Vampires (14 page)

The decadent Count accidently revives the long undead Mircalla Karnstein, this time in the shapely form of Katya Wyeth. After a spot of necrophile passion, she bites him in the throat after proving that vampires cast no reflection in a mirror. There are no three day waits as Count Karnstein is transformed almost immediately into a vampire. In the surrounding woodland, more vampiric activity is in evidence with young men being found drained of blood. This forces Gustav and his band of followers known as The Brotherhood, to ride down young girls in the forest and burn them at the stake as witches. Anton Hoffer (David Warbeck) is smitten by bad girl Frieda when the twins are enrolled at his sister’s school for girls. Ingrid Hoffer is played by Isobel Black, memorable as the zest-filled vampire from
Kiss of the Vampire.
Frieda amazes Anton by summing up the village neurosis and pointing out that all the activities seems to consist of;

“Hunting of one kind or the other. Boars in the morning and witches at night!”

When Anton, an expert on Karnstein history, counteracts that her uncle Gustav is really a good man, she whiplashes:

“Perhaps I don’t like good men!”
On her nightly rambles, Frieda is kidnapped willingly by Count Karnstein and learns for herself the secrets of the family. They are vampires. They cast no reflection in a mirror and can only be killed by a stake through the heart or decapitation. They can also be revived by reincarnation as is evidenced from the previous two films and they happily walk around in daylight. But only willing victims become vampires, informs Karnstein – which definitely cuts down on population explosion – and Frieda proudly bares her new found fangs while indulging in sadistic games with the Count’s human captives.

When Frieda is bitten by the Count, her sister, Maria, feels the agony at her throat. Frieda doesn’t seem to share this quirk however, as Maria tells her of beatings from Gustav that Frieda is blithely unaware of. She just promises her sibling that she will receive much worse if she ever lets the cat out of the bag.

Twins of Evil
is a movie that adheres to the trusted formula that Hammer made famous; the Demon and the Savant. Good versus Evil with the Good triumphing spectacularly at the fade out. The film leaves a few loose threads hanging around. There are evidence of vampiric activity and off-screen cries of alarm before Mircalla is revived. Young men are found with gaping holes in their throats.
Who is responsible? Where does Mircalla disappear to after she has put the bite on Count Karnstein?
Also juggled are the dates of Mircalla’s death from film to film. In
The Vampire Lovers
, the inscription on her tomb reads,
Mircalla Karnstein (1522-1545).
In
Lust For A Vampire,
Ralph Bates slimy lecturer reads the same inscription as
Mircalla Karnstein (1688-1710).
There is no tomb in
Twins of Evil
, but a lifesize bust of the Countess gives her date of death as 1547.

These inconsistences don’t spoil the trilogy to any major extent. Maybe I was a little put out at the disappearance of Miss Wyeth so quickly, particularly as she had been so involved with the action that I thought that she should have had more screen time. She would go on to play a memorable victim in Hammer’s psychological thriller,
Straight On Till Morning (1972).

Peter Cushing returned to the screen in this, his first film, after the death of his beloved wife, Helen and it certainly seemed as if Hammer were probing into a darker
resume
for the actor. Gustav Weil is more fanatical in his pursuits than Baron Frankenstein and more merciless in his decapitations of vampires than Dr Van Helsing or the grim but thinly sketched General Spielsdorf. He lectures loudly to his brow-beaten wife of the tyranny of the Karnsteins and berates his new charges for their diabolical dress sense two months after their own parents’ unspecified deaths and sends them to their room without supper. Failing to shoot the Count in the prologue, he shares insults with the vampire in the street and sets the film on course for the splendid climax. Discovering his toothsome niece, he lets her rot in the local jail and rushes home to beat the Love Of God into her sibling. He drags the over-ripe corpse of teacher into a schoolroom to the horrified cries from the young female students and wastes no time in hanging local girls on stakes to be burned before dawn when they have been radically accused of witchcraft because they refuse to take a husband.

Continuing the trend of fanatical witch hunters on the tail end of films like
Witchfinder General (1969)
and
The
Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970),
Gustav Weil is a monstrously believable patriarch in the cinematic fight of Good over Evil. Cushing himself was also due to star in the next Karnstein movie with the titillating title
The Vampire Virgins
as the vengeful Count himself. This would have him playing a vampire for the first time. Unfortunately, it was never made as the production was axed by Michael Carreras.

Damien Thomas makes a suitably decadent Count Karnstein and it is possibly his most famous movie role. The Count was originally envisaged as Ralph Bates until he broke a fang on Madelaine Collinson’s neck. A great way to turn in your job, I thought. Thomas fills the part admirably, showing the Counts real power after his insipid pedestrian guise in
Lust For A Vampire
by Mike Raven. He becomes more of a second cousin to the Baron Meinster, enjoying playing with humanity and sleeping with every girl in the village.
“Pray for me, Weil!”
he rants. When I first saw this movie as a teenager, I prayed to
be
him! Karnstein is searching for the ultimate thrills and pleasures that life has to offer. He is bored by his servant’s mock ups of satanic worship and sends would-be sorcerers packing just as they reach their peak in devilry.

