Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) - film review

Three seemingly upright Victorian gentlemen – William Hargood, Samuel Paxton and Anthony Higgins – have formed a secret society, ostensibly for the good of their fellow man.  Every so often, they leave their comfortable middleclass villas and set out for the seedy East End of London, not to do charity work as they claim, but to amuse themselves in brothels.  On one of these pleasure excursions, they are accosted by the mysterious Lord Courtley, who offers the three men a sensual experience beyond their wildest imaginings, if they will only join him in a satanic ritual.  The three hedonists cannot resist the bait and give Courtley the money he needs to buy some ancient artefacts, which are in fact the last remains of the vampire Count Dracula.  At an abandoned chapel, the four men assemble to perform their diabolical ritual.  When his three new disciples refuse to swallow the revitalised blood of Dracula, Courtley drinks it and collapses.  Horrified and disgusted, Hargood and his two friends kick him to death and flee.  Reanimated from Courtley’s corpse, Dracula is outraged at the death of his servant and swears that he will take his revenge on the three men who killed him...

Audiences who had grown accustomed to the reassuringly predictable style and content of Hammer’s gothic horror films in the 1960s must have been shaken when they saw Taste the Blood of Dracula in 1970.  This is a film that took the genre in a whole new direction, with far more explicit physical violence and a much creepier visual style than what had gone before, with less of the camp humour and clichéd silliness.   Director Peter Sasdy breathes life into a tired format and brings a refreshing auteur approach, using the camera and lighting to create a chilling dreamlike feel whilst injecting greater realism and emotion into the drama.  Sasdy would subsequently direct Countess Dracula (1971), another atypical film for Hammer, on account of its visceral horror content and unsettling stylisation.  

In this, his fifth appearance as Count Dracula, Christopher Lee gets very little to do but is impressive in the few scenes in which he appears.  Lee has been dismissive of this film although it is, arguably, the one in which he gives his best performance as the sinister Count, sending a chill up the spine whenever he comes into camera shot.  Like the other great gothic horror monsters, Dracula is more effective, more menacing if he is given fewer lines.  Lee’s presence alone is enough to frighten an audience.  As Lee showed in the earlier Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), in which the actor refused to speak his lines because they were so atrocious, words are superfluous.  Interestingly, this is the one film in which Dracula is presented as a morally decent character, avenging the death of his loyal servant and punishing an odious band of Victorian hypocrites.  It just goes to show, there is good in everyone.

The reason why Dracula appears so little in this film was the result of a last-minute rewrite which arose from Warner Brothers’ insistence that Christopher Lee be in the film.  At the time, the bosses at Hammer had fallen out with Lee over his salary and had decided to replace him with another actor, the virtually unknown Ralph Bates.  Plans to have Bates play the part of Dracula in this film were scuppered when Warner Brothers threatened to withdraw their financial backing if Lee was not given the role.  So, the script was revised, Lee appears briefly as Dracula, and Bates was demoted to a smaller role.  Hammer would later attempt to groom Ralph Bates as a replacement for Peter Cushing, casting him as Baron Frankenstein in The Horror of Frankenstein (1970), again without success.

To see how unusual and how far ahead of its time this film was, you have only to compare it with Scars of Dracula, the other Dracula film that Hammer released in 1970.  The latter has its fair share of visceral horror and features another fine turn from Christopher Lee but it is much closer to the house style that Hammer had developed in the previous decade (albeit with an unfortunate smattering of Carry On style humour).  Taste the Blood of Dracula is superior in virtually every respect, a much darker, more atmospheric film, that conveys more vividly the evil and power of the vampire than perhaps any other Hammer horror film.   Stylish, haunting and truly thrilling, this ought to be considered the best of Hammer’s Dracula films.

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