Vampires (2 page)

My own vantage point for the beginning of the vampire in movies will always be Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s pirated version of Bram Stoker’s novel,
Dracula
.
Nosferatu; eine symphonie des grauens (1922).
Max Schreck’s decadent invader is the undisputed blueprint for some of the best vampire movies ever made although the vampire himself only occupies very little screen time – Shreck’s whole performance can be viewed in just over ten minutes! The images however are perhaps the most iconic and memorable snippets ever put onto film. The vampire moving relentlessly with his ungainly walk with his arms tapering out to long sharp fingernails almost stuck to his sides. The most terrifying image of Graf Orlok staring from beneath a coffin lid at his midnight visitor has still to be bettered. Evil on a sea voyage is hinted at as crew members throw themselves overboard, preferring a watery death than to be left with thoughts of death at the hands of the unspeakable demon with egg-shaped eyes that controls the rats in the hold and guards its own coffin disguised as an ethereal phantom. A demon who invades a quiet German city carrying his only possession under his arm, a coffin: and, following in his wake, a horde of squeaking furry comrades that infest the whole country. A lumbering shadow moving with devious intent on a silhouette staircase and finally gorging himself on the blood of the sleeping heroine, only coming out of his own transfixed state when the cock crow announces the dawn and the rise of the destructive sunlight.

Nosferatu
is the first vampire to be felled by the rays of the sun mainly through economy. In
Dracula
, Jimmy Sangster would utilize the same weapon against Christopher Lee. In the novel,
Dracula
, Van Helsing confirms that the vampire can move around in daylight, but is shorn of his supernatural shape-shifting powers. Murnau had given future vampire hunters another weapon to help them in their battles against the undead. Apart from this film, which he labored on incessantly until his death; even to the point of adding sound,
Die Zwoelfte Stunde/The Twelfth Hour (1931),
Murnau would never tackle the subject of the vampire again.

Perhaps the most misleading film of the silent period is the Tod Browning/Lon Chaney collaboration,
The Hypnotist aka London After Midnight (1927).
Arriving on the heels of the films and serials mentioned above, I think that it is fair to say that film makers – particularly in the United States – were still unsure that the public were ready to accept a real, blood drinking phantom into their nightmares. Chaney’s top-hatted vampire, with his bulging eyes and profuse denture work is a nightmarish revelation, but the film cops out at the closing moments when it reveals that all the supernatural episodes are devices used to trap a real killer and the vampire himself, is fake. When sound arrived in the moves – courtesy of Al Jolson in
The Jazz Singer (1928)
– it was decided that vampires needed that little bit extra. Universal studios cast Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula in a film treatment based on the Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston stage play of 1927. Lugosi never fully mastered the English language and was notorious for learning his parts phonetically. This tack brought a further misconception of eeriness to Bram Stoker’s creation. Lugosi would be internationally recognized as
the Count Dracula
for billions of moviegoers and yet, the studio’s best Dracula films,
Dracula’s Daughter (1936)
and
Son of Dracula (1943)
don’t have Lugosi in their cast list. Their best Dracula adaptation, notoriously referred to as the
Spanish language Dracula (1931),
substitutes Bela Lugosi for an urbane doppelganger in Carlos Villarias. He is a grinning sociopath, who at least clutters his cob-webbed castle with the correct wildlife.

