Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror ([Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens] F. W. Munrau, 1922)

"And when he had crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him."

With Robert Eggers' acclaimed new iteration/interpretation (I refuse to use the word 'reimagining' seriously; was it Tim Burton who started that with his 2001 Planet of the Apes?  The film that may as well have had the tagline "you'll believe a chimp can be sexy"?) of Nosferatu - the third recitation of the decrepit revenant Count Orlok's macabre machinations after the 1922 original and Werner Herzog's masterful 1979 remake - due out on December 25th 2024 - at least in the States, here in the old country we have to wait 'til New Year's Day but at least that's U2's best song so there's some solace to be found in that I suppose - (someone needs to get the hashtag #NosferatuIsAChristmasMovie trending, if it hasn't been done already), I thought it was high time to go back ("back, back to the beginning!" as Morbius roared to the Fourth Doctor as he previewed the Timeless Child storyline back in the day) to the source of this particular sanguineous rivulet that runs like an offshoot from Bram Stoker's 1897 Dracula and flows out to its own delta of delicious devilment.

Now, it's very likely that anyone reading a blog like this has at least a passing familiarity with Nosferatu's history, but allow me for the sake of exposition and clarity to infantilise you - like a businessman who pays good money on a weekend to be dressed in a nappy, breast-fed and spanked.  No kink-shaming or judgement here.

Stoker's tome of terror had, as said, been published in 1897 and swiftly went on to be performed live on stage as a dramatic reading organised by the author himself in his day to day workplace of London's Lyceum Theatre on the 18th of May that same year, during which the establishment's principal star - and the man whose physiognomy Stoker had used for the physical description of the vampire Count - Henry Irving had declared the text to be "Dreadful!".  This criticism notwithstanding, the novel would be adapted into a fully-fledged theatrical (as in on stage live as it's performed, rather than in the American sense where they really mean 'cinematic') production by actor-producer Hamilton Deane which began a wildly successful tour in Derby in 1924 and would in turn be transferred to Broadway (with an Americanised, or rather 'Americanized' script by John L. Balderston) in 1927 for a run starring Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi that would run for 261 performances to packed houses of enraptured audiences and lead to Universal's immortal yet stagey 1931 classic movie.  

But during the in-between days, the lacuna betwixt the staged reading of the novel and the first professional and official acted rendition there crawled from the dark heart of Europe in 1922 the wholly unofficial and unauthorised first film adaptation (though not the first Dracula film, as in a film featuring the character of Dracula, the now lost Hungarian flick Dracula's Death [or Drakula halala] directed by Karoly Lathjay and co-scripted by future Hollywood maven Michael Curtiz emerging a year earlier in 1921, though this unrelated tale of a visitor to an asylum for the insane seeing visions of the Count is certainly an atypical entry in the canon).  Directed by cinematic pioneer Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau who would go on to helm classics such as The Last Laugh (1924), Faust (1926) and Sunrise (1927), Nosferatu would dodge paying Florence Stoker - widow of Bram Stoker and executor of his literary estate - for the rights to Dracula forcing Murnau and screenwriter Henrik Galeen to come up with their own (albeit barely disguised) spin on the tale of terror.

Murnau, who had previously tried to circumvent copyright on Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde [and see here for more on early adaptations of that tale) by simply changing the names of the protagonist's alter egos to Dr Warren and Mr O'Connor in the now sadly lost - like many of the twenty one films in his canon - 1920 Der Januskopf.  The dual role was essayed by Conrad Veidt who in your correspondent's humble opinion would have made a fine screen Dracula, and in fact was Universal head Carl Laemmle's pick to play the role (after Veidt's turn as the Joker-inspiring Gwynplaine in Paul Leni's 1928 The Man Who Laughs) subsequent to the loss of Lon Chaney Sr., firstly to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and then to the cold grip of Thanatos due to throat cancer - other actors such as Victor Jory, Ian Keith and William Courtney also being taken under consideration before Lugosi successfully lobbied for the role.

"Freely adapted" by Galeen, as the credits phrase it, Nosferatu like Der Januskopf attempts a "not Dracula, honest guv!" veil by giving the characters different names; so we are introduced to solicitor Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), our Jonathan Harker analogue and Ellen, his wife (called Nina in some prints, rather giving the Mina game away, played by Greta Schroeder) as our distaff Mina Murray-Harker combined with Lucy Westenra who dwell in the town of Wisborg (the filming location was the similarly-named real world city of Wismar as well as Lubeck) in the year 1838.  True to the usual versions of the story, Hutter is sent on a mission to deepest, darkest Transylvania (represented by location filming in Slovakia including Orava Castle for Orlok's damned demesne, a location later used for the Count's citadel in Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss's rendition) by his employer, the bizarre and eccentric estate agent Knock (Alexander Granach) - a strange hobgoblin of a man with whom the vampire client Count Orlok communicates in letters containing esoteric Kabbalistic signs and Enochian symbols.  These pictograms reflect the producer Albin Grau's esoteric inclinations; Grau was responsible for set designs and props including the Orlok/Knock correspondence and imbue the sinister characters with a feeling of an ancient and dreadful power - Orlok is as much a sorcerer (Orlok the Warlock?) as a vampire.  This calls to mind the mentions of the Scholomance from Dracula - the hidden school of witchcraft hidden among the peaks of the Carpathians wherein the Count trained as a Solomani, something that also finds a modern echo in in the 2024 version (2025 if you're in the UK, due to what the TV guide used to call "regional variations").

Leaving the distraught Ellen with Harding, a ship owner and the Hutters' neighbour (Georg Heinrich Schnell) and Ruth, his sister (Ruth Landshoff, in a similar fashion to the way Hammer's 1958 version makes Lucy Arthur Holmwood's sister) and takes the familiar journey to Transylvania, a land replete with fearful peasants dwelling within inns warning travelers to beware the castle on the hill so familiar after a century of entries in the Universal and Hammer canon and derivatives thereof.  In this land of phantoms, gods, monsters and werewolves that look suspiciously like striped hyenas, Hutter finds himself swept through a negative-tinted landscape at unbelievable inhuman speed - for the dead travel fast; it's interesting that these days one might depict a terrifying supernatural journey with slow motion, as Herzog did in the '79, rather than the opposite - to come face to monstrous visage with the Count. 

 Max Schreck's Orlok is certainly not the suave and slick bloodsucker familiar to audiences now and exemplified by the likes of Lugosi, Lee and Langella and first introduced in the form of Lord Ruthven (pronounced 'Rivven' - yes, I've been mentally mispronouncing it for decades too) in Polidori's The Vampyre, but a truly folkloric vampire.  Stoker's Irving-inspired Count may have been portrayed as noble of brow with a strong aquiline nose, but Orlok is a of rodentine, reptilian race apart from humanity; with a skull-like head from which protrude pointed ears and central incisor teeth - which make more sense for his diet than the now-traditional canines - and overgrown talons for fingernails like the pointed fingers of the nocturnal aye-aye, he certainly seems more animal than man, the lone surviving embodiment of an ancient race, the very seed of the daemon Belial rather than Stoker's moustached undead nobleman that inspired other embodiments including Bill Skarsgard in Eggers' film.  Orlok certainly appears every inch the disease-bearing beast, which brings us to the derivation/etymology of "nosferatu" - whether it comes from the Greek nosophoros meaning 'plague carrier', or Romanian nesuferitul signifying 'the unsufferable one', he fulfils both remits, his black shadow of death spreading across Europe like the mediaeval Black Death or the (then extremely, uncomfortably recent) Great War.

The vampire dwells in a realm of dreams and nightmares, a shadow land beyond life and death, and perhaps represents our shadow selves.  The eldritch thing that is Orlok himself may be Ellen Hutter's animus - in the Jungian sense, the masculine part of her, as well as the other sense of ill-feeling or ill-will; their deep and primordial destructive attraction for each other resulting in their mutual destruction.  Murnau plays up the shadow of the vampire (arf!) with some real Expressionistic shadowplay: the iconic shot of Orlok ascending the staircase to his and Ellen's terminal conflagration in flagrante delicto (taking the sexual term of le petit mort, "the little death" to its literal apogee) is one of the most recognisable in horror cinema if not cinema in toto.

