Curse of the Undead

Audacious hybridization experiment conducted by Universal Pictures in the late 1950s, “Curse of the Undead” boldly dared to inject elements from the vampire genre into a classic Western scenario. Indeed, all the classic Western ingredients are right there, starting with themes such as the role of the lawman, shootouts and revenge, and strained relations between neighboring landholders (“I don’t know about you likin’ Doc Carter, but I know you like his land. You wanna spread just like your mouth has been doin’“). We even get the archetypal mysterious stranger who rolls into town one day.

The twist comes when this particular mysterious stranger turns out to be an undead creature who, following the Gothic tradition, is wont to sucks people’s blood – details which steer the film perilously close to collapsing into absurdity (naming the vampire “Drake” isn’t the most subtle reference to Dracula, for example). Still, the director, who also came up with the story idea and co-wrote the screenplay, proves he’s up to the task, both on a narrative level (a skillful alternation between dramatic and suspenseful passages injects well-paced intensity) as well as when it comes to managing the subject matter (the film somewhat insistently takes on moral questions, but given the vampiric context, the material lends itself to being addressed from a mainly Christian perspective).

But what exactly is a vampire in Edward Dein’s view? Definitely a devious, fraudulent creature born of sin, but, at the same time, he’s also the victim of his own sins, an eternal slave that pays an incomparably high price for his actions in life and who hides deep within a murky romanticism befitting a Shakespearean tragedy (“What I am is not my own choice! You should pity me, not judge me in my torment! You think I wanted this? All I ever wanted of life was to live in love“).

A visually engaging film thanks to Ellis W. Carter’s refined B/W, which plays splendidly with shadows and delights in top-notch expressionist cuts. All in all, a rather atypical product which managed to avoid the sting of unintentional humor by keeping the freakish DNA that “Universal” injected into their classic Western from growing into a truly malignant monstrosity.