Peel's Meinster is just so markedly different to Lee's tall, dark, somber, and imposing Dracula. He's so much more boyish and angelic. And if you figure that violence tends to be substituted for male on male sex in most films, then the bite on Van Helsing seems significant to me. The vampire's bite tends to be regarded as a sexual thing. I really don't think the producers would've had Lee bite into Cushing had he been cast instead of Peel. And they certainly wouldn't have had Dracula infantilized and chained up by his mother. But with Meinster, it goes over OK, because like Carmilla from "The Vampire Lovers" (also similarly controlled by her parental figures), I always got the sense that these two are maybe "different" sorts of vamps, not as standard-issue as Dracula. Ralph bates is a similarly wayward and decadent youth in "Taste The Blood of Dracula", but he's shown cavorting with women of the night in a brothel. Meinster's origins are more vague. He isn't the prey of a female vamp like Bates is in "Lust For A Vampire". Instead, he's damned by his own unspeakable desires. Just the fact that no other male vampire like Meinster who isn't outwardly dark and scary really ever appears in another Hammer vampire film seems telling to me. It's as if Hammer realized that they had created a male vampire who was too open to interpretation, unlike John Forbes Roberston in "The Vampire Lovers" and "The Legend of The Seven Golden Vampires" and Mike Raven in "Lust For A Vampire", who were both carbon copies of Lee.
"Breaking away with the beast of both worlds, a smile that you can't disguise..."