As it turned out, the attempts to skirt copyright (despite actually crediting Bram Stoker in the title credits!) resulted in Stoker's widow Florence suing Prana Film into bankruptcy and gaining a court order to have all copies of the film destroyed.  Whatever the legal rights and wrongs though, thankfully for us lovers of the macabre some copies slipped through the net and survived (and yet a perfectly legal film like London After Midnight [for more on which...] didn't, such are the vagaries of the fickle finger of Fate) and to this day 103 years later - a vampiric lifespan - we can thrill to the chills of Orlok creeping through the darkness of German Expressionism to feast on our life's blood.

Or maybe just flick our lightswitch on and off.

Oh, Nosferatu!

THE JOHN SAXON BLOGATHON: Night Caller from Outer Space (John Gilling, 1965) [for 6th to 8th December, 2024]

Look, I'm just fashionably late, as per, okay?

So there I was peeking in at Xitter after having taken a long hiatus both from social media and quite frankly the world, when I espied amidst my many notifications (actually, cards on the table, there were fewer missed notifications than I expected; I was clearly not as missed as I'd liked to imagine.  Boy, is my ego bruised) a Tweet - or Xeet or whatever they're called now - putting out the word that another Blogathon was underway care of Barry from Barry Cinematic and Gill from Weemidgetreviews and that the subject of this one was none other than the late great and legendary John Saxon.

Having participated in the Blogathons in the past - my contribution to the Vincent Price one a while back, 1958's The Fly, can be found here - I thought I'd quite like to get involved; the down side being that coming to it a bit late meant that the more obvious options would have already been nabbed: stuff like Black Christmas, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Enter the Dragon will have been long gone.  Somebody had probably already bid for My Mom's a Werewolf and Blood Beach as well.  I've no idea if From Dusk Till Dawn would count, but putting a bid in for that one would have been a laugh, even if his small cameo may have gone against the spirit of the thing.  Can't be going against the spirits: that would be like Rush going against the spirit of radio.  Spirits are for drinking.  This is why optics are important - they're where the spirits come out of.

Anyway...

The artist known to the world as John Saxon was born Carmine Orrico in Brooklyn in August 1936, scion of a New Yorker father of Italian descent and a Calabrian mother and raised in a household where Italian was the primary spoken language.  Signed to a contract with Universal Studios in 1954 at the tender age of 17, the newly-Christened John Saxon (it being the style of the time for studios and managers to give young stars Hollywood-style names, hence Roy Scherer Jr becoming Rock Hudson, Norman Rambeau transformed into Dack Rambo, Francis McCown gaining the moniker of Rory Calhoun and Arthur Kelm being reinvented as Tab Hunter - all given their new identities, like Saxon, by agent Henry Willson) went on to gain teen idol status starring alongside such luminaries as Mamie Van Doren and Sandra Dee (who was not actually "lousy with virginity", despite what Grease tells us) throughout the '50s.  After expanding into the genres of neo-noir, Westerns and war movies, Saxon got his first taste of the horror genre when, after travelling to Italy in 1962 to make the drama Agostino for director Mauro Bolognini, friend Leticia Roman asked him if he would like to co-star with her in what he thought she he had described as an "art film".  Presumably expecting to be working with Fellini or Visconti, Saxon discovered that he had misunderstood Roman's accented way of saying "horror film" and that he'd signed up for the pioneering giallo movie The Girl Who Knew Too Much (La ragazza che sapeva troppo) for genre auteur Mario Bava - possibly a more prestigious name than Federico or Luchino for us fans of the macabre.

After taking the lead role in 1964 adventure The Cavern for director Edgar G. Ulmer, the man behind such classics as 1934's The Black Cat and 1944's Bluebeard, and completing Filipino-filmed war picture The Ravagers under Eddie Romero of Mad Doctor of Blood Island exploitation infamy Saxon's next assignment would take him to merry old England to make the subject of our discussion.  Released variously as The Night Caller (its original title, not to be confused with the recent Channel 5 Sean Pertwee and Robert Glenister drama of the same name), the slightly more explicit and less elliptical Night Caller from Outer Space and its more ostentatious U.S. distribution title of Blood Beast from Outer Space.  The film was directed by John Gilling, a veteran who had already overseen genre fare such as 1956's Anglo-American co-pro The Gamma People and the 1960 Burke and Hare-inspired The Flesh and the Fiends as well as many works for the illustrious Hammer Studios like the 1961 chiller Shadow of the Cat and 1962 adventure romp The Pirates of Blood River - and would go on in future to helm Hammer horrors The Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile (shot back-to-back in 1966) and The Mummy's Shroud (1967) before ending his career on high horror note with 1975's Iberian iteration The Devil's Cross (El cruz de diablo), an unofficial fifth entry in the Blind Knights Templar series initiated by Amando de Ossorio (further unofficial follow-ups exist, such as this) with a script by El Hombre Lobo himself Jacinto Molina  - such a shame that he had also made the low point of Bela Lugosi's career (yes, even more of a nadir than his work with Ed Wood), 1952's Old Mother Riley meets the Vampire, which I can only gesture towards explaining to modern audiences as Mrs Brown's Boys with a slumming Dracula in it.  Only that sounds fun, and it really isn't.

We begin with our intrepid team of boffin Dr Morley (Maurice Denham, who for all his solid career will forever best be known to me as renegade Time Lord Azmael in Colin Baker's sadly execrable debut 'The Twin Dilemma') and his assistants Dr Jack Costain (our man Saxon, fulfilling the role of the American import a la Brian Donlevy or Dean Jagger in this Quatermass-like - or maybe Quatermass-lite, if that's not throwing shade - scenario) and Ann Barlow (Patricia Haines. ex-Mrs Michael Caine [not a lot of people know that... they probably do] and stalwart of '60s and '70s TV such as Danger Man, The Avengers, Department S and Randall and Hopkirk, who sadly departed this harsh realm all too young aged 45 from lung cancer) as they are tracking what appears to be a meteorite entering Earth orbit, a la Quatermass II or Doctor Who's 'Spearhead from Space', before which we launch into the title sequence which - at least in the version I watched - features a crooning Mark Richardson rather than the original Alan Haven instrumental track.  The team go out on location to the site of the space object's landing, where they encounter a military team comprised of John Carson from Taste the Blood of Dracula as the Major, with the posh slur of James Mason, and Jack Watson as one of his sergeants; Saxon adrift in a sea of recognisable British faces of the small and silver screens - possibly moderating his accent to fit in?  He at least seems to be toning it down a little, even if he's not attempting a 'British accent' (whatever that is).

The object in question turns out to be a small football-sized sphere comprised of some type of carbon, which - after being cleared that the radiation being picked up by the Geiger counters is merely negligible stuff picked up as the orb passed through the Van Allen belt - they take back to their home base of Falsley Park (not, unfortunately, Paisley Park; much as the late His Purpleness Prince Rogers Nelson may well have been an alien) for study.  After Ann stays behind late to finish up her report and is menaced by a malevolent presence that appears in the lab after the globe glows a bit, resulting in a clawed reptilian-looking hand reaching for her around the door, Morley concludes that the object is a receptacle for a matter transmitter: what Mr Spock would call a transporter and Brundlefly might call a telepod.  Morley maintains that he should go on there alone and try to make contact, all miked up by the army men and insisting that no-one come in to attempt to rescue him no matter what they might hear, much to Costain's chagrin, and shortly comes a cropper at the taloned hands of the unseen invader who disappears into the night.

With Morley's Reginald Tate-flavoured Quatermass deceased, Costain steps up to the mark as his Donlevy/Jagger replacement.  Teaming up with Scotland Yard's Superintendent Hartley (another familiar 1969s British face, the Public Eye himself Alfred Burke), who swiftly becomes his Watson-cum-Lestrade, the pair are investigating some twenty-odd cases (yes, I should have taken more extensive notes whilst watching) of missing young women - obviously we've had a bit of a time jump in the narrative, and our alien boy has been busy - all connected to replying to an advertisement for modelling work in Bikini Girl magazine.  Seriously, we've gone from Quatermass sci-fi horror to Her Private Hell sexploitation sleaze.  I do approve. 

Following up on these ads placed by the mysterious Mr Medra (Robert Crewdson, dubbed with the voice of Robert Rietty - whose vocal talents grace many a film including being the original voice of Ernst Stavro Blofeld in From Russia with Love and Thunderball), who has traveled all the way across space to lurk around Soho taking pictures of girls: 'From Ganymede with Lust'?, Costain and Hartley are ably assisted by Hartley's compatriot Detective Grant (Stanley Meadows).  Allowing Ann to go undercover as a prospective model to infiltrate Medra's operation, via his seedy associate Thorburn (Aubrey Morris, another seemingly omnipresent UK genre face who's been in everything from Blood from the Mummy's Tomb to The Wicker Man to Babylon 5) our heroes and imperiled heroine discover that Medra's plan is to repopulate his war-torn world - or moon, if we're been finicky - with human females as they're running rather low on the ladies.  Ganymede wants women as much as Mars does, it seems.  All of this leads to a rather unexpectedly but rather refreshingly downbeat ending; Ann is dead, clawed and strangled by the angered xenomorph, and the victorious Medra, his mission completed, beams away back to his home leaving our awestruck protagonists dumbfounded in the ashes.

