Fifty-two years ago, in the film Dracula AD 1972, the count ravaged London in the merry seventies - and critics buried him with a leaf.
But that film changed the mold for the legendary bloodsucker, writes David Barnett.
The tagline of the movie Dracula AD 1972 tells you everything: "The Count is back and he's got his eye on London's hot-pants… he's ready to try anything!"
Once an inventory of dark 19th-century European castles and alleys, the legendary bloodsucker in this British cult horror classic instead haunts London in the second half of the 20th century - the first time Dracula has been taken out of his Victorian milieu and placed in a contemporary setting.
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Premiered in theaters 52 years ago, the film appeared in the twilight of the famous horror film company Hammer, which began its dominance in 1955 with the Quatermas experiment and had its heyday from the end of that decade to the end of the sixties.
Much like the earlier American equivalent of Juniversal, Hammer assembled a stable of classic horror monsters to bring to the big screen - the mummy, Frankenstein's monster, werewolves - but with a British sensibility, and more blood and sex.
For many film fans, Christopher Lee's interpretation of the red-eyed Count Dracula has become the archetypal cinematic incarnation, starting with 1958's Dracula, a more or less direct adaptation of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel.
By the time of Dracula AD 1972, however, Hammer had veered - in this case extremely - from the well-trodden path of uninterrupted chronicles of the Transylvanian villain.
Since Hammer's two mainstays in the form of Lee and his regular sparring partner Peter Cushing, who played the vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing, headlined 1972's Dracula AD, he seemed to be on the verge of success, despite Lee - in the penultimate interpretation of Dracula, while his last one was a direct sequel to Dracula's Satanic Rituals - he was reportedly not really warm to this film.
In his 2004 autobiography The Lord of Anarchy, Lee - although he expressed great admiration for the character of the Count - wrote: "It was aesthetically depressing to watch the films deteriorate step by step... with Dracula's satanic rituals I reached an irrevocable point of no return."
The film opens in typical Dracula fashion, with a frenzied race as Cushing's vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing chases Lee's Transylvanian count in 1872, eventually piercing his heart in a very unusual way, on a broken carriage wheel, killing himself along the way.
One of the greatest hero-villain dynamics in the history of popular culture was finally brought to an end.
But as one of Dracula's followers is burying his ashes near Van Helsing's grave in London's St. Bartholomew's Church, he looks up to the sky… and suddenly a passenger plane soars above him, conveniently fast-forwarding the story a hundred years later.
And there, in 1972, we find the gloomy Christopher Neem as Johnny Alucard (a cunning pseudonym that absolutely none of his friends even think to say backwards), the hippie apostle of an undead count whose mission is to bring Dracula back to ravage London in the Roaring Seventies.
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Even Dynasty star Stephanie Beecham, who plays both Alucard's acquaintance and the descendant of Dracula's nemesis Van Helsing, fails to connect what he's up to - not even after a long party sequence to the music of the seventies blues-rock band Stoneground (it seems (at one point Rod Suttart and Facesiz were considered to be a live band on the big screen), Alucard takes her and her ragtag crew of hippies to St. Bartholomew's Church to perform a satanic ritual just for fun.
Which, of course, brings Dracula back safe and sound and - as the tagline says - with an eye on hot pants... not to put them on himself, of course, but to sink his teeth into their owners.
"This isn't a great premise for another horror film, but given Miss Beecham's ability to sigh, and her sighing bust, it will have to do," noted and respected film critic Roger Ebert wrote upon the film's 1972 release. .
He also, somewhat unusually, praised him with mild criticism, complaining that Hammer "seems ready to follow in the footsteps of the artistic leaders of violent innovations with names like Kujubrik. Alas."
Meanwhile, Mantle Film Bulletin wrote that it was "a failed and utterly unimaginative attempt to modernize Bram Stoker's legend in contemporary Chelsea."
These were common depictions of the time, building on the derisive comments received by Hammer's previous Dracula film, The Dracula Scar.
It seemed that, at least in the eyes of critics, Hammer's stewardship of Bram Stoker's creation had become anemic by the time AD was published in 1972.
Counterarguments in defense of the film
"Hammer's Dracula films generally didn't get good reviews anyway - and fans tended not to embrace innovation," says Kim Newman, novelist, author and film critic.
“It was the first Hammer's Dracula I saw in the cinema and I loved it - I watched it again on TV later in the 1972s and thought it was hopelessly out of date. In the meantime, I've fallen in love with it again... AD XNUMX has kitsch/campy elements, but the action scenes are great, the characters are vivid and appealing, and I love the music."
What Dracula AD 1972 accomplished by taking the Count out of his historical setting and bringing him into modern times is also not to be underestimated.
Another big fan of the film is writer, actor and Sherlock co-writer Mark Gatiss, whose 2020 BBC mini-series about the earl with Sherlock collaborator Steven Moffat pulled a similar trick.
Namely, she placed Dracula (played with ominous charm by Klis Beng) in his original context, and then, somewhere in the middle of the story, turned everything upside down by bringing him to modern times.
Gatis couldn't have been more delighted with Dracula AD 1972, despite all its flaws.
"It's a very happy thing and I'm very glad it exists," he says.
“I've always loved that movie, mostly because it's so wrong. It had a wonderful displacement, and I think that comes from the fact that they originally planned to shoot it in 1969, but by the time it premiered in 1972, that hippie theme was already well out of date."
He adds that its seemingly eccentric premise was actually perfectly in the spirit of Bram Stoker's novel because it itself represented a modernization of the vampire story in relation to its traditional setting of centuries-old legends.