“I am sick of this world and its pathetic pleasures!”
he barks to the unseen lord. Calling on Satan himself, he plunges his dagger into a terrified peasant girl and, using footage from
Lust
, he indirectly reconstitutes the beautiful myth that is Mircalla Karnstein. After a soft focus midnight fumble, the Countess instructs that he looks in the mirror. Both stand in front of the glass and only Karnstein is visible. As the Count is bitten, he watches his own image fade from the glass in seconds. As a vampire, he sets his revenge on the family of Weil and orders his manservant Dietrich, a great turn by Dennis Price, to search out the hunter’s two beautiful nieces regardless of Weil’s powers at Court. Only Frieda is kidnapped and willingly accepts the curse of vampirism. Continuing to flout the laws of Man as vampires, they are only undone when Anton reveals the true way to destroy a vampire. Frieda is decapitated by her uncle Gustav and Karnstein himself, is staked by Anton. Damien Thomas was born in 1942 and still acts regularly. He would later appear on the big screen in Sam Wanamaker’s
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977)
as a Prince cursed by black magic. His Count Karnstein is a very memorable and commendable acting turn.

Maltese born Mary and Madelaine Collinson (
born: July 22
nd
1952
) are probably Hammer’s most beautiful vampires. Their acting in the movie is just serviceable with each doubling up for trick photography; i.e.: when Karnstein stands in front of the mirror with Madelaine, Mary plays her reflection so that the Count is never seen. Chosen as Playboy’s Playmates of the Month in 1970, they had a short-lived movie career in B movies. Madelaine went on to marry a Royal Air Force pilot and had three children, while Mary has two daughters and lives in Milan. Certainly, they will probably never live down their integral role as the stunning and identical
Twins of Evil.

Hammer’s Original Vampire Tales

“The grim and grisly ranks of the undead”

- Bram Stoker
Dracula (1897)

Like many studios before them, and even Bram Stoker himself, Hammer discovered that Dracula proved a very difficult figure to resurrect. In 1958, they did write the beginnings of a follow on to their original movie titled tentatively,
Dracula, the Damned
.
The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)
had become a superior film to
The Curse of Frankenstein,
The
Dracula, the Damned
screenplay faded into obscurity on the winds of time. As discussed in the Dracula section of this book, the studio really didn’t know how to handle the character and had to revive the franchise three times before calling it a day with
The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974).
The Count was fading ever further into the background in each movie. In the last installment, he disappeared entirely by possessing the body of a demented Holy man.

The Karnsteins were a pretty lifeless group to begin with and Hammer milked LeFanu’s short tale for all that it was worth becoming pioneers in the field of showing lesbian relations
, however infantile, on the mainstream screen. When they finally did get a hold on the characters, as opposed to the subject matter, it became just a little too late as their best propositions to take the stories even further remained unfilmed.

All that was left in the Hammer canon of vampire horrors were five original tales released from the chains of Victorian melodrama, but still stra
nded in Hammer’s distinct never-never land of torch wielding villagers, large breasted peasant women and savage decadent vampires. Three of these films rank very highly in my own top twenty and serve to prove the distinct lack of thought in their more serious adaptations. Light your torches and follow me into the final crypt…

The Brides of Dracula (1960)

Peter Cushing as
Doctor Van Helsing
. Martita Hunt as
Baroness Meinster.
Yvonne Monlaur as
Marianne Danielle,
Freda Jackson as
Greta
. David Peel as
Baron Meinster
. Screenplay Jimmy Sangser, Peter Bryan, Edward Percy. Director; Terence Fisher.

Synopsis

A young schoolteacher, Marianne Danielle is travelling to Badstein to take up a new teaching assignment. Her coach is mysteriously waylaid and she enquires about lodgings at the local inn. The innkeeper refuses until the strange Baroness Meinster offers lodgings to the girl in her own castle, The Chateaux of Meinster, where she lives with her old maid, Greta and very mysterious memories. At the castle, Marianne spots a young nobleman seemingly prepared to commit suicide. Her cries of alarm get him to stop and he introduces himself as the Baron Meinster, a guilty secret, hidden away in the castle by his insane mother and chained with a manacle of silver. The Baroness refutes her son’s story claiming that he is the mad monster that she never sees and his comfort is seen to by Greta his old nurse. Marianne convinces the Baron that she will find the key to his chains and free him. This is accomplished and the Baron wreaks revenge on his mother as Marianne bolts into the night. She is found the next day in the forest by Dr Van Helsing who understands her rambling of the events of the previous evening as he has made a marked study on the practice of the Cult of the Undead. He accompanies Marianne to the Teaching Academy of Meinster where strict rules are rescinded in his favour to visit the young lady whenever he wishes. The doctor investigates the Chateaux of Meinster and faces the fanged Baron who escapes into the forest leaving behind his own mother whom Van Helsing lays to rest with a stake through the heart. Meanwhile, the Baron has been busy as a young village girl is found drained of blood. Van Helsing takes a midnight watch as the old maid, Greta, urges the corpse to rise in the local cemetery. When Baron Meinster visits the teaching academy, he asks for Marianne’s hand in marriage and she accepts to Van Helsing’s horror. Marianne’s friend, Gina, is also attacked by the Baron. Her body is put into the stables in a locked coffin. Marianne agrees to stand watch over the corpse. As she waits, the coffin loses its locks and Gina rises as a vampire and informs Marianne that Menster is hiding in the old windmill. Before she can bite the schoolteacher, Van Helsing arrives and chases the demon away. He arrives at the windmill to be attacked by Greta and loses his crucifix as the Baron enters. They fight and Meinster proves to be too strong as he strangles Van Helsing into unconsciousness and then bites him in the throat. Thinking that he has secured victory, he kidnaps Marianne from the girl’s school. Back in the windmill, the two vampire girls watch as Van Helsing wakes and burns his throat with a brazier and splashes Holy water onto his wound. The wound fades and the Baron returns with Marianne. Van Helsing splashes the fiend with Holy water as the Baron sets fire to the building by kicking over the brazier. He runs out into the mill yard as Van Helsing pins him in the shadow of the sails that form the shape of the cross. As the Baron dies a second time, Van Helsing and Marianne hold each other close
.