A grim finale to an interesting collision of science fiction with gritty (or maybe grotty) British cinema of the 1950s and '60s - an auspicious start the John Saxon's science fiction resume which would soon see him fighting the vampiric Martian Queen of Blood and taking part in a Battle Beyond the Stars. 

Doctor Terror: The Horror Films of Leon Klimovsky (Part One)

Being Parte the Firste of a study of the horror genre forays of director Leon Klimovsky

Argentine-born Leon Klimovsky Dulfano and Norfolk-born Roger Meddows Taylor share two things in common: one, they would abbreviate their birth names to something slightly less unwieldy for their future professional careers, and two, they would both train as dentists before embarking upon their more well-known callings.  There the similarities end as, despite it being a matter of opinion as to whether Taylor would spend the decade of the 1970s unleashing  horrors onto an unsuspecting public (though it is the opinion of your humble correspondent that 'I'm In Love With My Car' is actually quite genius [though only when drunk]), in Senor Klimovsky's case this is a matter of record.

Born in 1906 in Buenos Aires into a family of Polish Jewish extraction, and the elder brother of noted mathematician and epistemologist Gregorio Klimovsky, Leon spent fifteen years in his dental career whilst exploring his passion for the cinematic arts firstly by founding Argentina's first film club in 1929 - giving Cineclub's burgeoning membership their first chances to see art movies and other less mainstream fare - and later by shooting his own short movies before progressing to working on features, beginning as second unit director on the 1945 family drama Se abre el abismo (The Abyss Opens) helmed by French director Pierre Chenal who had fled his Nazi-occupied homeland due to his own Jewish heritage.  By 1948 Klimovsky had become a director in his own right and helmed a duo of back-to-back films about the Argentine tango music legend Carlos Gardel (Se Llamaba Carlos Gardel [His Name Was Carlos Gardel] and La Guitarra del Gardel [The Guitar of Gardel] both released in 1949) before going on to cover many other subjects - ofttimes with a scriptwriting co-credit to his name as well as being at the directorial reins - including a fairly lavish Argentinian-Mexican co-production of Alexandre Dumas pere's The Count of Monte Cristo in 1953.

A prolific journeyman who spanned many genres, Klimovsky's output included such movies as 1950's exploitation potboiler Marihuana which became a surprise hit and was an entry at the 1951 Cannes film festival; the 1951 Cornel Woolrich adaptation The Earring and 1952 dark psychodrama The Tunnel - based on the novel by acclaimed Argentine essayist and scientist Ernesto Sabato - which like 1955's Express Train starred Romanian-born starlet Laura Hidalgo who would in that same year star in the first celluloid adaptation of The Beast Must Die (not the Amicus 'where wolf?' movie, but the revenge story penned by a pseudonymous Cecil 'Daniel's Dad' Day-Lewis, which would be later filmed by famed Gallic nouvelle vague auteur Claude Chabrol and recently adapted as a hit Britbox miniseries).

After relocating to Spain in his mid-forties, Klimovsky continued as a reliable jack of all genres with a variety of output compassing romantic musical (La Picara Molinera [The Mischievous Miller], a.k.a. The Miller's Saucy Wife, 1955), action adventure (1957's Los Amantes del Desierto [Lovers of the Desert] alias Desert Warrior, starring future KHAAAN! Ricardo Montalban) and of course the Spaghetti - or, rather, Paella - Western (1966 alone giving us the twin-spin of A Few Dollars for Django [Pochi Dollari per Django] - one of the countless myriad of semi-sequels in name only to Sergio Corbucci's seminal 1966 Django - and Two Thousand Dollars for Coyote [Dos Mil Dolares por Coyote].

After a brace of Spanish-Italian World War II action movies - 1968's Seven Into Hell (original title Giugno '44 - Sbarcheremo in Normandia) starring former Klaatu Michael Rennie, 1969's Fall of the Giants (Horo cero: Operacion Rommel) with Jack Palance and the same year's Bridge Over the Elbe (No Importa Morir) featuring then still closeted beefcake Tab Hunter - Klimovsky found himself partnered with Iberian icon Paul Naschy for a brace of horror movies.

Born Jacinto Molina, former professional weightlifter turned cinematic all-rounder (acting, scriptwriting and ultimately also directing and producing) Naschy had quite literally made his mark on the genre with 1968's La Marca del Hombre Lobo: a title that translates as The Mark of the Wolfman but was retitled for various markets including Les Fantomes de Dracula en de Weerwolf (The Ghosts of Dracula and the Werewolf) in Belgium, Hell's Creatures in the U.K., and - most bafflingly for a werewolf film that also features vampires - Frankenstein's Bloody Terror in the U.S.; notorious distributor Sam Sherman of Independent International not letting the absence of anything to do with Mary Shelley's creation stop him from publicising it this way when the Frankenstein movie he'd promised exhibitors failed to materialise.  Multiple nomenclatures aside, the film introduced Naschy's best-known character in the furry form of the ill-fated wandering werewolf Waldemar Daninsky. 

After reprising the iconic Daninsky in the alleged lost film La Noches del Hombre Lobo (Nights of the Werewolf, which was apparently never completed after its elusive director Rene Govar was killed during filming) in 1968, alien invasion monster mash Los Monstruos del Terror (Monsters of Terror, a.k.a. Assignment Terror, a.k.a. Dracula vs Frankenstein [spoiler: true to form for these U.S. distribution titles, Count Dracula doesn't meet the Frankenstein monster in the flick, due to not being in it!]) in 1970 and La Furia del Hombre Lobo (The Fury of the Wolfman, alias Werewolf Never Sleeps) the same year Naschy partnered with experienced director Klimovsky for 1971's La Noche del Walpurgis, translating to Walpurgis Night but best known as Werewolf Shadow (or, in tres prosaic American terms,The Werewolf vs the Vampire Woman).

Klimovsky lends the film an eerie Gothic quality as the audience is immediately pulled into the mise-en-scene of a Bond-style pre-credits sequence located in a windswept countryside morgue, the wind howling like the hounds of hell as pathologist Dr Hartwig (Julio Pena) and his assistant Muller (Barta Barri - something of a ubiquitous face in Spanish horror films of the period, like Michael Ripper was to Hammer) unwisely elect to remove the silver bullets from the corpse of Daninsky, allowing him to spring back to lycanthropic life under the influence of the waxing silvery moon.  Post credits, we're introduced to our female protagonist duo of Elvira (Gaby Fuchs) and Genevieve (Barbara Capell),  who are departing Paris - leaving behind Elvira's policeman beau Marcel (Andres Resino) - to embark upon a trip to the wild north to complete their graduate thesis on black magic, witchcraft and the Inquisition in France.  Their research on the topic has led to them trying to track down the resting place of infamous mediaeval Satanist and blatant Erzsabet Bathory analogue Countess Wandesa Darvula de Nadasdy (American expatriate actress Patty Shepard, a frequent pulchritudinous presence in Spanish horror flicks of the '70s): a goal shared by our hirsute hero Waldemar.  Teaming up to locate Wandesa's tomb, our trio of two students and a werewolf inadvertantly cause the Countess' resurrection by removing the silver Mayenza cross from her remains and unleash her vampiric terror upon the world - which Waldemar knows he must defeat before Walpurgis Night arrives and all the evils of the world will come under her thrall.

Klimovsky handles the scenes of supernatural terror with an expert eye, and his use of techniques such as slow-motion photography for the vampires as well as the shambling revenant of the devilish monk Baptiste Verdun lend an oneiric and otherworldy air, aided by judicious use of dry ice graveyard mist and an appropriately spectral soundtrack.  After the behind the scenes shambles of Naschy's previous pair of projects, including the alleged perpetual drunkenness of Fury of the Wolfman's director Jose Maria Zarabalza whose open disinterest in the material included allowing his teenage nephew to rewrite the script during production, Klimovsky's professionalism and keen eye for a good shot were a veritable godsend for Naschy, who was more than keen to continue their working relationship.  Klimovsky was agreeable, and after taking on revenge Western Su le mani, cadavere!  Sei in arresto (Raise Your Hands, Dead Man, You're Under Arrest!) and Spanish civil war drama La Casa de las Chivas (The House of Goats) the pair reunited for 1972's Dr Jekyll and the Werewolf.

