The Hammer Vampire

In the same film, we also see that a vampire can be destroyed by a stake driven through the heart and that the touch of a crucifix sears the flesh or the vampire or its victims. Moreover, we learn that a vampire cannot turn itself into a bat or wolf. When Arthur Holmwood (Michael Gough) suggests otherwise, Van Helsing’s reply is unequivocal – “That’s a common fallacy,” he states authoritatively.

So far so good.

In their very next vampire film, The Brides of Dracula”(1960), Hammer immediately began to move the goalposts. There is of course nothing wrong with doing this, cinematically speaking, and Universal had done similar things with their own horror series in the thirties and forties, but it’s interesting anyway to see the changes develop. In “Brides”, for instance, Van Helsing contradicts his statement in the original film, telling the Priest (Fred Johnson) that some vampires “have the power to transform themselves into bats” and offering burning as an alternative method of destroying the undead. We also see that holy water burns the vampire and getting caught in a cross-shaped shadow doesn’t do him much good either! Incidentally, in this film Van Helsing observes that “the vampire, by its kiss, the taking of blood from its victim, makes of that victim another victim – so the cult grows, infinitely slowly, but it grows.” The choice of the words “infinitely slowly” seems a little strange, given that if each vampire creates other vampires at the rate of just one a night, then the entire planet would be overrun with the undead in under a month!

After “Brides” came Kiss of the Vampire (1963), which dispelled the idea that vampires cannot move around in daylight, but merely have to avoid bright sunlight. This is best demonstrated by the scene in which, when Professor Zimmer (Clifford Evans) points out to Carl (Barry Warren) and Sabena (Jacquie Wallis) that the gloomy weather seems to be improving, they immediately rush home to the dark security of their castle, where they are later destroyed by a swarm of bats conjured up in a ritualistic ceremony performed by the Professor, another twist to the legend.

Next in Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1966), we are asked to believe that a vampire can be resurrected, despite its “final and absolute destruction” (the words used by Andrew Keir as narrator of the film’s prologue) and another weapon is added to the vampire-hunter’s arsenal – immersion in running water, a method of disposal used again on Christopher Neame’s Johnny Alucard in Dracula A.D. 1972 (more of which later). However, a more controversial turn to the myth was presented in Dracula has Risen from the Grave (1968). Here, having convinced audiences of the possibility of reviving a destroyed vampire, Hammer probably went a bit too far by insisting (for one film only) that a stake through the heart would only work if accompanied by the prayers of a true believer! The idea failed, not so much because it was something new, but more because we were being asked to alter our belief in a basic tenet – namely that a staked vampire really has met his Waterloo, prayers or not, (unless later resurrected, of course!). This was the argument put forward by Christopher Lee when he tried to have the scene amended, but he was overruled and it remains in the film.

The rest of the Hammer “Dracula” series remains quite consistent. He is revived and destroyed in reasonably acceptable ways: entrapment in a church (Taste the Blood of Dracula) , burned (Scars of Dracula) and staked (Dracula A.D.1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula). Similarly, the other vampires in these films get their comeuppance by traditional (Hammer) means, with the possible exception of the vampire girls in the cellar in “Satanic Rites”, where we are required to make a leap of imagination and substitute water sprinklers for immersion in running water! Other weapons also came along in these later productions, notably the silver knife in Dracula A.D. 1972 (by now we have been informed that vampires do not like silver either) and the hawthorn tree in “Satanic Rites”, abhorrent to the vampire because it “provided Christ with His crown of thorns”.