Countess Dracula (Peter Sasdy, 1971)

Inspired by Elizabeth Bathory, the Hungarian countess who, with the help of her servants, purportedly murdered hundreds of women and girls in the late 1590s and early 1600s, bathing in their blood to attain permanent youthfulness, but was more likely the victim of false accusations in a political power play designed to ruin her family's influence, Countess Dracula uses pieces of that legend as the basis for an enjoyable British Hammer-horror gothic period piece with a dryly funny sense of humor, great sets, stylish performances, and plenty of atmosphere.

Countess Dracula begins with newly widowed Hungarian countess Elisabeth Nadasdy (Ingrid Pitt) and various members of her entourage arriving by coach for the reading of the count's will. Along the way, a villager begs Captain Dobi (Nigel Green) for a once-promised job but is shoved aside. The coach rolls over the poor villager, killing him, though the countess and the captain remain unmoved and continue on their way. These are some ice-cold MFs. The countess appears relatively unmoved by her husband's death (she's been having an affair with Captain Dobi for years, though his obsessive love for her is not reciprocated) and mildly bored by the reading of the will until she spots a young stranger, Imre Toth (Sandor Eles). Imre is a lieutenant whose father and the count were old military buddies, and he has only recently learned that he's been included in the will. The countess perks the hell up after drinking in the handsome, mustachioed young man. She may be elderly, but she's still powerfully horny.

The will doesn't shake out to everyone's liking. Dobi gets some historical military items he doesn't much care about, while new jack hustler Imre gets the stables and all the horses, which Dobi wanted. The librarian/historian Master Fabio (Maurice Denham) gets the count's books, which he's insanely pumped about, but the countess gets a twinge of anger in her face when she learns she has to share the castle and the fortune evenly with her daughter Ilona (Lesley-Anne Down), who will be arriving home the following day. We got some serious conflicts a-bubblin'.

Things get freaky-deaky after a clumsy chambermaid cuts herself and the countess gets some of the blood on her cheek. Her wrinkles disappear. Inspired, she enlists loyal servant Julie (Patience Collier) and Dobi in a murderous conspiracy to keep the supply of young women fully stocked so Countess Elisabeth can murder them and bathe in their blood.

Post-bloodbath and smokin' hot, the Countess decides to pretend to be Ilona and has the real Ilona kidnapped and held captive in the deep-woods home of the 17th century Hungarian version of a hillbilly. She then gets to work making young Imre fall in love with her, which is pretty quick work. The cuckolded Dobi, much to his chagrin, helps the countess achieve all her murderous and romantic goals with not entirely sincere promises of occasional sexy times and his own conviction that she will tire of the young man and realize her love for him.

That is a lot of intrigue, conspiracy, love triangle, family drama, secret murder, and jockeying for favor. It's like a few months of a soap opera rolled into one horror movie package. And, as the world's most annoying people say online, I am here for it. The cast mostly gets the tone and strikes that perfect balance between hamminess and sincerity, and the blending of humor and horror is also achieved successfully, with the truly dark moments never played for laughs and the comedy occurring naturally from the behavior of the characters. The look of the film is subtly beautiful, too, with director Peter Sasdy avoiding heavy stylization but filling each image with life and atmosphere.

Sasdy, a Hungarian, mostly worked in British television, but he had a parallel career in the '70s as a director of horror films. His other horror film credits include Hands of the Ripper, Doomwatch, the TV movie The Stone Tape, Nothing but the Night, Sharon's Baby, and the horror/western hybrid Welcome to Blood City. Outside of horror, he also co-directed historical adventure King Arthur, the Young Warlord and directed the notorious Pia Zadora-starring flop The Lonely Lady, which ended his film career and his brief stint in Hollywood, though his television career continued to thrive. He's still alive but retired in 1993.

