonathan Rigby to comment on the film’s production and reception. There are also interviews with Barbara Shelley (she tells the lost fang story) and Francis Matthews who both extol the virtues of director Terence Fisher. David Huckvale discusses the James Bernard score. There’s also a look at the restoration process with technical manager Jon Mann at Pinewood, the problems of working with Hammer’s Techniscope format and the reinstatement of the original UK opening and end credits.
- World of Hammer: Christopher Lee (24:48 / 4:3) Another episode of the Ashley and Robert Sidaway anthology clips series exploring Hammer’s production history. This time it’s Lee’s work for the company covered by the rumbling tones of Oliver Reed. Don’t go looking for any serious analysis of Lee’s career, just enjoy the clips.
- Super 8mm Footage (4:39 / 4:3) Smashing home movie footage, shot by Francis Matthew’s brother Paul Shelley, of the climax to the film, Dracula’s demise, being made on the Bray back lot. Christopher Lee, Barbara Shelley, Francis Matthews and Suzan Farmer provide a commentary to the footage. Originally on the Anchor Bay DVD release, this is a lovely little time capsule.
- Restoration Comparison (3:57) A selection of sequences that compare the state of the original camera negative with the fully restored version presented on the disc.
- Trailer (2:22) The original trailer. Presumably the US one as this has a ‘released by 20th Century Fox’ credit on it. Double bill trailer (0:36) For a late 1960s UK re-release, Dracula Prince of Darkness was coupled with Frankenstein Created Woman.
- Original USA Titles The Fox logo followed by the Seven-Arts — Hammer credit.
- Original Theatrical Titles The original ABPC credit, inserted into the restored version.
Dracula Prince of Darkness
1966
Hammer / Associated British Productions / Seven-Arts / 20th Century Fox
StudioCanal Double Play Blu-Ray & DVD Special Edition / Cert: 15 / Catalogue No: OPTBD0634 / Released 5 March 2012
Blu-ray tech specs: Region B / Total Running Time: 90 mins approx / Feature Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 / Colour PAL / Video Codec: VC1 1080p / Feature Audio: LPCM Mono / English Language.
DVD Tech specs: Region 2 / Feature Running Time: 87 mins approx / Feature Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 / Colour PAL / Audio: Mono 2.0 / English language.
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