Films: 1960s

(1966) Dracula Prince of Darkness

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Dracula Prince of Darkness
Director: Terence Fisher
Release: 1966

However tempting it is to view the resurrection of Christopher Lee's Count Dracula - his ashes soaked with the blood of a British tourist - as a warning the next incarnation of Hitler lurks in the dust of the Third Reich still metaphorically scattered across Europe, director Terence Fisher is going for something universal, rather than political, here.

Fisher leaves behind most of the Nazi-commentary with which he infused the first two installments of Hammer Studios' Dracula franchise, developing "Dracula Prince of Darkness" along themes of aristocracy and capitalism, as well as spiritual and sexual repression.

The butchered rich Brit in "Dracula Prince of Darkness" is the sacrifice that returns the movie's titular character to life, but in a way wholly different from Fisher's previous films. Dracula is no longer the master of an army; he is a voiceless supernatural presence - the demonic force wrought by the animal-to-slaughter blindness of upper class transgressions.

"Dracula Prince of Darkness" follows vacationing Londonites the Kents into Germany. Despite warnings, they proceed to Carlsbad and are lured into Castle Dracula. There, manservant Klove promises them comfort and hospitality. What they receive, however, is a brutal and soul-searing ordeal - as castle-keeper Klove enacts a plan to bring the disintegrated Count back to life.

It is no accident that the four English travelers find their journey intertwined with eccentric monk Father Sandor (Andrew Keir). The brother in robes two brothers and their wives to steer clear of Carlsbad and the castle that rots there. His admonition is well-founded, for as they sally forth in luxurious arrogance, the quartet fall directly into a spiritual and physical trap that lands them directly within the castle - and so unfolds a nightmare that not only claims lives, but strips away the foursome's willful ignorance of the soul and their true relationships with each other.

Fisher takes real risks in "Dracula Prince of Darkness," chiefly in the character of Helen (a shrill Barbara Shelley). Helen is the only member of the party who is not immediately swayed by Klove's use of material comfort. The warmth hearth, well-appointed table, and deferent act put on by towering castle servant Klove to Helen seems wrong in texture and timing.

She is right, but no one will listen to the privileged lady, for whom "two miles outside London and nothing is right." She is the girl who cried wolf, dramatically lifting her skirts from the mud one too many times and no longer convincing her company her opinion is anything but self-pity.

Fisher peels apart the nature of the mortified aristocrat, the complaint-culture lady. Confronted by the shattering sight of her husband's bloodless body dangling by the ankles over Dracula's resurrection pit, Helen first loses her mind. The vampire takes her life. When she returns as a monster, he inner world - long locked away - gushes all over the two remaining companions. She is overtly sexual to both her husband's brother and his wife.

"Let me kiss you," she purrs at Charles, baring new fangs.

But Dracula prompts not only the carnality lurking inside the cultured Old World heart. He drives agnostics to Church.

Prince of darkness that he is, the Count provokes a showdown between moneyed's ignorance of God and an avenue to salvation - available by finally listening to Father Sandor.

The second half of "Dracula Prince of Darkness" focuses on Sandor and his harboring of Charles and Diana within the walls of an abbey near Carlsbad. There, while Diana lingers in a coma from the duo's castle-escape coach, Charles is taught to fight vampires with instruments of Christianity. He is forced to watch the vulgar dispatching of Helen by Sandor's stake (and thus severs the sublimated lust she reveals they shared). By the time Dracula rallies and steals Diana back to the castle, Charles is ready to wield his own crucifix against the Count, fastened by a broken sword.

Here, Fisher picks up the thread of the historical and political to which he carefully adhered in "Horror of Dracula" and "Brides of Dracula," with Charles refashioning the sword into a cross, making something new and spiritually powerful out of the symbol of post-World War II Western Europe's fading power. By the end of "Dracula Prince of Darkness," the lead male English character is no longer a dainty British tourist, but a grappling man of God and combatant against the evil that threatens to rise from (to destroy) the blinded and bloated -- the ever-acquiescent and ivory-towered -- aristocracy.

Fisher has predicted the fight to come, the war that would consume late-20th-Century civilization. As the Kents bumble their way into Dracula's castle, Fisher foresees a post-Nazi world in which the safe and happy West will stumble into nests of insurgent vipers, that they will be stung and poisoned, and then wreak terrible things upon themselves - being largely the cause of their own undoing.

But Fisher also posits a solution. A Westerner that resumes the care of the mind, spirit and body will become equipped with the sensibility and the tools (wrought from pieces of his own past) to avoid - and fight back against - the powers of darkness that rise from the land.

James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff

updated 2 years ago