This is part four of a thirteen part series.
The interesting thing about Great Britain after World War II is that it promoted itself as being more important than it really was. Yes, it’s undeniable that the liberal democracy of today has its origins in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and it is also true that the British Empire, as brutal as it could be towards colonial populations, was responsible for a unprecedented era of (relative) international peace and prosperous commerce.
That all changed with the world wars. World War I, which was caused by poor diplomacy and ended with even worse diplomacy, nearly wiped out an entire generation of young British lions. The next war - the really big one, as they say - still ended in British victory, but the cost in human lives forced the British to admit that their imperial days had come to an end. America and the Soviet Union were the new superpowers, and the former colonial nations in Asia and Africa were no longer willing to wait until Britain’s gradual withdrawal. Decolonization had begun, and it was a crimson affair to say the least.
It is precisely around this time that Great Britain, a former naval and land-based empire, was starting to become a cultural empire. At first it was James Bond and the spy novels of the 1950s, then it was the British Invasion and “Swinging London” of the 1960s. The horror films of Hammer Studios jumped on these bandwagons sometime around 1957, and by 1973 - right before the explosion of the American independent underground - the British horror film was the apex of fright film moviemaking.
“The Satanic Rites of Dracula,” which was released in that fateful year, shows the superiority of the British while at the same time it displays the clear signs of Hammer’s imminent decline. “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” was the last hurrah for Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. In the film, they reprised their classic roles as the arch vampire and the supreme vampire hunter for the last time. “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” is Lee’s last appearance as the Count, and his barely there performance in the film truly marks the end of a cinematic era.
Directed by Alan Gibson and scripted by Dan Houghton, “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” is an explicit follow-up to the more famous and beloved “Dracula A.D. 1972,” and like its predecessor, “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” is set in contemporary London. Gibson and Houghton, the team responsible for both of these films, also decided to keep the cast the same for both films. Well, that is except for Stephanie Beacham. In “Dracula A.D. 1972,” the voluptuous Beacham had played Lorrimer Van Helsing’s daughter. In “The Satanic Rites of Dracula,” the role of Jessica Van Helsing went to the redhead Joanna Lumley, an actress best known to modern audiences for her performance as Patsy Stone on the television show “Absolutely Fabulous.”
While Beacham played Jessica Van Helsing as an innocent London teenager out for big kicks in “Dracula A.D. 1972,” Lumley’s portrayal of the youngest Van Helsing in “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” is more mature and promotes Jessica as an intellectual protege of Cushing’s elder occult professor. This is not the only change from “Dracula A.D. 1972,” for “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” not only broke away from the earlier form of the Hammer golden era (which ran approximately from 1957 until 1968), but it also successfully blended diverse genres in order to make one of the most unique vampire films of the entire decade.
Borrowing liberally from the spy novels of Frederick Forsyth and the supernatural adventure yarns of Dennis Wheatley, “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” deals with a secretive circle of four highly influential people who meet nightly at Pelham House, a Georgian mansion right outside of London. Since the film is named “The Satanic Rites of Dracula,” the viewer knows immediately that this is no ordinary shindig. The four men robbed in white with bloody crosses on their foreheads are John Porter (played by Richard Matthews), an MP and a minister in charge of the security services, Lord Carradine (played by Patrick Barr), a wealthy noblemen who owns half of London, General Sir Arthur Freeborne (played by Lockwood West), and Dr. Julian Keeley (played by Freddie Jones), a Nobel Prize-winning expert on germ warfare and biochemical engineering.
As the film opens, these four men are being lead in a blood ritual ceremony by a mysterious Chinese woman named Chin Yang (played by Barbara Yu Ling). The black-robbed figure of Chin Yang not only alludes to the Occidental tradition of making the perverse Eastern in origin, but it also presages Hammer’s next big vampire film - 1974’s horror-meets-kung fu flick “The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires,” which was also written by Houghton. The ritual performed by Yang involves the slicing of a cockerel's throat and the stabbing of a nude female who looks young enough to be a virgin (but hardly acts like one). This is all par for the course for the Satanism-themed films of the 1970s, and the mixture of sex, violence, and ritual in “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” is in keeping with square society’s countercultural fascinations. Sex sells after all, and “The Satanic Rites of Dracula,” while not being as sleek or sexy as “Dracula A.D. 1972,” is certainly chock full of plasma, breasts, and cool cars.
“The Satanic Rites of Dracula” is also full of intrigue, and where this film deviates from the norm is in its major plot line which turns this film into a horror-themed political thriller. While the members of the well-to-do coven are busy drinking blood and starring at boobies, a thoroughly beaten hostage is shown escaping from the mansion’s sheepskin vest-wearing bodyguards. The man (played by Maurice O’Connell) turns out to be an MI6 agent who had been captured whilst working undercover. After he is rescued from the manor house by a sharpshooting colleague, he divulges to his superiors that the house’s front as a meeting place for those interested in psychic research is all hokum. These superiors - Agent Torrence (played by William Franklyn) and Colonel Mathews (played by Richard Vernon) - decide that since one of the cultists is in charge of their agency, a member of Scotland Yard should be called in to work on the case as an independent agent. The man they bring in is Inspector Murray - one of the detectives from “Dracula A.D. 1972.” Murray, who is again played by Michael Coles, immediately recognizes that something stinks of the supernatural in the case, so he again consults Dr. Van Helsing, a lecturer in Anthropology and the history of Eastern Europe.