Vampires continued to emerge in USA’s chapter play serials of the thirties such as
Flash Gordon (1936),
with Buster Crabbe’s blonde hero battling fanged monsters in the arena. Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan was plagued by giant vampire bats in a scene from
Tarzan Escapes (1932)
that ended up on the cutting room floor. The more interesting vampire stories were attributed to poverty row quickies such as Majestic Pictures,
The Vampire Bat (1933),
in which Lionel Atwill plays a mad scientist lusting after Fay Wray whilst using hypnotism to create fake vampire scenarios. Dwight Frye –
Dracula’s
Renfield – is mis-identified as the killer in this cash in on Atwill and Wray’s success,
The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1932).
The director, Frank Strayer, continued with Invincible picture’s
Condemned To Live (1935).
Ralph Morgan, brother of the
Wizard of Oz,
Frank, begins terrorizing a small European village when he turns into a vampire on the nights of the full moon. This film stands head and shoulders above most poverty row movies primarily for the performance of Morgan as the cursed scientist who is unaware of his malady. Gloria Holden cut a very memorable figure as the Countess Marya Zaleska, half-heartedly seeking a cure for her ills while attempting to indulge in lesbian shenanigans with young models in her art studio in the great
Dracula’s Daughter (1936).
Warner Brothers
The Return of Dr X (1939),
is a real anomaly. Humphrey Bogart starred as Marshall Quesne, a reanimated corpse. Despite the title, this is not a sequel to any of Warner’s earlier monster movies and remains of interest because it is Bogart’s only role in a horror movie. Director Vincent Sherman’s first film gives Bogart a great introductory sequence emerging from his laboratory with grinning white face and holding a syringe in one hand and a cuddly bunny in the other.

Bela Lugosi starred in Tod Browning’s
Mark of the Vampire (1935),
as he found himself, thanks to Universal’s publicity machine, typecast very quickly. He had been paid off not to star in
Dracula’s Daughter
and was impersonated by a wax dummy. Similarly, he would be replaced by Lon Chaney Jr for
Son of Dracula,
and John Carradine for
House of Frankenstein (1944)
and its sequel,
House of Dracula (1945).

Mark of the Vampire
and the later
Return of the Vampire (1943)
are Lugosi’s best vampire movies and should be discussed in more depth. The characters, Count Mora and Armand Tesla, released Lugosi and the film makers from the shackles of Bram Stoker’s novel and the movies fare better because of this. Neither was made at Universal.
Mark of the Vampire
was fashioned at MGM and was a remake of Browning’s earlier
London After Midnight.
Browning had given the script writing reins to Guy Endore, author of
The Werewolf of Paris (1933),
and he had invented one of the more interesting reasons that people become vampires after death. Lugosi’s Count Mora sports a bullet wound to his temple throughout the film. The censor had cut the explanation that he had abused his own daughter, Luna (Carroll Borland), forcing him to take her life and his. Both rise impressively from the grave as vampires to reveal shocks that had been bereft of in Browning’s
Dracula
. Unfortunately, this cover is also blown when it is revealed that the mute vampires are actually jobbing actors trying to force a murderer to confess. As Lugosi was already waning in the studio popularity stakes, this final revelation added a life-imitates-art irony to the bizarre
façade
of eeriness that Browning was never able to match in his masterpiece by proxy,
Dracula.

As Armand Tesla in Columbia’s
Return of the Vampire,
Lugosi is a black magician who has cursed himself with vampirism. He is destroyed at the beginning of the movie, only to be unearthed by the mortar bombings of World War One. Military Police of the comedy relief variety pull the spike from his heart, believing it to be a length of shrapnel. Tesla revives and is aided by Andreas (Matt Willis), whose cloak of servitude is yak hair, a rubber snout and fangs. Andreas is a werewolf. This film was Columbia’s attempt to cash in on Universal’s own movie;
Frankenstein meets the Wolf man (1943),
in which Lugosi played the blind Frankenstein monster.