Mark of the Vampire (Tod Browning, 1935)

Traveling circus and carnival performer, vaudevillian, and movie actor turned filmmaker Tod Browning  has been a fixture on this site. I've written about several of his classic horror and horror-adjacent films, including The Unholy Three, The Show, The Unknown (his masterpiece), West of Zanzibar, Where East Is East, Dracula, and Freaks (his other masterpiece), and touched on his wild life traveling the country on the lower rungs of showbiz before breaking into the movies. I love his work, and even his weaker films have a handful of amazing scenes. (Crew members did not love Browning so much, complaining of the ridiculously long hours and intense pressure Browning put on the people working for him, and his dissatisfaction with most of their efforts.)

A Browning film most of us Tod-heads have been hoping (without much hope) to see is his 1927 follow-up to The Unknown, London After Midnight. The Lon Chaney-starring silent film was heralded as one of Browning's best, but, as is the case with the majority of silent films, prints eventually went missing or were damaged or destroyed, and the last-known print went up in flames in an MGM vault fire in the 1960s. Since then, the search for an existing print of London After Midnight has turned up nothing, but the production stills survive, giving us a glimpse of what we lost.

We don't have London After Midnight, but we do have Mark of the Vampire. Browning remade his then-extant silent film as a talkie in 1935, swapping Lon Chaney for Bela Lugosi. It's a relatively minor Browning film, with its one hour running time a hint that it was probably the second film in a double feature, but it has some knockout moments that reward viewers willing to put up with the silliness of the narrative.

Mark of the Vampire moves the silent film's action from the big city of London to a village near Prague. The villagers have a serious vampire superstition, which amuses travelers from the city and irritates the hell out of the police inspector, Neumann (Lionel Atwill). That inspector is in town because Sir Borotyn (Holmes Herbert) has been murdered, his body drained of blood, puncture wounds in his neck, the whole nine vampire yards, and the doctor, Doskil (Donald Meek), has pronounced the death the work of vampires. Neumann, pissed as hell at this professional tomfoolery, calls in his own expert, Professor Zelen (Lionel Barrymore, hamming it up to a delightfully absurd degree). Neumann loses his damn mind when Zelen agrees with the vampire theory. This is a man who feels he has been surrounded by fools.

The village soon has 99 problems, and vampires are all of them. Borotyn's daughter Irena (Elizabeth Allan) and her fiancé Fedor (Henry Wadsworth) have encounters with vampirish figures, leaving them with similarly punctured necks and spell-like behavior. I would be on Neumann's side, but the mysterious Count Mora and his daughter Luna (Bela Lugosi and Carroll Borland) have taken up residence in a nearby castle, and they give off intense vampire vibes while serving vampire looks and trending on the town's pre-social media vampire grapevine. These pale, vampirish freaks have to be vampires, and if you accept that premise, it logically follows that Mora and Luna are the ones biting necks and sucking blood.

An aside about Tod Browning's vampire castles in this film and Dracula. He tried to start a trend that didn't really take off, but I salute his oddball efforts. Browning goes classic vamp and fills the otherwise empty castles with coffins and creaky doors and cobwebs and bats and rats and even roaches (as a resident of the Southwest, I hate roaches to hell and back and am currently enduring giant roach season in my 1960s-built house), but both films populate their vampire dwellings with an opossum. You don't really see too many vampires with pet opossums after Tod Browning stopped making movies, and I think it's time we bring this back.

Mark of the Vampire is a relatively generic but enjoyable vampire story for most of its running time until MILD SPOILER a silly twist ending that nevertheless returns Browning to one of his favorite subjects, the small-time showbiz life of struggling actors, carnies, and/or circus people. What really makes Mark of the Vampire worth seeing is Carroll Borland. Her performance as Luna should have been iconic. She's creepy, she's funny, she's scary, she works well with Lugosi, and all of her scenes are by far the best part of the movie.

Until someone turns up a print of London After Midnight in an attic or studio vault or buried under an ice rink or floating in the ocean, Mark of the Vampire will have to do. It's not one of Browning's strongest films, but it's fun, it's only an hour long, and Carroll Borland is fantastic.