"People often forget how radical the original novel is," he says.
"Dracula comes to England for new horizons, new blood, his land is old and barren, and what has become the standard setting for Dracula adaptations, Victorian England, was new and contemporary at the time."
Still, like Newman, Gatiss thinks the sequel, The Satanic Rituals of Dracula, which keeps Dracula in the modern age, this time pitting him against secret agents, is a better film, "raw and very gruesome," and perhaps a more fitting farewell to Lee's career as the titular bloodsucker. .
"I don't think Christopher Lee was very happy with Dracula AD in 1972," says Gatiss.
"If you look at the publicity photos from when the movie was made, he looks extremely unhappy!"
However, someone who was very pleased with the film was iconic actress Carolyn Munro, who, as the film's first victim Laura Bellows, took center stage when she signed up to be the central figure in the ritual that brings Dracula back from the dead.
Covered in blood that has been spilled all over her as she lies on the altar in the ruined church, she then confronts the count.
It was her first Hammer film after studio head Sir James Carreras spotted her in a billboard rum ad.
She would go on to build a career in horror and sci-fi films for both Hammer and others - starring in films such as Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter and At Earth's Core, and also becoming a Bond girl in 1975's The Spy Who Loved Me.
"I'm not entirely sure how it was received by critics or at the box office, but I think that many young people recognized themselves in it, and I also think that it might have been a little ahead of its time," she tells BBC Culture.
"It was a very bold move by Hammer, because it was so over the top, and a lot of people thought, 'Honey, what is this?'"
Working with legends like Lee and Cushing was inspiring for Munro, who insists she didn't see Lee in his full Dracula mask before shooting her pivotal scene.
She says, “The look on my face when he appears is real, because I wanted to be very surprised when his imposing figure looms over me.
"I didn't have scenes with Peter Cushing, but I got to know him better when we were filming In the Earth's Core," she adds.
“Both he and Christopher were true gentlemen, and I was privileged to work with them. It was the first time I worked with such fantastic actors, with Stephanie Beach and Michael Kitchen. I was very, very nervous, but it was an incredible learning curve for me as an actress."
While this may have been the first time Dracula himself had been transported into modern times, the groundwork had already been laid, says Christopher Frayling, cultural critic and author of The Vampire Movie: The First 100 Years.
He cites Count George, a 1970 vampire in which the titular vampire runs amok in modern-day Los Angeles, and Blackwell, a "blackploitation" favorite released only a few months before Hammer's film, as examples of films that preceded it and brought the vampire into a contemporary setting. .
A key place in horror history
Still, while it wasn't the first, "Dracula AD 1972 is a fascinating film," Frayling tells BBC Culture, "the beginning of Hammer's last rush, in a way. It's quite innovative, an obvious attempt by Hammer to appeal to a younger audience, albeit the teenagers of Merry London the sixties seemed strangely old-fashioned at the time the film came out."
"The film is a kind of connective tissue between Hammer's old films from the fifties and the new breed of horror films that followed," he adds.
"Devil Chaser came out in 1973, which sent horror in a whole new direction, and in 1975, Stephen King's vampire novel Salemovo was published, which was turned into a series of TV movies. So, in a way, Dracula AD 1972 really represented the end of that one particular era."
Newman - who would later use the name "Johnny Alucard" for one of the main characters in his Anna Dracula novel series with an alternate history in which Count Dracula marries Queen Victoria - believes the film received a harsher reception than it deserved because it was a late Hammer film at a time when the company was starting to have problems.
"There was no resistance to the idea of a vampire film in a contemporary setting," he says.
"A few years later, Salem's was practically Dracula set in Peyton Township."
Hammer struggled to stay in the game, and some at the time were just noticing the "chicks" - see also Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde or Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires for examples of unusual hybrids."
And so, while he wasn't entirely sure what he wanted to be and perhaps wasn't entirely successful in introducing the immortal Dracula to hipster central London, Dracula AD 1972 gained quite a following in the decades that followed.
After its first release on DVD in 2006, in particular, it found a new audience that knew how to appreciate it.
As stated by the Classic Monsters website, "the film succeeds in doing what it set out to do, refreshing a tired franchise while preserving enough of its legacy to remain believable."
And as the Grindhouse Database says, "it's the epitome of seventies exploitation at its most twisted and whimsical...a gloriously entertaining experience."
What would Bram Stoker say to that?
We'll never know, of course, but his great-great-nephew Decker Stoker, who has written many books about his ancestor's creation, thinks that, if nothing else, the film sets the stage for Dracula to escape his Victorian shackles.
"He did set the stage for writers and screenwriters who modernized Bram Stoker's Victorian horror story and released the Transylvanian grog off the chain to a much wider and more diverse audience," he tells BBC Culture, joking that he "would have thought the soundtrack was bad enough to kill the earl, but instead he was impaled on the wooden toe of the carriage wheel, which I think was quite an ingenious solution."
Without the ambition of Dracula AD 1972 and its at the time bold and controversial move to bring Dracula into the modern age, the seeds might not have been sown for other writers and filmmakers who themselves refreshed the vampire legend.
Three years later, Stephen King released the aforementioned Salem, and the basic concept of the 1972 film was repeated with Hollywood's Dracula 2000 at the turn of the new millennium, with Gerald Butler as the Count, and in its two sequels.
Who knows, without AD 1972 we might never even have contemporary vampire stories like Interview with the Vampire Ann Rice, published in 1976, or the Twilight series, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
He may be a mildly humorous rarity in the horror canon, but he is nonetheless significant.
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