hammer`s new blood - Monsters from the Vault

HAMMER’S NEW BLOOD
By Cleaver Patterson
“Since Helen passed on I can’t find
anything; the heart, quite simply, has
gone out of everything” (Peter Cushing,
The Radio Times, 1972).
Though the master of horror was talking about the loss of his beloved wife a year
earlier, to the British television listings magazine The Radio Times, Peter Cushing could
as easily have been summing up the state
of the company with which his career had
become so intrinsically entwined. By the
early 1970s, Hammer Studios, the scion of
British filmmaking during the late 1950s
and 1960s, was hemorrhaging. Lee’s Count
and Cushing’s Baron were mere shadows of
their original aristocratic selves, though still
managing to shamble through several more
bloodless outings in the early years of the
decade. It must have been obvious to anyone with any say at the studio (not the least,
Michael Carreras, who had increasingly
taken over executive responsibility from his
father James) that something had to be done
if the studio was to survive.
Hammer’s main fare, apart from
gothic horrors, were psychological thrillers
such as Scream of Fear (1961; U.K. title, Taste
of Fear) and historic adventures like She
(1965) and Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion
animation spectacular One Million Years
B.C. (1967). Notwithstanding the success
of these movies, and despite importing
Hollywood stars like Bette Davis for such
genuinely unsettling shockers as The Nanny (1965) and the downright bizarre black
comedy The Anniversary (1968), it was the
old Hammer stalwart of the vampire to
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which the studio consistently returned.
Indeed, except for a couple of exceptions,
bloodsuckers became their mainstay before
they disappeared completely with Cybill
Shepherd in The Lady Vanishes (1979).
Two notable entries in the early 1970s
that fell into this bracket made no mention
whatsoever of Dracula, though an alternative title of Twins of Dracula was at one point
mooted for Twins of Evil (1971). This lack of
reference to the Count may have been the
film’s downfall. Compared with the mistake
of transferring the Count to contemporary
London, as the studio later did with Dracula
AD 1972 (1972) (later re-titled Dracula Today
when aired on CBS in 1981) and Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride (1978; released in the
U.K. as The Satanic Rites of Dracula in 1974),
Twins of Evil and Vampire Circus (1972) are
surely atmospheric; however, they are by no
means classics when compared with Hammer’s vampire films from a decade earlier.
Even after 50 years, there is an undeniable charm about the studio’s early
vampire films; despite their clearly having
been made with a minimal budget, they
simply ooze class. From Christopher Lee’s
first appearance as Count Dracula in Horror of Dracula (1958), when he welcomes
John Van Eyssen’s Harker to his home, to
the castle of Baron Meinster in The Brides of
Dracula (1960), with its ramparts, candlelit
great hall, and hidden terraces where the
unfortunate Meinster is chained up by his
paranoid mother, they had a certain chill
that was missing in the later films. The
atmosphere of gothic decay shrouding
Dracula’s castle and, later, that of Baron
Meinster, was brought to life by the genius
of production designer Bernard Robinson,
whose skill at making something from
nothing, along with the deft touch of cinematographer Jack Asher, created some of
early Hammer’s most memorable environments on a par with Universal and RKO’s
Golden Age during the 1930s.
Unfortunately, though suitably creepy,
even chilling in parts (the angular staircase
that Cushing’s Gustav Weil ascends to his
niece’s bedroom in Twins of Evil is reminiscent of that from Baron Frankenstein’s castle in Son of Frankenstein (1939)), what moments of magic there are, are few and far
between and cannot hide the fact that the
work of Twins of Evil production designer
Roy Stannard and Vampire Circus’s director of photography Moray Grant lacked
the detail and depth that imbued Robinson
and Asher’s bleak landscapes with their
brooding realism and believability.
However, what Twins of Evil and Vampire Circus lack in style, they more than
make up for with fast-paced originality.
Analyzed today there is a disturbing, if not
downright distasteful, underlying theme
common to both films—namely, that of
child molestation. In Twins of Evil, Gustav Weil’s twin nieces, Maria and Frieda
Gellhorn, are mere teenagers when Count
Karnstein seduces them; in Vampire Circus it
is the children of the village whom the perpetrators of evil attempt to corrupt, thereby
extracting revenge upon their parents.