After reviewing the captured photographs taken by the now deceased undercover agent, Van Helsing draws parallels between the Pelham House group and the Hellfire Club of the eighteenth century. Like the previous, real-life entity, the men of Pelham House are all highly influential members of polite society, and their interests, which run from domestic security to private finance, could very easily make or break the welfare of Great Britain. There is a whiff of the Cold War in this film, and its critique of both government and private wealth speaks to the then slowly dying anti-Communist and liberal majority.
As Van Helsing continues on with his theories (which also articulate that rather than Satanism, the members of Pelham House are actually blood worshippers dedicated to a pre-Christian mythology), it is suggested that he make contact with Dr. Keeley - a former colleague at Oxford. Van Helsing agrees, and when he confronts the obviously deranged Keeley, the goal of the Pelham House group is revealed.
It’s a plague!
Not just any plague, but the bubonic plague that helped to nearly kill off all of Europe in the fourteenth century. At the behest of the financial backer of Pelham House, Dr. Keeley has created a new, more virulent strand of the Black Death, and while espousing a misanthropic worldview, he claims that the plague would destroy humanity and only leave those followers of the blood ritual alive.
What kind of monster would seek such a goal, you ask? Well, after the MI6 secretary Jane (played by Valerie Van Ost) is captured by Pelham House’s motorized guards, it is revealed that Count Dracula, who has somehow arisen since his destruction at St. Bartolph’s, is behind it all. In an elaborate attempt at suicide, Dracula has decided to destroy his food supply and claim his bride (Jessica) with the help of his own Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (the members of Pelham House, who just want power). After piecing this together, Van Helsing once again confronts Dracula, who has backed the entire Pelham House project under the name of D.D. Denham. As with the other Hammer films, Van Helsing gets the better of the Count, and even though his first attempt at killing the vampire fails (his silver bullet misses wide), he eventually traps Lee’s bloodsucker in a hawthorne bush - an overt Christian symbol because of Christ’s own hawthorne crown.
As a film, “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” is both hit and miss. The screenplay is downright genius, and “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” is arguably Hammer’s most original concept. The film’s combination of political potboiler and supernatural horror is well executed, and certain scenes in the film are reminiscent of classic cinema. For instance, when Van Helsing finally meets D.D. Denham at his high-rise office building, the viewers are treated to a wonderfully ugly site - the Labour-brought deformity of postwar London. Comparable to Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange,” the architectural background of “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” showcases a drab conformity to a post-Bauhaus modernism that allows for little more than the basest minimalism. Similarly, when Van Helsing finally meets Denham/Dracula in is his private suite, “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” gives a subtle nod to Fritz Lang’s 1933 masterpiece “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.” In that film, the Hitler-esque master criminal, who headquarters himself in the barest of rooms, uses a recording and his silhouette to anonymously communicate with his servants. Denham/Dracula, using a fake, heavily accented voice and a bright lamp, obscures his identity for a brief time as he riddles Van Helsing with pseudo-Fascist garbage about the need for occult-based political regimes.
While Dracula is far from sincere in his politics, there are moments of sharp political honesty in “The Satanic Rites of Dracula.” In a film that has all the seemingly mandatory bits of schlock (buxom female vampires, shootouts, and death scenes shot with negative film in order to appeal to acid-taking youth), these moments of political commentary are genuinely shocking. While the critique of monopolistic power grabs is done in a somewhat predictable way, the film’s constant portrayal of CCTV cameras and other tools of surveillance seems to point to an unease with the deployment of modern technology. Right before Van Helsing goes to Denham’s private suite, he asks the nightwatchman if the abundance of CCTV cameras bothers him, and the man’s blasé response shows why free societies so often forsake their privacy for lesser gods.
While these side discussions make the film more interesting, the cinematography and the acting almost sink “The Satanic Rites of Dracula.” Besides the always charismatic and genteel Cushing, the majority of the cast just seem to be going through the motions. Since Lee is hardly in the film at all, the action falls on the shoulders of lesser talents. Coles is as uncharming as ever, and even though Lumley’s attempt at depicting Jessica as a modern and bright young woman is commendable, her performance is noticeably inferior to Beacham’s (who, to be fair, is not as good of an actor as Lumley). Franklyn’s take as the tough secret agent works fairly well, but much of his success in the film is based on the fact that everyone else in the film speaks little and does even less.
Making matters worse is the fact that the film looks like a made-for-TV production. Unlike most of Hammer’s other films, the cinematography in “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” is neither lush nor colorful. It can be argued that grittiness was what the producers were going for, but even then the film fails at being artistically grimy. “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” looks like a soap opera at times, with soft lenses and a faded-out look that often makes the film seem sleepy. This is a shame, for “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” could have easily started a Hammer revival, but instead it heralded the end of a great franchise. After 1973, Hammer went downhill fast and it became only a matter of time before the public put their stakes into the heart of a once-proud brand.
Still, despite how Hammer ended, the legacy of their films lives on. The Dracula films of Hammer have eclipsed all others, and the argument can made that the team of Lee and Cushing is the greatest on-screen pairing in the history of horror cinema. “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” is a good example of their chemistry, and one does not have to look any further than Electric Wizard for confirmation. On their 2007 release “Witchcult Today,” Electric Wizard penned a song called “Satanic Rites of Drugula,” which re-imagines Lee’s misanthropic vampire as a drug-crazy night fiend on the lookout for drug-laced blood. Since Electric Wizard are keen on promoting an image of themselves as world-hating witches from a different era, a film like “The Satanic Rites of Dracula” is a perfect foil for their sonic carnage.
Words: Benjamin Welton