Young Hannah, Queen of the Vampires (1973)

Young Hannah, Queen of the Vampires (AKA Crypt of the Living Dead) is a 1973 Spanish-US gothic horror movie. It was part of the trend at the time to do gothic horror in contemporary settings so the story takes place in the 1970s.

Chris (Andrew Prine) arrives on a remote Mediterranean island to find out how his father died. The circumstances were mysterious. He was crushed under a four-ton stone sarcophagus.

The setting might be the present day but in fact it could have been set any time in the preceding hundred years or so. The island is sparsely inhabited and incredibly backward. There are no cars, there seem to be no telephones and no electricity. The islanders are steeped in superstition. They’re still living in the mental world of the Middle Ages.

There are two other Americans on the island, Peter (Mark Damon) and his sister Mary (Patty Sheppard). Mary teaches at the island’s one and only tiny school.

That sarcophagus is the resting place of Hannah. She was a French noblewoman. She was interred on the island by Louis VII on his way to the Second Crusade. She has lain in her sarcophagus for seven hundred years. But nobody on the island believes she is dead. They believe she was interred alive and still lives, in some way. For Hannah was a vampire.

The island was at one time known as the Island of the Vampires. What Chris doesn’t know is that there is still a vampire cult on the island.

Chris wants to bury his father. To do that he needs to move the sarcophagus. To do that he has to remove the lid. Chris is warned that this will free Hannah but he doesn’t believe in such foolish superstitions.

Mary does believe. She cannot change Chris’s mind but events will soon accomplish that. The corpses start to pile up. Chris realises that he has unleashed something evil and terrifying.

There are important things that Chris doesn’t know. He has more to worry about than the vampiress Hannah.

Of course Chris and Mary fall for each other.

There are plenty of conventional gothic horror visual clichés but the great thing about such clichés is that as long as they’re executed with a modicum of skill they always work. They work pretty well here.

The island setting works well too. There’s no escape from the horrors. And on such a remote island the survival of ancient fears seems plausible.

The major problem is that Hannah just doesn’t seem like a very formidable vampire. There’s no real sense of menace.

The acting from the three principals is quite adequate.

The movie was shot in Turkey and there are indications that the island is supposed to be a Turkish island.

The feel of this film is very American. One can’t help feeling that an Italian or a Spanish director would have extracted a bit more from what is a perfectly decent gothic horror movie setup.

The horror is very mild. There’s no nudity and no sex. For 1972 it’s very very tame. There is one very brief tantalising hint of an incest subplot but it’s immediately forgotten and never mentioned again. This movie desperately needed to be spiced up a bit, and livened up a bit.

Oddly enough this was apparently a Spanish movie (directed by Julio Salvador) which was subjected to drastic re-editing and had a lot of extra scenes shot in California by Ray Danton. It would be nice if the original Spanish film surfaced one day as it was apparently much less tame and bland. But the exact details of this movie’s production history are very murky.

Not a great movie but kind of fun if you don’t set your expectations too high.

I bought the very old VCI DVD which is letterboxed. I have no problems with that. I don’t mind as long as a movie isn’t pan-and-scanned.