Count Dracula has been resurrected many times in the movies, especially in the Hammer ones. Conversely, he has also been killed off much more than once. When it came to coming up with some pretty novel – and gruesome – ways of disposing of the evil count, Hammer films were certainly outstanding in this respect.
In Dracula (1958), Hammer’s debut film in the Christopher Lee series, the count is vanquished by his arch enemy Professor Van Helsing (played so brilliantly by Peter Cushing), who bravely leaps across a table, whilst chasing Dracula through his castle, and pulls down the curtains, exposing the bloodsucker to the thing that is always guaranteed to roast a vampire into dusty nothingness: the sunlight of dawn. As Dracula crumbles away under the combined destruction of the sun’s rays and Van Helsing’s makeshift crucifix, hastily formed from two pieces of candelabra, we are witnessing the start of what would go on to be such an entertaining, iconic series involving the vampire lord.
In Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1965), the count is resurrected in the most gruesome manner imaginable: servant Klove cuts the throat of a suspended corpse over the sarcophagus containing Dracula’s remains… and as the blood flows down onto the ashes, the count slowly materialises back to life, whereupon he proceeds to feast on the vulnerable female visitors to his castle. At the climax of this sequel, Dracula slips under the ice to a watery grave as a priest shoots at the frozen moat around his castle.
But you can’t keep a good vampire down. In Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (1968), the count is resuscitated from his icy grave by the blood from the head wound of a priest who stumbles and falls down onto the spot under which Dracula’s body is lying in suspended animation, cracking the ice and trickling the blood onto the vampire’s lips. The death scene in this movie is truly my favourite Dracula exit of all. After a desperate struggle with the hero Paul (played by Barry Andrews) outside his castle, Dracula falls off a cliff and becomes impaled on a large cross, previously thrown down there by the hypnotised heroine Maria (Veronica Carlson). Some awesome Dracula death throes ensue, with the impaled count staggering around the woods with the top of the huge cross protruding from his chest, gasping and screaming in agony, blood pouring profusely from his body, as he gradually disintegrates, leaving only a crimson, viscous mess all over the cross and ground.
In Taste The Blood of Dracula (1969), which follows the story right on from where Risen From The Grave left off, a businessman (played by Roy Kinnear) who sells valuable artefacts, stumbles across Dracula’s remains, along with his cloak and ring. He gathers them up and takes them back to his shop, where he locks them away. However, he is bribed into parting with them by the sinister Lord Courtley (Ralph Bates), who then uses them for an occult ritual in an old desanctified church. The way Dracula meets his end in this movie has often been deemed a rather weak and questionable one by many Hammer fans. After the hero has put a large cross on the door and set out the altar as if in preparation for a holy mass, Dracula suddenly experiences strange hallucinations of the church coming to life, with priests chanting litanies amid a general atmosphere of religious ceremony. Becoming dazed and confused as this surreal mass rings unbearably through his head, Dracula falls down to his death onto the altar and, as always, crumbles to red dust.
The next movie, The Scars of Dracula (1970), presented a break from the continuity of all the previous films, as we find the remains of Dracula lying not in the old English church of the previous film, but in a sarcophagus in his Transylvanian castle. As angry villagers attach his castle, a vampire bat vomits blood all over his ashes, and once again our favourite count is up and running, raging with anger at the villagers who seem hell bent on destroying him. At the climax of this movie, I thought that the manner in which Dracula meets his death was a little too convenient and far fetched, for as the vampire is trying to hurl a steel pike back at the hero (Dennis Waterman), he is suddenly struck by a bolt of lightning. As the screaming count falls to yet another death, body aflame, you are left feeling a little disappointed that his demise this time was not handled a little more creatively and convincingly, instead of relying on a bit of fortuitous divine intervention from above. Still, despite the weak ending, The Scars of Dracula remains one of my all time favourite Dracula films.
The break from continuity continued on into the next movie, Dracula AD 1972 (1972). Like Scars, the opening scene in this one seems to bear no relation whatsoever to what went on in the previous film, with a titanic battle between Dracula and Van Helsing (Peter Cushing making a welcome return to his role) on a runaway stage coach. The culmination of the fight sees Van Helsing die as he valiantly impales Dracula on a broken coach wheel. Exactly a hundred years later, the count gets his first taste of blood in modern times, as he is revived (again in an old church) in a satanic ritual performed by a group of teenagers, led by a descendant of one of his followers, a Johnny Alucard. Mirroring somewhat the stagecoach battle that occurred back in 1872, a descendant of Professor Van Helsing confronts Dracula in his lair, with a view to rescuing his kidnapped daughter from the count’s clutches. After a cliffhanger of a fight on the stairs, Van Helsing eventually triumphs, staking Dracula into the ground with all the unwavering strength and determination that his ancestor had.
But as was the case with Dracula’s Victorian adventures, so the modern world was not going to escape a grand vampire resurrection that easily. In the 1973 sequel to Dracula AD, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, the count is stirred from his grave by an eerie black mass, which involves such top brass people as MPs and Nobel Prize winning professors – not to mention a naked sacrificed blonde on an altar! Cushing’s Van Helsing again returns to do battle with his vampiric arch nemesis, this time by luring the count right into a hawthorn bush (and we all know what hawthorn does to vampires, don’t we? That is, if they are careless enough to walk right through one!). As Dracula screams and falls forward out of the bush, bleeding profusely from all the wounds inflicted by the hawthorn branches, Van Helsing again administers the coup-de-grace with the trusty stake – or, to be more precise, a piece of sharp wood which he breaks off from a nearby fence.
So, as it turned out, that would be it as far as Hammer making any more Dracula sequels was concerned. Sadly for us Dracula fans, there would be no more spectacular resurrections, no more wonderfully blood-soaked demises. Dracula was finally put to rest in Satanic Rites, and stayed in his grave forever. Pity, as I so loved the Hammer Dracula series that I would have loved to see the studio make one more – just one more – awesome Christopher Lee Dracula film.