Both films, particularly Twins of Evil,
also rollick along. From the opening scenes
in which the Devil, appearing as sexually
charged members of the nobility lording it
over the local townsfolk, is pitted against
God in the form of the Bible-wielding Puritan Weil or the combined force of the town’s
officials and schoolmaster, to the usual gory
Hammer climax, the action never loses
pace. The air of seriousness with which the
stories are told also helps to wash away any
lingering disbelief felt by the audience. The
casts of Twins of Evil and Vampire Circus,
particularly Cushing, who attacked every
role as though he were playing Hamlet at
the Old Vic, clearly believed in what they
were doing, and their obvious relish makes
the viewer forget (for the most part) the preposterousness of the proceedings.
In Twins of Evil and Vampire Circus,
these dual elements of originality and pacing, a common thread throughout Hammer’s films, may just be their saving grace.
Twins of Evil (1971; Hammer Film Productions - The Rank Organization) Director:
John Hough. Producers: Harry Fine, Michael
Style. Screenplay: Tudor Gates. Cinematographer: Dick Bush (director of photography).
Cast: Peter Cushing, Kathleen Byron, Madeleine Collinson (billed as Madelaine in the
credits), Mary Collinson, Damien Thomas,
Dennis Price, and Roy Stewart.
The lovely Collinson twins (Madeleine and Mary), as Maria and
Frieda Gellhorn, arrive in the village of Karnstein to stay with their
uncle Gustav Weil in 1971’s Twins of Evil. (Courtesy of Photofest)
European village of Karnstein is terrorized by a group of puritanical clergymen
called the Brotherhood. Led by the austere
WHICH IS THE VIRGIN?
Gustav Weil, they patrol the village and its
WHICH IS THE VAMPIRE?
surrounding forests for people they believe
–tagline to be practicing witchcraft. Their ultimate
goal is to capture the evil Count Karnstein,
In the late 17th century, the small east whose mountaintop fortress casts a sinister
shadow over the village.
Twins Maria and Frieda Gellhorn arrive to stay
with their uncle, Gustav
Weil, after the death of their
parents. They receive a
cold reception from Weil,
who sees their city finery
as disrespectful to the
memory of their parents.
That night Frieda overhears her uncle talking
of the debauched, devilworshipping Count Karnstein and decides she must
meet this intriguing man.
That same evening in
his castle, Count Karnstein
prays to Satan and offers
up a girl for sacrifice, resulting in the resurrection
of his long-deceased ancestor Mircalla Karnstein. The
vampiric Mircalla wastes
no time in inducting the
count into the family of the
Peter Cushing as Gustav Weil in Hammer’s Twins of Evil. In the
film, Weil is the leader of a group of puritanical clergymen called
undead, nor does Karnstein
the Brotherhood. (Courtesy of Photofest)
waste time in transforming
the thrill-seeking Frieda into a vampire.
When Weil and his fellow Brotherhood members discover Frieda feasting
upon a victim’s still warm body, he imprisons his vampire niece. But Karnstein
abducts Maria and frees Frieda, leaving
the innocent twin to face the fate meant
for her undead sister. Fortunately, Maria’s
paramour, Anton, discovers the deception
in time and races to save Maria from the
stake. Explaining how Karnstein switched
the twins and is really the perpetrator of
the evil, Anton leads the Brotherhood and
the villagers to Karnstein’s castle to end
his reign of evil. Though the vampires are
destroyed and Maria is saved, it comes at
some cost, as the overzealous but well intentioned Weil falls during the fray.
Hough’s decrepit castle interiors
and foggy forests give the film a lushness that’s more incipiently erotic.
–ferdyonfilms.com,
Roderick Heath
Death With Conviction
Hammer produced three films in the
early 1970s that could loosely have been
considered a trilogy: The Vampire Lovers
(1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971), and Twins of
Evil were based on the author Sheridan Le
Fanu’s vampire tale, Carmilla. Of the three
films, Twins of Evil was the least like the
novel, though it is sometimes considered a
prequel to The Vampire Lovers, as the set and
costumes have a strong eighteenth century
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