EDITOR’S NOTE: Dracula Has Risen From His Grave was on the CBS Late Movie on May 19 and October 12, 1972 and August 9, 1974.

The fourth Hammer Dracula movie and the third to star Christopher Lee (he doesn’t appear in The Brides of Dracula), this was directed by Freddie Francis. He stepped in to replace Terence Fisher, who injured his leg in a car accident. It has a really strange and wonderful effect when Dracula appears in the film, as the edges of the frame take on the colors of crimson, amber and yellow.

There’s an amazing beginning where a young altar boy (Norman Bacon) finds a dead woman hidden inside a church bell, just one more of Dracula’s victims. But a year after — and the events of Dracula: Prince of Darkness — finds the greatest of all the undead quite dead.

Monsignor Ernst Mueller (Rupert Davies) visits the village from the opening and learns that the altar boy can no longer speak and the town’s holy man (Ewan Hooper) has lost his faith. Because Dracula’s castle has a shadow that extends over their church, they refuse to even come near it. The monsignor decides to exorcise the castle, which leads to the kind of strange occurrences that always bring Dracula back: lightning strikes, the older priest slips, he hits his head on a rock and the drips of his blood through the cracks in the ground make their way to the deceased vampire.

As Mueller returns home, Dracula quite literally rises from his grave and takes on the frightened priest as his familiar. Now unable to enter his castle, he flips out and demands revenge, heading off to Keinenberg, where he plans on making Mueller’s niece Maria (Veronica Carlson, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, The Horror of Frankenstein) into one of his lovers.

Luckily, her boyfriend Paul (Barry Andrews) is ready to protect her, even if he has to defeat the advances of a barmaid Zena (Barbara Ewing, who has since become a well-reviewed author) who has been hypnotized by Dracula. There’s a wild moment when Dracula orders the priest to kill Zena, so he burns her body in a bakery oven while Dracula himself leaps across the rooftops to find and bite Maria.

This has some interesting ideas as Paul has to go it alone after the Monsignor dies. As an atheist, he and the lost faith priest are unable to properly stake and destroy Dracula. As always, Dracula is stopped and faith is restored. This just feels like the hardest time to achieve that end goal.

As a kid, the Hammer movies were quite literally the end all, be all of my existence. I thought about them literally all day and would discuss them with anyone who wanted to hear about them. Often, many who didn’t.

As an old man, I’m struck by how often the film in the movie is sped up, which doesn’t work, while the color effects and rooftop scenes have lost none of their infernal power. Plus. this has one of the best posters I’ve seen, just the throat of a bosom woman with band-aids where Dracula’s teeth have penetrated her.