Bringing Naschy's pulpy 1940s Universal Pictures monster mash inspired script to life with the appropriate look and feel of a lurid Technicolor comic strip, Klimovsky spins us the tale of expatriate Hungarian big businessman and big game hunter Imre Kosta (Jose Marco, who had essayed the role of the unlucky Pierre in Werewolf Shadow) who is displaying his trophies to his wedding guests: he has a mounted Bengal tiger and Bavarian wolf on display to go with his beautiful and much younger trophy wife Justine (Irish actress Shirley Corrigan, memorable in Jean Brismee's The Devil's Nightmare the previous year, and who would go on to play the titular Fanny in 1974's Around the World with Fanny Hill).  Having collected from Bengal, Bavaria and Begravia, Imre feels homesick and wishes to whisk his brand new bride away for a honeymoon in sunny Transylvania to see his home town of Baliavasta.  

Bidding farewell to their circle of friends, including research scientist and namesake of his infamous ancestor Dr Henry Jekyll (Eurotrash stalwart Jack Taylor, who viewers may recognise from anything from Jess Franco's Female Vampire to John Milius' Conan the Barbarian), Imre and Justine leave the bright lights of swinging '70s London for the misty mountains of the Carpathians - a land inhabited by stock frightened peasants (including - it's that man again! - Barta Barri as the innkeeper who warns the couple to beware the graveyard and the cursed Black Castle on the hill) and knife-wielding bandits as much as wampyrs and werewolves.  When they visit the proscribed cemetery to visit the graves of Imre's late parents, Justine is given more to worry about than catching pneumonia (kudos to Ms Corrigan for being a trouper, acting her heart out in the snowy landscape wearing a miniskirt and go-go boots; spirits seem to have been high on location, though, her relating an anecdote about Klimovsky dealing with filming in the mountains by shouting direction over a megaphone, with Naschy amusing the cast and crew by responding with a loudhailer of his own) when the Kostas are accosted by armed robbers who stab Imre to death.  The unhappy widow is rescued by the castle's inhabitant, Waldemar (Naschy), and upon discovering his lycanthropic malediction she brings him back to London in the hope that the renowned Dr Jekyll can effect a cure.

Klimovsky makes good use of the limited location shooting in London (no doubt all done on the fly, guerilla filmmaking style) not only to establish Daninsky, a Polish-Spanish werewolf in London, wandering Trafalgar Square and flagging down a black cab but - once Jekyll's unhinged attempt to wipe out werewolfism with his grandfather's personality splitting formula results in Waldemar becoming a new and even more sadistic Hyde - great footage of a top-hatted and caped Naschy strolling around seedy Seventies Soho at night.  The incongruous sight of the anachronistic 19th century monster twirling his cane along a neon-lit street, past a billboard advertising the Lyric Theatre's production of How the Other Half Lives starring Robert Morley and Shiela Steafel, on his way to pick up, use and dispose of an unfortunate lady of the night is a wonderfully handled sequence with a surreal touch.

In the brief interim before next working with Naschy, another Klimovsky joint materialised under the title of Mean Mother: originally shot in 1971 as El hombre que vino del odio (The Man Who Came from Hate, also variously known as Run For Your Life and A Soldier Named Joe), this Vietnam-influenced thriller - starring American lead Joe Safran and red-maned Italian actress Luciana Paluzzi, backed up by a cast of familiar Euro horror faces such as Barta Barri, Julio Pena and Antonio Mayans - was picked up by Sam Sherman of Independent-International; Sherman's regular participant in cinematic crimes Al Adamson shot new footage with Afro-American performers Clifton Brown (a.k.a. Dobie Gray) and Marilyn Joi to turn it into something resembling a blaxploitation picture.  The resulting slice of spliced-together near incomprehensibility surfaced two years after the original movie's release, in 1973.

Meanwhile, Klimovsky and Naschy teamed up once again for that year's La rebelion de las muertas, more accurately transliterated as The Rebellion of the Dead Women but alias Vengeance of the Zombies, once again with Klimovsky directing a Naschy-penned script that pulls us into the mise-en-scene of an English graveyard at night where the cemetery's caretaker cum part time body snatcher August (Fernando Sanchez Pollack, who would go on to co-star in two more Naschy genre efforts - 1973's El retorno del Walpurgis [a.k.a. Curse of the Devil] and 1975's Le venganza de la momia [The Mummy's Revenge]) and his nagging wife Flora (Montserrat Julio, who had just featured in Naschy's '73 classic El espanto surge de la tumba [Horror Rises from the Tomb] and would go on to work for another Spanish horror maven in Jose Ramon Larraz' wonderfully-titled 1978 The Violation of the Bitch) are preparing for the disinterral of the recently murdered Gloria Irving; this slaughtered scion of a wealthy family has been buried with her jewels which Flora has cajoled her henpecked husband into retrieving for her.  Needless to say this does not go according to plan, as the resurrectionists find themselves sealed into the tomb with the literally resurrected Gloria when a mysterious robed figure locks the door and performs an eldritch voodoo-style necromantic rite invoking Baron Samedi and calling the late Ms Irving (Norma Kastel) from the beyond to rise in Klimovsky slow motion like the ethereal vampires of Werewolf Shadow.

After a post-credit whirl of travelogue footage of early '70s London (much of it looking like the same shots from Dr Jekyll and the Werewolf: standard Big Ben, Picadilly Circus, red buses, etc) we are introduced to a sitar-accompanied tantric display - no, not like that, you dirty sods - from Bernares-born Brahmin Krishna (Naschy, looking like a dead ringer for Ricardo Montalban's legendary eugenic ubermensch Khan from Star Trek TOS' 'Space Seed' - from the Latin actor in Indiaface down to the barrel chest and black bob wig).  This ritual is being observed by a crowds of interested onlookers including Elvire Irving (played by the mononymic Romy - misspelled 'Rommy' in the credits - nee Carmen Romero; Naschy one again using the name of his wife Elvira Primavera for his heroine a la Werewolf Shadow) and her companion Dr Lawrence Redgrave (two-time Naschy collaborator Victor Barrera, alias Vic Winner).  Elvire (who is currently residing with her bereaved aunt and uncle after the death of her cousin Gloria) and Lawrence are both interested in Krishna's current British tour to promote his philosophy and way of life and he extends an invitation to the house he has taken in the village of Llangwell (not pronounced with a Cymric trill despite the double L; nevertheless another Chaney nod from Naschy, the name being a clear analogue of fictitious Welsh village Llanwelly - ancestral home of carnivorous lunar activity perpetrating protagonist Lawrence Talbot of 1941's The Wolf Man).

While La Irving becomes besotted with the Indian mystic that she clearly wants to fakir, we also intercut with the story of a cloaked killer wearing a selection of "hideous latex masks", as Would I Lie To You's Bob Mortimer might phrase it.  This mystery assassin, behatted and caped like pulp detective the Shadow if he'd become a giallo-style homicidal maniac, is ceremoniously (quite literally, given that each slaying is immediately followed by a resurrection incantation) dispatching and resuscitating young women of prominent and wealthy families.  Doc Lawrence investigates the murderer's macabre modus operandi and starts to uncover the truth about the targeted families: the Irvings, Mortimers, Hendersons and Mortons had been involved in an incident in 1957 Benares (more properly Varanasi since 1947) involving the rape and killing of Elizabeth Irving by Krishna's twin brother - that old U.S. soap opera staple of the evil twin, also played by Naschy - followed by his Cropsy style burning by the family members.  After the incident was officially and officiously covered up due to the families' 'importance', Kantaka has returned as a vengeful Asian Freddy Krueger using the daughters of the families as his undead instruments of vengeance.

With a meaty double role for Paul Naschy (actually a triple role including his appearance as a blue-skinned and goat-legged satyr-like Satan in a trippy nightmare sequence), Vengeance of the Zombies is a gleefully ghoulish slice of minor Gothic with a soupcon of slasher served with trademark Klimovsky style.

