EDITOR’S NOTE: Scars of Dracula was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 28, 1974 at 11:30 p.m. It also played on February 21, 1976 and December 16, 1978.
Directed by Roy Ward Baker and written by Anthony Hinds, this Hammer film starts with Dracula’s dead body on a stone plinth in a chamber in his castle, defeated after Taste the Blood of Dracula. A bat flies in, gives him blood and Dracula is back and he even survives his castle being burned down. Weirdly, that’s the same footage from that movie played backwards because, you know, the budget.
He soon hs a new servant named Klove (Patrick Troughton) and a mistress named Tania (Anouska Hempel). Well, he did, because she tries to get with his new captive Paul Carlson (Christopher Matthews), so Dracula stabs her and tosses her into acid because, you know, he’s Dracula.
Paul’s brother Simon (Dennis Waterman) and his fiancee Sarah Framsen (Jenny Hanley) come to save him but you know how smart Dracula is about these things, even if Klove chooses Sarah over him, which gets him punished.
This one has perhaps the dumbest death for Dracula ever, as he holds a metal spike and gets struck by lightning. He catches on fire and just keeps burning, but come on. That doesn’t kill a vampire. That ending is forgotten about by Dracula A.D. 1972.
Warner Brothers and other American major studios didn’t want to deal with Hammer’s Sir James Carreras, so the budgets were cut to $200,000. Many think that the decline in Hammer movies starts here.
Christopher Lee said, “I was a pantomime villain. Everything was over the top, especially the giant bat whose electrically motored wings flapped with slow deliberation as if it were doing morning exercises.” Sure, he was sick of playing Dracula. You would be too if you played him four times in the same year in Count Dracula, One More Time and Taste the Blood of Dracula. He almost didn’t do this and would have seen John Forbes-Robertson take the role earlier. He eventually played the count in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires.
If you look close, Peter Cushing is one of the milkmaid in the opening village scenes. There was a delay on Scream and Scream Again and Lee dared him to sneak into the movie.
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I totally agree with you, Sam, that this was the film where the Hammer formula started to come apart. Dennis Meikle in his terrific book on the financing of Hammer films, A History of Horrors: The Rise and Fall of Hammer, wrote that the big American distributors had started to become disenchanted with Hammer, especially after the box-office failure of the fairly opulent Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed. And while Hammer had a profitable relationship with Warner Bros. at the time, that company passed on Scars of Dracula and Horror of Frankenstein because they were cheap looking. Hammer, while being an incredibly creative company, unfortunately managed its money poorly. They were literally going from film to film trying to convince people to give them money. EMI didn’t give them much for Scars/Horror, and it shows in the finished product: Scars is terrible, and Horror is no world beater, though I’ve always had a soft spot for it. The fiscally responsible folks at AIP only did one co-production with Hammer, The Vampire Lovers, even though you’d have thought that the pairing of the two greatest horror companies of the 1960s would have flourished. Hammer’s golden era was coming to and end. But somehow, through sheer chutzpah, they secured a U.S. distribution deal with Paramount for Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell and Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, among the last of the U.S. studio double features.
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