Vampires Read Free Page A

film, he stakes the vampire a second time. Lugosi melts away under the rays of the sun as his skin falls from his face like wax. Arguably, Lugosi was never better as a vampire than in this movie. As in Mark of the Vampire’s Count Mora, Armand Tesla is again freed of Dracula ’s very demanding constraints – a stage bound script being the worst culprit – becoming a character that holds his own hypnotic fascination.  He changes into a bat and vanishes into mist. He is rebuked by the glowing cross of his adversaries and duplicates his Dracula moan when staked onscreen by a long spike. It is certainly the last time that Lugosi was taken seriously as the movie master of the undead. In 1948, he was lured back to Universal and burlesqued his famous image in Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, playing Count Dracula for the second and final time. In satin cape and clown white face, he takes on the role of the Mad Scientist trying to supercharge the Frankenstein monster (Glenn Strange), by adding the brain of Lou Costello. It is hard to believe that the film had once been conceived as a straight thriller, following on from House of Dracula – in which John Carradine’s Count approaches Mad Scientist Dr Edelmann (Onslow Stevens), for a cure for his need for blood – Bela has obvious fun in his old role and the film was a box office bulls eye that pulled Universal from the brink of bankruptcy in much the same way as Dracula had seventeen years earlier. It was also the last time that Lugosi would be taken seriously in the cinema. After Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, he was forced into films on the poverty row that were general slap stick comedies that ran his image into the ground quicker than a stake through the heart. Old Mother Riley meets the Vampire (1952) billed him opposite fading vaudevillian, Arthur Lucan. He plays a deluded scientist who believes himself to be a vampire. The only point of interest is the fact that the director of this film was John Gilling, who would go on to direct Hammer’s Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile, both made in 1966.
    The World was changing. Man had split the atom and the new craze known as the drive-in would take hold. Scientifically bred vampires such as The Thing From Another World (1951), joined the roster with alien bloodsuckers found in Not of This Earth (1956) and IT! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958) and relegated a back seat to the dire half-vampires invented by Edward D Wood jr and his contemporaries that Bela Lugosi was reduced to. The actor himself had been fighting drug and alcohol addiction for twenty years or more and I think that it is safe to say that his need for easy money to feed his habits made it harder for him to secure a safe and well paying contract. He died in 1956 on August 16 th , in poverty and practically forgotten.
    Further vampires of note consist of Francis Lederer in the low budget shocker The Fantastic Disappearing man aka The Return of Dracula (1957), made just a few months earlier than Hammer’s epoch-making classic, but very atmospheric for all of that. Taking its cue from the plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of A Doubt (1944), Lederer’s Dracula enters the mid-west disguised as an illegal immigrant named Bellac. He hides out in a cave on the outskirts of town and vampirizes a local blind girl whilst trying to put the moves on the films young leads. He is eventually destroyed by falling into a pit primed with wooden stakes. Hungarian Lederer is creepy, but fails to have a real supernatural aura as the Count. Also, like his predecessors, he bares no fangs. The same company, Gramercy pictures, had been responsible for the earlier movie, The Vampire aka Mark of the Vampire (1956), starring John Beale who changes into a scaly monster after ingesting pills made from the blood of the vampire bat. Hammer had also ventured into science fiction with their film, The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) starring Brian Donlevy as Nigel Kneale’s hero.