The Dracula Saga (La saga de los Dracula, also released as Dracula: The Bloodline Continues and the awful but awesomely alliterative Death Death Death) would be Klimovsky's next project as well as his third release of four in 1973 and is a lovely and neglected Gothic gem. Blessed with a literate script by the awesomely pseudonymous Lazarus Kaplan (in reality Emilio Martino Lazaro), good cinematography (if one can let go the obvious day-for-night shots that are the bane of this period of horror flicks) and lush period costumes, sets and locations this is a fascinating piece that sees the last scion of the Dracula dynasty recalled home to the Transylvanian castle.

Our protagonist, Berta (the absolutely radiant Tina Sainz) is the granddaughter of Count Dracula and is travelling home whilst pregnant with her husband Hans (Tony Isbert, who -with his long hair and astrakhan hat, appears to be cosplaying a young Hartnell Doctor). When their coach driver stops in the middle of the forest, a la Dracula: Prince of Darkness, and says that the horses will go no further they have to stop off at 'Borgos' - presumably a village in the Borgo Pass, since they're on their way to Bistritz (there are many references and allusions to Stoker's novel here, it's cool) - where a hunchbacked stable hand, who seems a bit unhinged (an unstable hand?) warns them of the devils and lamias that lurk in the locality.

They decide to forge on, of course (Hans seems to think that a stable isn't good enough for a pregnant woman, even though it was good enough for Mary LOL) and eventually reach the castle which seems deserted by daylight - and Berta is perturbed to find the family crypt contains coffins emblazoned with the names of her grandfather and cousins, the very family that she was expecting to meet. By the way, did you know that Count Dracula's first name is Ivor? Well, it is, his crypt bearing the legend 'Ivor, Voivode Vlad De Tepes - Count Dracula'. Ivor the Chaos Engine, maybe?  Of course the family appear after dusk, with the Count (Narcizo Ibanez Menta, who back in 1952 had been the star as well as co-producer of The Beast Must Die, as quite a book-accurate looking Dracula with his hawklike features and white facial hair.  Possibly the most physically resembling Stoker's imagined villain since Christopher Lee's moustachioed turn in Jess Franco's 1970 El Conde Dracula.  Why is it only the Spanish that can do a Dracula that looks like Dracula?), his bride Munia (the always lovely red-maned Helga Line) and young cousins Xenia (Maria Kosti [be still my throbbing.... heart, yes, let's go with that]) and Irina (Cristina Suriani) welcoming the pair and showing great interest in Berta's gestating foetus - whom the Count is pinning his hopes on to be the saviour of their declining clan.  There's a scene between Dracula and Berta wherein the Count describes the decline of the family as an illness, and calls the Draculas inherently melancholy, pallid and decaying that calls to mind both Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and Morrissey and Warhol's Blood for Dracula - the feel of a decadent and degenerate aristocratic family in decline (replete with a deformed cyclopean child locked in an attic room: how's that for European regal inbreeding?).

When Hans falls prey to the predations of Munia (who just silently seduces him, no small talk, by disrobing replete with a flash of her cinnamon muff [thanks to Zach Galifianakis and his Amy Adams Between Two Ferns spot for that term nesting in my brain]), Berta finds herself surrounded by a family of the undead who are solely concerned with the vampiric baby who is literally eating her from the inside and drinking her blood rather than her well-being; the young couple have been continually served the rarest and rawest of meats at mealtimes along with a suspiciously sanguineous full-bodied red wine.  This repeated repast has a different deleterious effect on each of the couple as Hans falls further under the sway of all three of the castle's vampiric vixens and Berta weakens into a pallid shell of herself, the monstrous child within her growing concomitantly stronger as her life gradually ebbs away. 

Klimovsky maintains the gloomy atmosphere (aided by a score comprised of the harpsichord compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, enhanced by some input from Jess Franco regular Daniel White) whilst ramping up the tension until our 'til now passive heroine explodes in a frenzy of violent vengeance with I think best to leave vague for those who may be curious enough to seek out the movie (which I do highly recommend for anyone into Gothic nosferatu action).

"This is my story - a strange incredible story." Berta (or, at least, the voice actress who performed her English language dub) intoned in the trailer. "I can't tell you the ending... and when you see it, don't you divulge it either!"

1973 continued in a vampiric vein for Klimovsky with The Vampires' Night Orgy (La Orgia Nocturna de los Vampiros being its rather prosaically translated original title, also known in the US under its reissue moniker of Grave Desires), which was released in Spain that same year but wouldn't see US distribution until September of 1974.  Opening with a strange scene of a funeral during which the appalling pallbearers drop the coffin into the waiting grave, causing it to burst open and spill out its sepulchral contents: a charred and blackened skeletal cadaver swarming with worms and maggots, we certainly get off to an atmospheric start.  From thence, we cut to a lonely country road and a busload of passengers making their way to an estate where they are going to be employed - we have the chauffeur Ernesto (Gaspar 'Indio' Gonzalez), the lady's maid Alma (Dianik Zurakowska, no stranger to the Spanish gothic horror having been the romantic lead in Paul Naschy's La Marca del Hombre Lobo), tutor Cesar (David Aller), majordomo Marcos (Manuel de Blas), gardener Godo (Luis Ciges, a veteran of Vengeance of the Zombies and The Dracula Saga), and cook Raquel (Charo Soriano) with her young daughter Violet (Sarita Gil).

When the bus driver suffers a heart attack on the road to Bojoni, they decide to had to the more geographically expedient village of Tonia in search of somewhere to spend the night before resuming the journey.  Our group ventures down into the valley and finds the village - a picturesque place of cobbled streets and stone houses - strangely deserted, and assume that the inhabitants must be all in the church (which raises an interesting question as to where this film is set: the assumption seems to make sense for early 1970s Catholic Spain, and the place names Bojoni and Tonia seem authentically Espanol, but there had been a long-standing rule against horror films being set at home - they generally took place in France, or some mittel-European hinterland [hence Paul Naschy's wolfman being Polish rather than Spanish].  Maybe it's set in Portugal?  Amando de Ossorio's Blind Dead must be interred in the next valley), yet strangely a search turns up no trace of such a building.

There's a tavern in the town (IN THE TOWN!  Sorry, it's a reflex, I can't help it), and our gang decide to take advantage of the roaring fire and the well-stocked bar and hunker down for the night.  Here they encounter fellow stranded traveller Luis (stock American in a Spanish genre film Jack Taylor, with his marvelous porn star moustache) whose US manufactured car has broken down, and whose vague air of sleaze and disreputability is lived up to when he discovers a Norman Bates-style peephole in the wall of the bedroom he selects, which just so happens to adjoin Alma's chosen boudoir and gives an eyeful of her changing into her nightie.  It's so nice to have an identifiable hero.  Like Luis, the morning soon comes and with it a suddenly populated tavern and village and the travellers are greeted by mystery man, major and acting mayor Boris (Jose Guardiola) who runs the town on behalf of the mysterious Countess (oh look, it's Helga Line as a sexy vampire again!).  When their seemingly hospitable hosts confer with each other and decide that serving the visitors only bread might raise suspicions, the major-mayor dispatches the intimidating and appropriately named 'El Gigante' (Fernando Bilbao, who played Dr Frankenstein's towering creation in Jess Franco's bonkers double bill Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein and The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein) to lop off the local blacksmith's leg to serve up as a platter of fresh meat.

As the group are gradually whittled down one by one - first the corpse of the bus driver vanishes from the vehicle, then Ernesto is ambushed by a crowd of the undead on the moonlit streets (another wonderfully atmospheric nosferatu sequence by Klimovsky) before returning as a revenant himself, Cesar is first dated and then predated upon by the voluptuous vampiric Countess (after feeding on his blood, she thoughtfully tosses his corpse from her balcony for a crowd of her wampyr willagers to feast upon) and Godo and Marcus are lured onto the bus by Ernesto only to find it full of said villagers pounce upon them and tear them asunder - Luis and Alma pair together as our horror film final guy and girl.  When little Violet is lured away to play by a spectral child (Fernando Romero) we are treated to a sequence of Raquel searching for her missing daughter that features the exquisite deathless dialogue "Violet?  Violet, dear, are you there?  Don't worry, I'm not going to hit you."  Top parental guidance.  How times have changed.  Or have they?  Unsurprisingly, this leads to our Mother of the Year mug owner being pursued by the Countess back to her room, where - in another highly effective scene - her undead compatriots are waiting to devour her.

