Taste the Blood of Dracula

The “Pop Dracula” experiment having run its course in 1968, Hammer – in collaboration with Warner Bros. – wisely decides to go a different route, and for the fifth entry in their franchise featuring the most well-known vampire in all history, they turn to the 34-year-old Peter Sasdy, with numerous TV episodes under his directing belt.

It was a daring choice, but at the end of the day it turned out to be a winning play, given that “Taste the Blood of Dracula” emerges as one of the best films of the entire series. Esthetically refined and rich with evocative ideas that accentuate an underlying technical know-how, this is a work of suffocating darkness which rises from the merely esthetic plane to directly incorporate an allegorical-moralistic component. After all, the very idea of the count’s return (he’s always been a metaphor for Evil) being prompted by the unbridled boredom of three dismal, bourgeois representatives of their era (“And having tried everything that your narrow imaginations can suggest, you’re bored to death with it all, right? And now you want someone with infinitely greater experience than yourselves to suggest alternatives?“), serves to highlight that all-too-common impulsiveness and poor judgement that formed the basis of the “banality of evil” concept that political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt elaborated in her 1963 book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”.

Further, the choice to ruthlessly linger on the recently ended Victorian era’s characteristic hypocrisy and its consequences not only takes on a menacing symbolism (with the offspring committing patricide almost as if attempting to sever the final bonds tying them to that false, dissimulating Victorian generation), but also manages to echo current events – audiences of the time must not have found it difficult to grasp, in a more or less conscious way, the parallels with civil rights movements of the 1960s.

With that in mind, it’s clear how the figure of the count serves solely as a catalyst – his arrival is the fuse that ignites the sedate social expectations of a contradiction-filled reality, leading to an explosion of social revolution, which is why this iteration of the classic character might arouse some puzzlement among vampirism philologists. After all, we’re talking about a Dracula who’s interested in revenge rather than blood (“They have destroyed my servant. They will be destroyed!“). This oddity can be partially explained by Lee’s initial refusal to don the iconic cloak for this movie, leading to the development of a script which would have featured Ralph Bates’s Lord Courtley as the main villain.

Contractual obligations and some pleading by producer Michael Carreras ended up convincing the reluctant Lee to reconsider, and after a bit of short-lived drama (along the lines of “I hope this will be my final film for Hammer”), we’ll find Lee right back in the role for the following “Scars of Dracula” (1970) as well.