Columbia didn’t hold the patent to the name
Dracula
, but this doesn’t stop director Lew Landers from aping many scenes from Bela’s signature movie. Events take a turn when Andreas is taught to shuck off the hold of Armand Tesla and stand on his own two feet. At the end of the film, he stakes the vampire a second time. Lugosi melts away under the rays of the sun as his skin falls from his face like wax. Arguably, Lugosi was never better as a vampire than in this movie. As in
Mark of the Vampire’s
Count Mora, Armand Tesla is again freed of
Dracula
’s very demanding constraints – a stage bound script being the worst culprit – becoming a character that holds his own hypnotic fascination.  He changes into a bat and vanishes into mist. He is rebuked by the glowing cross of his adversaries and duplicates his Dracula moan when staked onscreen by a long spike. It is certainly the last time that Lugosi was taken seriously as the movie master of the undead. In 1948, he was lured back to Universal and burlesqued his famous image in
Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein,
playing Count Dracula for the second and final time. In satin cape and clown white face, he takes on the role of the Mad Scientist trying to supercharge the Frankenstein monster (Glenn Strange), by adding the brain of Lou Costello. It is hard to believe that the film had once been conceived as a straight thriller, following on from
House of Dracula
– in which John Carradine’s Count approaches Mad Scientist Dr Edelmann (Onslow Stevens), for a cure for his need for blood – Bela has obvious fun in his old role and the film was a box office bulls eye that pulled Universal from the brink of bankruptcy in much the same way as
Dracula
had seventeen years earlier. It was also the last time that Lugosi would be taken seriously in the cinema. After
Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein,
he was forced into films on the poverty row that were general slap stick comedies that ran his image into the ground quicker than a stake through the heart.
Old Mother Riley meets the Vampire (1952)
billed him opposite fading vaudevillian, Arthur Lucan. He plays a deluded scientist who believes himself to be a vampire. The only point of interest is the fact that the director of this film was John Gilling, who would go on to direct Hammer’s
Plague of the Zombies
and
The Reptile,
both made in 1966.

The World was changing. Man had split the atom and the new craze known as the drive-in would take hold. Scientifically bred vampires such as
The Thing From Another World (1951),
joined the roster with alien bloodsuckers found in
Not of This Earth (1956)
and
IT! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958)
and relegated a back seat to the dire half-vampires invented by Edward D Wood jr and his contemporaries that Bela Lugosi was reduced to. The actor himself had been fighting drug and alcohol addiction for twenty years or more and I think that it is safe to say that his need for easy money to feed his habits made it harder for him to secure a safe and well paying contract. He died in 1956 on August 16
th
, in poverty and practically forgotten.

Further vampires of note consist of Francis Lederer in the low budget shocker
The Fantastic Disappearing man aka The Return of Dracula (1957),
made just a few months earlier than Hammer’s epoch-making classic, but very atmospheric for all of that. Taking its cue from the plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s
Shadow of A Doubt (1944),
Lederer’s Dracula enters the mid-west disguised as an illegal immigrant named Bellac. He hides out in a cave on the outskirts of town and vampirizes a local blind girl whilst trying to put the moves on the films young leads. He is eventually destroyed by falling into a pit primed with wooden stakes. Hungarian Lederer is creepy, but fails to have a real supernatural aura as the Count. Also, like his predecessors, he bares no fangs. The same company, Gramercy pictures, had been responsible for the earlier movie,
The Vampire aka Mark of the Vampire (1956),
starring John Beale who changes into a scaly monster after ingesting pills made from the blood of the vampire bat. Hammer had also ventured into science fiction with their film,
The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)
starring Brian Donlevy as Nigel Kneale’s hero. The imaginative plot had Richard Wordsworth’s astronaut exposed to the elements and turning into a slimy creature. Jimmy Sangster had written the
Curse of Frankenstein
for Hammer, but had also free-lanced with a blood and thunder offering titled,
Blood of the Vampire (1957)
starring Sir Donald Wolfit, Barbara Shelley and Vincent Ball. A grim tale that despite the title, it has no vampires and is more attuned to the
Frankenstein
series of movies. But Wolfit’s sadistic Dr Callistratus does succumb to a stake through the heart in the shocking opening sequence before turning up unexplained to cause havoc in a small mid-European town – not unlike Hammer’s own settings in their Bray days – and causing all kinds of trouble for Miss Shelley and her beau Vincent Ball. There is also the inclusion of Victor Maddern as Karl, a bug-eyed hunchback who turns the tables on his master at the cost of his own life. Callistratus is finally eaten by his own guard dogs. Sangster was a fan of the gothic novel and proved his enthusiasm for the genre with his scripts, streamlining the stories to give them an incredible cinematic look whilst ejecting overblown theories and concepts that the author’s ran afoul of. With their Victorian prose. Jimmy Sangster entered Hammer as a 28 year old copy-boy and worked his way up through the ranks. He wrote many of Hammer’s better screenplays and directed a few films too.
Lust For A Vampire
and
Horror of Frankenstein
were directed by Jimmy Sangster.