Luis and Alma finally manage to get his car started and make it out of Tonia and back into the outside world, and are suddenly attacked in a jump scare in the form of the Countess, who's been hiding in the back seat of the vehicle like Michael Myers - only to be thwarted by a cross-wielding Alma and rapidly disintegrating; and this the movie is bracketed by shots of rotting corpses covered in a writhing mass of maggots: the funeral opening, with the coffin cracking open, and toward the end with the rotting Countess in the back of the car.  Thus the pair finally arrive at a police station with no proof of their crazy story bar a messy back seat, and the scoffing sceptical sheriff (Antonio Paramo) relectantly accompanies them only to find the ghostly hamlet completely missing - the valley is empty, and the village a virtual vampiric Brigadoon.

Leon Klimovsky will return.

Vampire (E. W. Swackhamer, 1979)

1979's TV movie Vampire is as an odd a creature as its titular undead bloodsucker.  A strange hybrid of horror movie and police procedural (in fact, co-written and executive produced by the late Steve Bochko of later Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law and NYPD Blue fame - in the period before these shows and when he had definite SF/fantasy cred for penning the screenplay for Douglas Trumbull's 1972 Silent Running and creating the 1975 David McCallum-starring The Invisible Man and its Ben Murphy sequel-cum-remake Gemini Man), it dwells in a twilit world betwixt genres.

As the film opens, we see the inauguration of construction on a new San Francisco church, marked by the unveiling of a gaudy gigantic metallic cross on the site - one suspects that the eventual church will be one of those hideous modern monstrosities of glass and concrete; call me old-fashioned, but I believe (in that I don't, not actually being a believer, but you know what I mean) that these sorts of buildings should be terrifying Gothic edifices.  If you're not going to do something properly, why bother?  Anyway, this parish's particular Reverend Lovejoy (played by Scott Paulin, who fans of genre flicks will probably recognise as Kirk Lolley from 1985's Teen Wolf and the original Red Skull in the 1990 Albert Pyun Captain America [oh, yeah, here) is making his speech watched by husband and wife architectural design power couple John and Leslie Rawlins (The Exorcist's more junior exorcist Jason Miller, and Nightwing's Kathryn Harrold) as well as mysteriously lurking ex-cop Harry Kilcoyne (E.G. Marshall of Superman II, Creepshow and many others), who remains loitering around the premises after the ceremony is over, noticing that the ground where the shadow of the cross was cast has slightly scorched.

That night when the moon has risen, the badly reacting earth finally spits out its unwelcome contents as the vampiric Anton Voyteck (Richard Lynch, who in common with fellow 1979 TV screen vampire villain Reggie Nalder gained his distinctive appearance through scarring from burn injuries - in Lynch's case self-inflicted from setting himself ablaze whilst off his face [history fails to record whether or not he was shouting about being "real gone" at the time like a freebasing Richard Pryor]) crawls out of the soil of his resting place of many years.  You don't get all that many blond-maned male vampires, do you?  Apart from Geordie Johnson in Dracula: the Series, Julian Sands in Tale of a Vampire and Christopher Atkins in Dracula Rising of course.  But they do seem a comparatively rare breed.

Skipping ahead some weeks, we move to a house party given by the Rawlins where some guests are gossiping about the recent spate of homeless people being found dead with their throats torn out (in a vampire film?  Unconnected, I feel sure) and lawyer Nicole DeCamp (Jessica Walter, probably best known these days from Arrested Development and lending her distinctive tones to Archer) introduces first Leslie and then John to her new beau Anton who has a business proposal that they might be interested in.  Now dapperly dressed in a sharp '70s suit and taking to wearing his overcoat draped over his shoulders to create a classic cloaked Dracula-style silhouette, Voyteck presents as a mysterious, charming and urbane wealthy aristo who has family interests in the Heidecker estate where the new church is going to be built.  He claims that the grounds of the property contain a great many priceless works of art that were removed from Europe during World War II for safekeeping that might be lost forever when construction begins in earnest, and he wants to commission a survey to retrieve them.  John expresses scepticism over the endeavour, but agrees and to his surprise soon locates a underground vault containing not only countless lost masterpieces but also skeletal human remains.  Calling in his friend on the force Chris Bell (Michael Tucker, who would go on to star in Bochko's L.A. Law alongside his wife Jill Eikenberry) it's established that not only were the artworks looted from their rightful owners during WWII but that the remains are those of an ex-cop who also disappeared in the 1940s; Voyteck is arrested by Bell and his men and before being taken away threatens Rawlins for grassing him up to the filth, saying that he will soon "repay him in kind".

Bailed out by Nicole just as he is attempting to escape by wrenching the cell bars asunder at sunrise, Voyteck dashes home to the secret coffin stashed in his swanky apartment without a minute to spare before rising at nightfall to pay a visit to the Rawlins household.  Persuading the home alone Leslie to invite him in, he swiftly takes his vowed vengeance by sinking his teeth into her lovely neck and leaving her exsanguinated corpse for her husband to find and we are faced with the prospect of John going rogue after his wife's brutal death: we all know what architects can do when they take the law into their hands after the murder of a loved one - have the SFPD not heard about the Paul Kersey case?

The distraught designer is contacted by Kilcoyne, who has been mooching around the sidelines investigating - back in the '30s and '40s he was the partner (in a cop rather than romantic sense) of Maurice Bernier, the previous one non-careful owner of the skull and other remnants that were found in Voyteck's vault of stashed artworks.  Bernier had become convinced of the existence of evil and creatures such as vampires and left the force join a seminary (a place for trainee priests rather than semen, but there may be a lot of that too) whilst Harry was off fighting in the war; upon Kilcoyne's return home Bernier had vanished mysteriously whilst playing amateur occult detective and sniffing around.  Which is a shame, because a noirish 1940's-set series about a detective-priest investigating the paranormal would have been pretty cool, but we'll just have to make do with this tale of a bereaved architect and an aged hard-boiled cop teaming up to take out their mutual vengeance upon a centuries-old vampire.  Which is good enough, honestly.  Rawlins and Kilcoyne (Vampire Slayers) become like Van Helsing's "God's madmen" from Stoker's tome, diligently tracking down Voyteck across all of the property interests where his multifarious coffins lie. It's an entertaining and breezy hour and a half of safely TV movie horror fun with an ending screaming 'pilot that was never picked up for a continuing weekly series' and it's available to watch free on Youtube as of the time of writing.

Night of Dark Shadows (Dan Curtis, 1971)

 

Having already covered the first instalment of Dan Curtis' Dark Shadows cinematic universe (the DCDSCU?) - 1970's House of Dark Shadows - here, the series' second silver screen escapade came but a year later in 1971.  Filmed as the show was coming to its conclusion - and so unburdened by the first film's logistical juggling to free up actors from an ongoing televisual storyline - and initially titled Curse of Dark Shadows, Curtis' initial (and rather obvious) idea to do a direct follow-up with Frid returning as Barnabas was swiftly thrown out by the actor's refusal to reprise his role; for the final storyline of Dark Shadows' run Frid had only agreed to stay on as another character (the Heathcliff surrogate Bramwell Collins [a reference that any true Bronte-saurus should surely get] opposite Lara Parker's Catherine Harridge in an obviously Wuthering Heights-inspired saga) such was his boredom with Barnabas and legitimate fear of typecasting in the role.  Curtis instead turned to the show's second most popular character: Quentin Collins, as played by David Selby.

Now, Night of Dark Shadows was the first piece of the Shadowsverse I ever saw when it was shown on British TV late one night when I was young and I was rather excited.  I knew of the programme - as mentioned previously in my HoDS review - from the couple of novels that my grandmother inexplicably owned, and the the thing I knew about Quentin Collins was the fact that he was a werewolf.  Lycanthropes being my favourite movie monster I was as intensely excited as I was intrigued to finally see live action Dark Shadows.  Picture my confused li'l face, then, as I sat up late and watched this completely loup-garou free film transpire.

That's the fault of Li'l Glen and his assumptions, of course, and I did enjoy what transpired to be a very interesting horror movie - albeit not one free of bigger problems than my erroneous expectations of carnivorous lunar activities: the film's production was fraught with behind the scenes struggles, the biggest one being MGM's eleventh hour commandment that that Curtis cut the finished picture down from a runtime of 129 minutes to 95 minutes at only 24 hours' notice.  This of course led to an edit that could be charitably described as authentically oneiric, capturing the real feel of a nightmarish dreamscape of witchcraft and possession, but could also be pointed to as a last-minute hack job that has a lot less coherence than the original cut.  The good news is that the majority of the cut footage was rediscovered in the late 1990s; the bad news is that it was silent.  Dan Curtis never did get to assemble the director's cut during his own lifetime, and with many of the actors also having departed this mortal realm, the chance to re-record the lost dialogue has passed.  Unless they do it using soundalikes, of course, but the studio sadly doesn't seem motivated enough to actually embark on the endeavour.

