There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, the one in the middle doesn’t get the attention it deserves…
Lust for a Vampire (1971)
Distributed by: MGM-EMI Distributors
Directed by: Jimmy Sangster
Everything comes in threes, they say.
The past, present, and future. The Three Norns. Faith, hope, and charity. Three famous deaths happening in quick succession. Three acts in a story. Three books in a trilogy.
The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King sandwiching The Two Towers. The Golden Compass and The Amber Spyglass bookending The Subtle Knife. The Hunger Games and Mockingjay interrupted by Catching Fire.
Three films in a film franchise, with such middle films as The Matrix Reloaded, Back to the Future Part II, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. All of which getting passing mention as part of a set, a chance to breathe between the start and the end.
It’s time to take a deep, deep breath…
We open cold in Austria on a warm day, where we watch a peasant girl (Kristen Lindholm) make her way home from the tavern. She’s set upon by a carriage, and because it’s 150 years before “stranger danger” becomes a thing, gladly takes their invitation to share a ride.
This ends badly, as the girl gets taken up to the ruins of Castle Karnstein, where the girl’s blood is drained into an unholy chalice for a satanic ritual performed by the vampires Lord Karnstein (Mike Raven, in his film debut on leaving radio), Countess Karnstein (Barbara Jefford), and their coachman (Christopher Cunnigham). We watch as they pour the blood out upon a desiccated skeleton, which reforms into a body-
Just as we get a quick cut back to the tavern in town, where they have a visitor, Richard Le Strange (Michael Johnson). We get an info dump between him and the barman, where we discover that Le Strange is a novelist whose work includes vampires, that the year is 1830, and that it’s been forty years since the last time a member of the Karnstein family rose from the dead and started snacking on the young maidens of the area.
Events which were covered in the prior film of this trilogy:
Wanting to prove that vampires are just a superstition, Le Strange makes his way up to Castle Karnstein, where he’s surrounded by three seductive vampires-
Or so he thinks before Giles Barton (Ralph Bates) shows up. He chides the women, three of his pupils at the nearby finishing school run by Miss Simpson (Helen Christie), for doing vampire cosplay to spook Le Strange.
He takes an interest in the student bodies- um, body, although one of the instructors, the phys ed teacher Janet Playfair (Suzannah Leigh), takes an interest in him. His focus, however, is on a recent attendee who roles up while he’s present, Mircalla Herritzen (Yutte Stensgaard), who he falls heads over heals with.
Wanting to spend more time at the school, he volunteers to become the lit teacher, but gets told that they have a teacher coming. Le Strange runs into a bit of luck, though, when the teacher, Arthur Biggs (Jonathan Carrol), shows up at the inn, giving him a chance to go to school:
(In all fairness, there are lots of writers who, if faced with someone like Biggs, would do exactly what Le Strange does here…)
That night, one of the naughty students we met earlier pretending to be a vampire, Susan Pelly (Pippa Steel), meets someone for a nighttime rendezvous, but gets taken out by a vampire. Worse for her, Barton drags her body to a well and throws it down there, to hide the crime.
Why does he do this? We find out soon enough, and then see how far that gets him…
With Susan missing and Barton found dead the next morning, there’s a crisis at the school. Miss Simpson is worried about the scandal, Playfair demands something be done, and Le Strange waffles because he still wants to get Mircalla. He wants her too desperately, even after he discovers Barton’s notes and confirms from her that she’s Carmilla Karnstein, who we saw revived with the blood from the victim in the opening of the film.
When he confronts her, Mircalla/Carmilla agrees to having a hook up right there in the grass, even though her interests run towards the same kind of women he enjoys. This effectively buy’s Le Strange’s silence, although Playfair still goes to the constables to alert Inspector Heinrich (Harvey Hall).
The inspector, unlike a lot of police on other Hammer films, is very thorough and committed to his job. He cracks down hard on Miss Simpson, because in Europe they don’t sit on such things like they do in-
MUST. Resist. OBVIOUS. Comment…
Mircalla/Carmilla has her work cut out for her to get out of this jam. To that end, the Karnstein’s coachman dispatches with the inspector, while Countess Karnstein bullies Miss Simpson. And as for Playfair, she’s got something special lined up for her…
There’s a lot more going on in 1830 than there was forty years earlier, the time the first film was set.
The first film was also a fairly faithful adaptation of Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, the classic 1872 novella of Sapphic vampiric lust that preceded Dracula by two decades. Having to live up to the expectations that both sources engendered is a tough ask, but the script by Tudor Gates (who co-wrote Vampire Lovers with Harry Fine and Michael Style) makes a grand effort that captures much of what made the original(s) attractive, with a sensibility that makes the story pop.
Sangster’s direction does the production well, especially his Carmilla POV shots where we watch the young women she beguiles fall for the vampire’s charms as the victims embrace her before Carmilla feeds off of them. Having to fill in at the last minute when original choice Terrance Fisher was injured in a car accident before shooting, it’s not as overtly Sapphic as Vampire Lovers had been, but it’s clear enough who Carmilla is and what she wants. And with snappy quick edits and the vibrant colors provided by David Muir’s cinematography, the film offers a brilliant pallet that was a departure from Hammer’s usual soft washes that Vampire Lovers was immersed in, giving it a strong identity of its own.
Yutte Stensgaard on set with Jimmy Sangster
Keeping the whole thing going among a decent cast is Stensgaard, whose Mircalla/Carmilla does amazing things when going from sheep to wolf in under a second’s time. If anything, her version of the character played in Vampire Lovers by Ingrid Pitt (who was originally offered a chance to reprise the role here) works a lot better, capturing not only the malevolence of the character but the depths to which that evil is buried and how hard it has to be held down to keep it from surfacing.
Watching the film is apparently more fun than having made it. The movie came out soon after Tony Hinds left Hammer, and the new regime was trying to recapture the audience loyalty that had eroded over the last few years. Both Sangster and Gates had to deal with studio interference, such as Sangster insisting on a more serious tone, while the studio wanted more nudity to bring in male eyeballs, and including adding the love song (?!?!?!!) “Strange Love” by Tracy to give the film a music tie-in. Of all the actors from Vampire Lover that Hammer wanted to bring back, they only got Lindholm and Hall, obviously not in the same characters they’d played before. In addition, Raven, who was made up to look like Christopher Lee’s doppelganger, was redubbed in the film by Valentine Dyall to make him sound more like Lee, which for a radio personality who made his name with his voice was extremely distressing.
US theatrical release poster
Despite it all, the film holds up well on its own today. Its combination of artistic choices (excluding “Strange Love”) and timely themes resonates with current audiences, possibly more so than those who watched in its initial release. It may not surpass its predecessor the way The Dark Knight or The Empire Strikes Back did theirs, but it stands up on its own well. Likewise, it is a more enjoyable watch than the third film in the unofficially entitled “Karnstein Trilogy,” Twins of Evil.
When you get here, take a breath and stop at two…
