They didn’t have Comic-Con in 1970, but if they did, they might have been speculating on the franchises and multiverses of the day; would George Lazenby top Sean Connery’s five James Bond films? Would Alan Arkin’s Inspector Clouseau eclipse Peter Sellers? And would Hammer’s Karnstein trilogy launch a horror franchise to dwarf their popular Dracula and Frankenstein revivals? (Bringing back Terrence Fisher and Peter Cushing, plus red hot vampire lesbianism would surely be a draw). The answers to each of these propositions were no, no and no, and miscalculation of audience demands were the cause in each case, but Hammer’s Karnstein films are well overdue a reassessment. Ireland’s J Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novel Carmilla was the jumping off point for 1970’s The Vampire Lovers, but with Fisher and Cushing dropping out for this loose sequel, Jimmy Sangster crafted an unusually restrained treatment of vampire lore. Large dumps of exposition establish that Styria, Austria is a supernatural place where the locals grumble about the influence of the vampire family Karnstein. Writer Richard LeStrange (Michael Johnston) is warned off visiting, but stumbles across a luxurious girls school where the ‘girls’ all appear to be models of about 25 and all wear the kind of diaphanous nighties that suggest auditions for The New Seekers are in progress. The girls are prone to going missing, but owner Miss Simpson (Helen Christie) manages to cover things up by mailing their families death certificates provided by a tame doctor (Radio 1 DJ Mike Raven, voiced by Valentine Dyall). Miss Simpson turns out to be in thrall to vampire Countess Heritzen (Barbara Jefford), but star pupil Mircalla aka Carmilla Karnstein (Yutte Stensgard) seems to be falling for LeStrange via dream sequnces and strange anachronistic bursts of pop-music…Co-star Ralph Bates, who hams it up in the school-teacher role intended for Cushing, reckons Lust for a Vampire was one of the worst films ever made, but in comparison with his 1974 horror stinker Persecution, it’s a masterpiece. The script is literate; as the scrupulous DVD extras carefully point out, if a few scenes from Tudor Gates’s script could be re-instated, would offer an original story in a clever, meta way. Perhaps there’s one crash-zoom into neck-bites too many; there’s an exploitative sequence with the camera cycling through three separate female disrobings that may have quickened pulses at the time but might potentially tax the modern viewer’s patience. Sangster’s energetic direction, however, plus the unfamiliar cast and premise, make Lust for a Vampire a prospect to make the blood rush to the extremities of even the most jaded horror connoisseurs.
On DVD and Blu-Ray in the UK from Aug 12th 2019
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