Films: 1960s

(1960) Brides of Dracula

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Brides of Dracula
Director: Terence Fisher
Release: 1960

If Peter Cushing's Van Helsing led a crusade against appeasement in director Terence Fisher's "Horror of Dracula," the good doctor scours the German countryside for war criminals in that film's sequel.

"Brides of Dracula," opens with an affirmation. A solemn voice-over intones some recent history. That Dracula is dead and gone is confirmed. The camera crawls the dark and barren landscape. But his cult survives.

In a castle in the Badstein region of Germany, old royalty keeps the darkness that lingers locked away. Baroness Meinster (Martita Hunt) lures young French schoolteacher Marianne Danielle (Yvonne Monlaur) to her lair. There, Marianne is destined to feed Meinster's imprisoned son.

Baron Meinster, as the baroness eventually confesses, was subject to evil company. The baroness let these terrible influences into her castle years ago, and her impressionable prodigy fell under their spell. Wanting to emulate the powerful and elite forces with which his mother filled Castle Meinster some evenings, the baron was eventually and inevitable consumed. The monsters the baroness courted made a monster of her son.

Young blonde David Peel brings a gentile malice to Baron Meinster. He is the perfect young Nazi, now imprisoned in his home - as the Van Helsings of Europe search for the "cult" and the baroness slowly crumbles into poisonous grief injected by her realization of what she brought to her bosom, and kept at her hearth.

Fisher tells more than a post-Reich home drama, here, of course. True to Hammer Studios formula, "Brides of Dracula" combines subtext with physical action and on-screen mayhem.

Van Helsing stumbles into Marianne's new private hell, following her unwitting release of Peel's monster, and a chase story ensues.

As the Badstein countryside revisits the consequences of its own dark-times harboring of the Meinsters, young woman fall to the baron's fresh free thirst. Fisher plays the havoc with a liberal hand, letting Baron Meinster fell victims and focusing with perverse intensity on progressively unhinged Meinster-servant Greta (a cackling -- sometimes nerve-rattling -- performance by Freda Jackson).

Girls dig themselves out of the soil. Mothers submit to son's bloodlust in Fisher's most wicked moment - aping incest right there on the big screen for early 1960s audiences.

Fisher also takes some time for a side trip to Marianne's school, where he reinforces the appeasement trope initiated in "Horror of Dracula." Van Helsing descends upon Henry Oscar's Otto Van Lang with particular intellectual vengeance, leaving the blowhard isolationist blubbering in his French-manners-school office. It is exactly this kind of man Van Helsing blames for allowing vampires to blitzkrieg the Continent.

As "Horror of Dracula" ended in dust and sunlight, "Brides of Dracula" ends in darkness and fire. Van Helsing's war promises to stretch on, and the great crucifix of a windmill fan's shadow, cast by the crackling flames of the building behind is a double symbol: The crusade to cleanse Europe of the evil it invited into its homes continues, and the landscape itself - its homes and its industry - must be turned to the purpose.

James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff

updated 2 years ago