The dream unfolds with the very much human aspiring artist Quentin Collins (Selby) and his wife Tracy (why, it's only Kate Jackson - soon to become one of Charlie's Angels - who had played Daphne Harridge in the Dark Shadows series; including the earlier part of the aforementioned Wuthering Heights storyline) arriving at Quentin's newly-inherited property of Collinwood, presumably as the last remaining Collins he has inherited the family manse after the mass deaths of the family members in House of Dark Shadows, though that of course presumes that both films occupy the same universe / dimension / time-band - though some of the casting may... uh... cast doubt upon any certainty of that. 

Greeted by the cold and decidedly Mrs Danvers-esque housekeeper - presumably Mrs Johnson's replacement, if we are going with the same time-band theory - Carlotta Drake (Grayson Hall), our cute new Collins couple begin to settle in to their swanky new digs only for Quentin to be plagued by strange dreams.  He is being visited by dreams of Angelique Collins (Lara Parker), an ancestor with whom he has a burgeoning obsession after becoming entranced with her portrait (like Josette's painting in the previous film an all-new prop rather than simply re-using one from the series, a worthwhile expense rather than cost-cutting from Curtis).  Carlotta continues to be very much the Mrs Danvers  to the late Angelique's Rebecca (a storyline that Hall and Parker had played out in the show's '1970 Parallel Time' sequence, when Kathryn Leigh Scott had essayed the role of the endangered heroine here being portrayed by Jackson), suggesting that Quentin set up his own easel in the house's Tower Room - once the boudoir used by the bewitching Angelique and Quentin's identical ancestor Charles Collins (a dual role for Selby) for their extra-marital trysts - increasing his fixation and recurring visions. 

Tracy tries in vain to get help from neighbouring husband and wife author team Alex and Claire Jennings (John Karlen and Nancy Barrett - either proof that this is in fact a different timestream, or Willie Loomis and Carolyn Stoddard has doppelgangers living just down the road) but Angelique's vengeance reaches out from beyond the grave to prevent the couple rendering aid.  When Quentin, coming ever more dangerously under the ghost-witch's domination, assaults his wife and almost drowns her in the estate's disused swimming pool he even begins taking on the physical traits of Charles (gaining a limp and a facial scar) as well as his personality.  Through dreams / flashbacks we are given the backstory that Angelique's wanton and free-spirited ways aroused the ire of her husband Gabriel Collins (Christopher Pennock, reprising here in 1810 his television character of 1840, who was the brother of  Selby's Quentin Collins the First: namesake ancestor of the better known immortal Victorian wolfman rendition of the character... I swear it makes sense if you have the time and dedication to watch over a thousand episodes) and sister-in-law Laura (Diana Millay) whose accusations of witchcraft and devil worship invoke the wrath of Matthew Hopkins wannabe Reverend Strack (Thayer David again); Angelique is hanged from the branch f the large tree outside the Tower Room before Quentin is inhumed alive with her in the family vault.  All of this is watched by young servant girl Sarah Castle (Monica Rich), an acolyte of Angelique's and of whom Carlotta Drake is the present day reincarnation ready to resurrect the woman with whom she was obsessed.

Accompanied once again by an evocative score by Robert Cobert, Night of Dark Shadows is if anything even more nihilistic than its predecessor (remembering that almost all the main cast, including the young boy, wound up dead in that one).  Its troubled post-production may not have been the product of a vengeful sorceress's curse, but it leaves us with a disjointed but dreamy reverie of a film as haunting as the terrifying but beautiful conjuress at it's dark core. 

And so there we leave the denizens of the cinematic Collinwood, left in a state of stasis never to return for a third instalment and the TV show existing only in the netherworld of reruns and nostalgia.  The spin-off novels would continue until the February of 1972 - and eventually be revived by Lara Parker herself some sixteen years later with her rather wonderful Angelique's Descent - while the Gold Key comic books would continue into February 1976.  But, of course, legends - just like vampires - are very hard to kill.

House of Dark Shadows (Dan Curtis, 1970)

Welcome to Collinsport.  You'll never leave.

Where to begin?  My Gothic love affair with Dan Curtis' Dark Shadows - a five-days-a-week (theoretically, barring pre-empting by live sporting events, political resignations, etc) soap opera that began as a monochrome melodrama only to transform under the light of the moon into a full-blooded and full colour monster fest replete with vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, zombies, time travel and parallel dimensions - began when I was quite young.  Even though it was never shown on terrestrial British television, my grandmother had somehow accumulated amidst the mass of paperbacks that cluttered her house a number of the 1970s Marilyn Ross-penned (well actually Dan Ross-penned, utilising his wife's name as a pseudonym) tie-in books; I remember Barnabas, Quentin and the Mummy's Curse and Barnabas, Quentin and Dr Jekyll's Son were definitely two of them but the identity of the other (for there were three of course, everything comes in threes) is lost in the mists of time.  I don't know if she'd mistaken them for Mills & Boon romance novels or something, or if she'd actually read the back blurbs and decided that stories about a vampire and a werewolf teaming up to take on a mummy, the scion of Stevenson's schizophrenic scientist and sundry other super creeps seemed like a great idea.  Hard to tell with her, as her reading went from the aforesaid M&B romps (Harlequin romance for overseas readers) to the likes of Catherine Cookson and Barbara Cartland to the novelisations of films such as Dawn of the Dead and Blue Sunshine.  You helped warp my young mind, Nanna, and I miss you.  Thank you for the time you were babysitting me and let me stay up to watch Taste the Blood of Dracula.

Anyway, these books intrigued little me of course.  I was always mad for vampires and werewolves especially, so having the two main protagonists being an undead coffin-dwelling bloodsucker and a lycanthrope with carnivorous lunar proclivities respectively was right up my darkened moonlit fog-wreathed alley; the photographic covers and statement that these novels were based on the ABC-TV series blew my little mind entirely.  Books were one thing, but there was an actual programme on the telly with these sort of Universal / Hammer famous monsters of filmland having adventures?  Every weekday?  Satin-lined, velvet draped luxury!  It would, sadly, be decades and the acquiring of a multi-region DVD player and an Amazon account before I actually got to see the show (and soon after came the revelation that the discs were multi-region, so I could have actually got hold of them slightly earlier but nevermind), but those thin paperbacks and the idea of the show that they built up in my young mind - of the vampiric but heroic Barnabas Collins, his roguish and conflicted wolfman cousin Quentin and all the other benighted residents of the haunted halls of the Collinwood estate - lived long and lingered in the memory.

Created by producer Dan Curtis who had until 1966 worked primarily in sporting broadcasts such as golf until he saw what he deemed "stuff that would fly in from the coast on its own it was so bad... talk about turkeys!", and buoyed up by the idea that "if I couldn't do better than these dumb bastards I'd give up the business" pitched an idea that - lie Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson among others - had come to him in a dream: a young woman on a train heading towards a strange and dark destiny.  From this Bronte-esque nascence sprang a daily gourmet feast of horror, as Gothic melodrama gave way to bloodsucking revenants and carnivorous lunar activities across sundry timelines and dimensions; meanwhile back in the U.K. our idea of a soap opera remained steadfastly dull and stuck in the mud of day to day 'realism' - no ghouls or time travel ever bothered the cobbles of Coronation Street alas.

By the end of the '60s Curtis had moved from a pretty hands-off approach to the show - having left the drafting of the series Bible (then titled Shadows on the Wall) to Art Wallace, and the day-to-day scripting and directing duties to a regular roster of writers (such as Wallace, Ron Sproat, Malcolm Marmorstein and Sam Hall) and directors (series stalwart Lela Swift who helmed the first and last episodes and many in between, John Sedwick, Sean Dhu Sullivan and many others) - to a much more active role in the series, taking the directors' chair for twenty one episodes of Dark Shadows between March 1968 and August 1969.  Feeling sufficiently proficient directing the material by this point, when the opportunity came to transfer the series from the flickering set in people's living rooms to the silver screen Curtis himself would be in the driving seat.  Taking full advantage of the series' early 1970 Parallel Time plotline in which many of the major players were either absent or in diminished roles, Curtis and his core cast decamped to Tarrytown NY some twenty five miles north of their usual studio setting where the Lyndhurst estate would be playing the cinematic Collinwood (the television equivalent having been the Carey Mansion in Newport, Rhode Island) to work some macabre movie magick.

