Here4: curious what is it about the 1959 script that made you "see why Cushing objected to it"? (P.S. It is this Picture Show article &/or contemporary PR materials from which Forry Ackerman clearly derived his preview of the film in "The Ghastrological Horrorscope," Famous Monsters #8, @ May 1960. That synopsis has always sounded really dynamic & thrilling to me -- a good deal more violent, & coherent, than the eventual film.)

Skel/opticalguy: If Ramsland's book misses out entirely on the obvious Meinster/Lestat connection, it is, for one thing, an interesting gauge of the degree to which Hammer's acknowledged influence was still below mainstream radar even as late as the mid-90s. By coincidence, that was around the time in which BRIDES was just starting to be recognized outside the shadow of HORROR OF DRACULA, beside which it had unjustly lingered as an "inferior sequel," according to conventional genre wisdom, for 30-odd years.

I don't know Ramsland's book, does she perchance mention the FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS influence upon Rice & Neil Jordan? I'm sure most of us know that that film's "gentle, sensitive youth," Iain Quarrier's remarkably funny/scary performance as young Von Krolock, is not only clearly based on David Peel's Meinster but is, in turn, a screamingly obvious antecedent to Lestat's character & appearance.

BTW does anyone have the actual quote from Polanski in which he is famously supposed to have alluded to a "great affection" for Hammer movies (cited, depending on where paraphrased, as BRIDES &/or KISS OF THE VAMPIRE)? To see VAMPIRE KILLERS is to believe, absolutely, in the substance of this notion, but it's grown so murky in the telling over the years that I've started to wonder if it's just apocryphal.