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David Peel/BRIDES OF DRACULA
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Re: David Peel/BRIDES OF DRACULA
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vayapues
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Nov 17 14 12:20 AM
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My Recent Posts
I'm inclined to agree w/gerda. Let's go even further & say this: Imagine how enhanced the abundant charisma & originality of the 1958 DRACULA would be if most of its great visual & narrative setpieces hadn't, over the past 56 years, been sampled & updated
ad nauseum
. But, of course, the mark of a great work is that everyone wants to "borrow" from you you over & over until the bats come home. (Not to mention that today's horror movies wouldn't exist, as we know them, without the precedent of Fisher's masterwork.) Just so, even as early as its 1965 sequel, the original innovations -- precise dollops of graphic carnage, startling closeups of bloodshot eyes & feral teeth, violent human–vampire confrontations -- already went down like weak tea. Which leads me to a thought that more properly belongs in the other thread about Hammer's decline. CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN & DRACULA were not conceived as unending series. They had the freshness & power of one-offs, jumpstarted at least as much by the success of that first horrific Quatermass as by the Subotsky Frankenstein treatment that crossed Michael Carreras's desk in 1956. In other words, Gothic came to Hammer out of left field; a one-joke (or, in this case, two-joke) phenomenon whose life was then stretched out beyond reason over the next 15 or so years. In the late 50s, Michael Carreras himself had wanted to steer Hammer away from its self-limiting proto-Gothic branding, which now seems like the most sensible thing the company could've done in terms of turning out a unique body of British films as varied & provocative as YESTERDAY'S ENEMY, HELL IS A CITY, NEVER TAKE SWEETS FROM A STRANGER, the dynamic B/W horror-SF subjects that followed in the wake of Quatermass, &, yes, those great first Gothic inspirations. But his father & Tony Hinds overruled him by clinging ever more desperately to the Gothic brand, with rare exception, because it could be assembly-line manufactured & accordingly profitable (even though this was a case of mostly diminishing returns as the years ground on & public tastes fairly rapidly started to bypass them).
Which is why, if followups there had to be, I too delight in BRIDES OF DRACULA for much the same reason that I love REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Sangster's successes have given him some well-earned confidence by 1958/60 & he now reckons on pulling the myths his own way: he seems content to follow the human threads of Baron Frankenstein & Dr Van Helsing, not, a la Universal, their respective monsters. In this context, the evil Prince Charming figure of Baron Meinster & Karl in his sad, deteriorating new body present surprise & novelty of the sort that one rarely hopes to find in sequels. Sad but logical -- Hammer being above all a business, as Jimmy Carreras was always at pains to point out -- that, by 1964-5, the 2nd sequels would be as resolutely predictable & unoriginal as those 1st sequels were not.*
*History is not always as schematic or clearcut as a writer likes, & I must admit that this interpretation is pretty but not quite straightforward. I know that Sangster wrote the treatment that later became DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESS to
be
the original DRACULA sequel, thwarted only because Christopher Lee insisted on playing possum at the time, & so necessitated the writing of a Dracula sequel without Dracula. But, despite all the scripting spasms & compromises that incontestably mar BRIDES OF DRACULA, I am happy that it effectively unchained Sangster to do some creative stretching within the genre, as REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN had done earlier. On that note, let's remember that
he
tired of & ditched the Gothics early on -- until his diffident, temporary, & unsuccessful return to them in 1970.
Last Edited By:
vayapues
Nov 19 14 6:47 PM. Edited 1 times.
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Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards
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The World of Sherlock Holmes
Murder and Mystery
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