With House of Dark Shadows, Curtis and writers Sam Hall and Gordon Russell decided to make the film's story a compressed, condensed and streamlined adaptation of the introductory storyline of the vampire Barnabas Collins, which originally ran from episode 210 to around 290 of the Monday to Friday show.  The original plan of introducing an explicitly supernatural character into what until that point had been a Gothic wherein the ghosts of Collinwood were as much the haunted pasts and concealed misdeeds of the characters as actual phantasms had been to bring in a blood-drinking villain to menace the show for around thirteen weeks, at which point he would be duly dispatched with the obligatory stake through the heart and the show would move on to another storyline.  However, the sheer amount of adoring fan mail that poured in for the character - as well as actor Jonathan Frid - prompted a quick rethink and change of plans that ended up with the genteel vampire becoming the central character of the series.  One wonders what Frid, a reserved gay man, made of the mail sacks full of hot 'n' horny housewives' fantasies that would arrive at the studio each week.  Anyway, they decided to write a screenplay that hew closer to the original vision before Barnabas became the dashing televisual hero defeating daemonic forces daily and protecting the town of Collinsport against heartbroken witches, hairy werewolves and headless warlocks - one where he remained the villain he was originally envisaged in a motion picture freed from the constraints of daytime television and more like the Kensington Gore-strewn antics of Hammer horror or nearest American equivalent.  Something along the lines of the same year's Count Yorga, Vampire from American International Pictures (memo to self: must rewatch the Yorga duology at some point, maybe for Halloween).

The film opens with the customary roar from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Leo the lion before Bob Cobert's eerie, ethereal theme from the series heralds the supernatural storm coming toward the house of Collinwood, where the never more camp and flustered Roger Collins (Louis Edmonds, or 'Big Lou' to his friends) is searching for his errant son David (David Henesy).  The youth, always a bit of a bad seed - especially in the early episodes of the TV series, wherein he engaged in such japes as extending wires across the staircase to trip his father into plummeting to his doom, and removing the bleeder valve from his car's brake cylinder to, again, send him plummeting to his doom - has on this day crossed the line; worse even than attempted patricide he has wronged his lovely nanny / governess Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott, known by Dark Shadows fandom as The Lovely And Talented Kathryn Leigh Scott).  As Roger scours the grounds to locate his spawn he comes across itinerant handyman and ne'er do well Willy Loomis (John Karlen, who will always be more than a decade older and heavier and rocking a 'stache with "as Harvey" captioned under him as he adjusts his tie as Tyne Daly's hubby in the title sequence of Cagney and Lacey) who is mooching about - a great skill to have, I honed it to fine art whilst at 'working' the Inland Revenue - and informs him that his unsatisfactory conduct means that his employment is at an end.  The now free Willy is a man with a plan, however, and is following the clues hidden in an old riddle that purportedly lead to the lost Collins family treasure.  Heading to the Collins crypt in the nearby Eagle Hill cemetery, Loomis locates a secret room within the tomb and pries open the chained-up coffin that resides within.  Never a good idea, as the hand that looms toward his throat teaches him.

Now liberated from his tomb with a view / home sweet prison after approximately 173 years, Mr Barnabas Collins (Frid) swiftly shrugs off the funk of the ages to  make a house call on his own descendants but not before attacking and feasting upon family secretary Daphne Budd (Lisa Richards, who played Sabrina Stuart in the show; Sabrina's main timeline boyfriend was werewolf Chris Jennings, whilst her alternate reality equivalent's beau was the Shadowsverse's equivalent of Jekyll and Hyde: Chris Pennock's Dr Cyrus Longworth / Mr John Yaeger.  I guess she just really digs guys with hirsute alter egos).  Presenting himself to the 1970s-vintage Collinses - the aforementioned Roger and David, Roger's sister the family matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (legend of old Hollywood Joan Bennett, also reprising her usual TV role), her daughter Carolyn (Nancy Barrett), Carolyn's fiance Todd Blake (Don Briscoe, who played the aforementioned lycanthropy-stricken Chris Jennings in the show and whose life seemed similarly cursed: he was forced to drop out of the show, disappearing suddenly during the 1970 Parallel Time storyline due to personal problems [probably exacerbated by "a little too much L.D.S.", as Admiral Kirk said to Gillian]), live-in physician Dr Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall), Professor Timothy Elliott Stokes (Thayer David, who would go on to menace Marvel's ol' webhead in the 1977 Spider-Man as Mr Byron), as well as Maggie and her boyfriend Jeff Clark (Roger Davis) - as his own descendant newly arrived from London, the vampire swiftly inveigles himself into their company and confidence. 

Entranced with the young governess due to her remarkable resemblance to his late 1700s love Josette - yes, Curtis is the one responsible for the whole "bewitched by the modern doppelganger of a past romance" thing that made its way from the original show via this movie and then Curtis' 1973 Bram Stoker's Dracula to eventually infect its 1992 Coppola namesake (actually, thinking back, the real culprit of originating this is most probably Nina Wilcox Putnam who wrote the unproduced Universal Pictures Boris Karloff vehicle Cagliostro, elements of which wound up in 1932's The Mummy with its millennia-spanning love story betwixt Imhotep and Ankhesenamun / Helen Grosvenor) - Barnabas arranges for an out of town job opportunity to arise for Jeff so that he can move in on Maggie.  What girl could hope to resist a man with his own silver wolfshead cane (ideal for killing loup garous, as Larry Talbot and Jack Whittier can attest), crumbling old mansion (Barnabas has moved into 'the Old House', his original 18th century home) and mad Renfield-like servant (the unfortunate Willy Loomis, now under Barnabas's spell and acting as his handyman-cum-gofer).  As Barnabas and Maggie enjoy romantic strolls in the countryside he is supplementing his dating with some nocturnal predating upon Carolyn, who becomes a very willing Lucy Westenra-style blood donor.  It's like Carolyn his side piece of ass or fucktoy so that he won't feel the need to pressure lovely innocent Maggie.

The curious Dr Hoffman, meanwhile, works out who and what Barnabas really is (with the help of Professor Stokes) and her utter fascination with a specimen of the undead leads her to make him a promise that she can cure his condition with a series of alchemical injections that make him able to go out in the daylight unharmed - handy for his and Ms Evans' bucolic walks - but when Barnabas makes it very clear that he is interested only in her medical help rather than indulging in her doctor-patient fantasies the scorned scientist gives him an overdose of the formula that leads to him aging rapidly to his true age of two centuries (very impressive make up from Dick Smith, improving upon the TV series and a blueprint for his work on Dustin Hoffman in the same year's Little Big Man).  Barnabas responds by slaying the doc before rejuvenating himself by completely draining Carolyn of her blood, giving us an atmospheric rain-lashed funeral sequence that Curtis would repeat almost shot for shot for Lucy in his version of Dracula three years later before Carolyn rises in vampiric Bloofer Lady form to prey upon her young cousin David and her boyfriend Todd; a reign of terror ended by her staking at the Van Helsing-style hands of Professor Stokes.

When Barnabas sweeps Maggie away to a desecrated church on an isolated island to complete her conversion into the reincarnation of Josette Dupre as his vampire bride, Jeff has to draw on the Professor's arcane knowledge to arm himself with cross and crossbow to turn amateur vampire slayer and rescue his betrothed from a fate worse than un-death.  The film ends with a sequel-baiting final shot dangling the promise of Barnabas Collins' return but although a sequel would arrive but a year later it would be a very different beast than the writer and director intended.  Which we shall get to anon. 

I recall (god, I wish I didn't) once having a drink with film academic Dr Laura Mayne - co-host of the Second Features podcast, which covers some wonderful obscure gems of cinema and would highly recommend to anyone who suffers through the rubbish I write here as well as having a suspiciously familiar blurb about the byways and back roads of film (no Laura, I'm not accusing you of plagiarism, I'm just sayin') - and, upon her mentioning that her partner has acquired an original cinema poster for House of Dark Shadows, I responded rather embarrassingly.  So bewitched, beguiled and bewildered by her pulchritude was I that in my semi-inebriated state I blurted out how jealous I was of him for having that poster as well as her.  I am facepalming as I type this.  Your scorn is accurate.  No, she doesn't talk to me anymore.  Yes, I came close to cringing myself to death afterwards.

Still wish I had that poster, though.