Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) - film review

One year after Dracula was destroyed, Monsignor Ernst Müller returns to the village of Klausenberg to see how the locals are faring now that they have been freed from the vampire scourge.   He is incredulous to find the church empty on the Sabbath day.  The villagers tell him that they dare not set foot inside the church since it is touched by the shadow of Dracula’s castle.   Aware that the threat of the vampire has not yet been removed, the Monsignor sets out to exorcise the fiend’s mountaintop castle, accompanied by a Catholic priest.  Whilst Müller is busy nailing a crucifix to the castle gates, his companion stumbles and unwittingly revives the slumbering Dracula, who has lain frozen in a mountain stream.   The prince of darkness is outraged when he sees the crucifix barring his entrance to his castle and, making the priest his servant, swears vengeance.   Happy that his work is done, Monsignor Müller returns to his hometown of Keinenberg, and arrives just in time to meet his neice Maria’s new boyfriend, Paul, at a dinner engagement.   Paul, a student who works in the local bakery, makes an immediate bad impression by revealing that he is an atheist.   The Monsignor will soon have more serious matters to contend with when Dracula arrives in town, with the intention of making his niece his next victim...

The third of Hammer’s Dracula films picks up where Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966) left off, although on this occasion Christopher Lee was sufficiently unoffended by the dialogue to deign to speak his lines.  The mute Dracula of the previous film wasn’t particularly convincing and having the vampire articulate his anger adds greatly to the power of Lee’s performance.  Dracula Has Risen from the Grave may not be the best of Hammer’s Dracula films, but it is arguably the one in which Christopher Lee is most effective in the role.  

Another thing that counts (no pun intended) in this film’s favour  is its visual modernity.  In contrast to Dracula: Prince of Darkness, which looks as if it were made a year after Hammer’s first Dracula film (in 1958), this quaint Gothic horror is touched by sixties psychedelia (note the inventive use of coloured filters to accentuate the film’s creepy atmosphere) and far more imaginative use of the camera.  These inspired visual touches are no doubt down to Freddie Francis’s experience as a cinematographer.

This film marked the Hammer debut of the stunningly beautiful Veronica Carlson, one of the studio’s more talented discoveries who bears a striking resemblance the iconic French screen actress Catherine Deneuve.  Carlson’s angelic presence both accentuates the film’s elegance and heightens the menace and viciousness of Lee’s Dracula.  The actress would subsequently feature in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) and The Horror of Frankenstein (1970).  

Although the plot of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave has many original elements (whilst retaining the familiar motifs of Bram Stoker’s original novel), it does stretch credibility a little too far and is unevenly paced.  Too much time is spent on the tedious romantic love triangle involving Paul, Maria and Zena, time that could have been better spent building the tension and rewarding the audience with genuine horror thrills.  For a film made in 1968, it is almost ludicrously naive in both its horror and sexual content, and Hammer’s Gothic horror seems to be trapped in a time warp.  Aware that they were falling behind the times, Hammer would inject far more violence and eroticism into their next Dracula offerings, Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) and Scars of Dracula (1970), whilst sadly losing much of the camp fun which made the earlier films so appealing.

© Alex Sullivan 2010

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