The Vampire Lovers (1970), Blu-Ray review

The Vampire Lovers was Hammer’s first serious attempt at a truly erotic gothic horror film. It’s based on J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla (also filmed in 1960 by Roger Vadim as Blood and Roses and in 1972 by Vicente Aranda as The Blood Spattered Bride). Carmilla is regarded as a kind of foundation text for the lesbian vampire sub-genre. It should have been the perfect choice to take Hammer into the 1970s.

If you wanted to make a sexy vampire movie you could hardly go wrong with Ingrid Pitt and Madeline Smith as the two female leads.

The structure of Le Fanu’s tale (with the second half of the story being an extended flashback) works perfectly well as a novella but might have been a little confusing in a movie. The screenwriters have transposed the second half of the novella to the beginning of the movie. This has the advantage of letting us know straight away that we’re dealing with vampires and it has the added benefit of allowing Peter Cushing to be introduced at the beginning rather than the halfway stage of the story. At this time Ingrid Pitt was an unknown (that would change once the movie was released) but Cushing was an established star. Cushing was the obvious box-office draw so Hammer obviously wanted him there from the start.

The movie begins with a ball hosted by General Spielsdorf (Cushing). A mysterious countess asks a favour of him. Could he possibly put her daughter up for a while? The General gallantly agrees. The Countess’s daughter Marcilla (Ingrid Pit) will be company for his own daughter Laura. Laura begins to be troubled by nightmares about huge cats. She also becomes ill, although the reasons for her illness are inexplicable. Laura and Marcilla have become quite close. Marcilla is perhaps excessively affectionate towards Laura, and in particular she is perhaps excessively physically affectionate. No-one thinks anything of this. Affectionate friendships between women were not considered odd in the 19th century.

Laura dies, leaving both her father and her young man Carl (Jon Finch) devastated.

A short time later a coaching accident occurs near the home of Roger Morton (George Cole). The passengers, a mother and her daughter, are unhurt but the daughter is considerably shaken. The daughter, Carmilla, is in no state to resume the journey but the mother insists that her journey is urgent. Morton solves the problem by suggesting that Carmilla should stay at his home until the mother returns from her journey in a few months. Morton’s daughter Emma (Madeine Smith) is delighted at the idea of having a female companion since Morton’s home is rather isolated.

Emma and Carmilla get along well, although Emma seems a bit confused by Carmilla’s caresses. Then Emma starts to become ill and weak.

When La Fanu wrote Carmilla vampire lore had not yet hardened into dogma. As a result Le Fanu’s version of the vampire seems refreshingly unconventional by later standards. His vampires are not at all troubled by daylight. There is none of the silly nonsense about garlic. There are no crucifixes or holy water used as weapons against vampires. Unfortunately Hammer lost their collective nerve and decided to make the vampires in The Vampire Lovers drearily conventional. They dislike daylight, they are repelled by garlic. Carmilla exercises her vampiric mind control powers over Emma’s governess, who becomes a kind of female Renfield. There’s even the crucifix stuff. It’s all too depressingly like their Dracula movies, and by 1970 these were boring tired clichés. None of this stuff is in Le Fanu’s story.

There was a realisation on Hammer’s part that they needed to start doing something fresh but they seemed to be afraid to do so. When you compare this movie to European vampire movies made in the same year such as Jean Rollin’s The Nude Vampire or Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos then The Vampire Lovers seems very dated and conventional.

It doesn’t help that this movie looks exactly like Hammer’s other gothic horror movies and it has the same central European setting. It was time to update the vampire movie but Hammer were unwilling to take the risk.

The screenwriter of The Vampire Lovers, Tudor Gates, felt that Hammer’s gothic horror movies were becoming stale and conventional but oddly enough he wrote a screenplay that is incredibly stale and conventional. His one innovation was to add nudity and lesbianism. He apparently thought that would be enough to make the movie up-to-date for the 70s, but in fact it just serves to emphasise how stale and conventional his script is. It’s the same old formula, but with nudity and lesbians.

The good news is that at least it wasn’t another Dracula movie. They made four Dracula movies between 1966 and 1970 and the formula was wearing very thin.

While it has its problems The Vampire Lovers has one major strength and that is the erotically charged performance of Ingrid Pitt. There were problem with Pitt’s work permit and Hammer had trouble convincing the relevant government authorities to allow her to make the film. Hammer argued that no British actress could have played this part. And they were quite correct. Only a European actress could have brought the necessary uninhibited and sophisticated sexuality to the role.

She also quite effectively captures the ambiguous nature of Carmilla’s feelings towards her victims, and in fact she makes Carmilla’s feelings more complex and more ambiguous than they are in Le Fanu’s tale. Carmilla really does seem at times to be in love with Emma. She certainly seems to be sexually obsessed by her. But she still intends to kill Emma. Her whole approach to Emma is in the nature of a seduction, but it’s a seduction that will end in death. Does she really have any feelings at all for her victims? Miss Pitt leaves us wondering. It’s a wonderful performance. Ingrid Pitt is the one thing in this movie that doesn’t seem horribly dated and staid.

Hammer did understand that they needed to sex things up a bit. There’s a small amount of nudity (including brief frontal nudity) but not enough to achieve that aim. Luckily Ingrid Pitt is a mass of seething sexuality whether she’s clothed or unclothed and she is enough to make it Hammer’s sexiest movie up to this time. In fact she’s enough to make it Hammer’s sexiest movie ever. Hammer were treading very cautiously which, given the incredible rigidity and stupidity of British film censorship, was understandable. But while the censor might have vetoed any additional nudity they could not prevent Ingrid Pitt from being sizzlingly sexy.

If you want a good example of why censorship is such a terrible idea you only have to consider the reaction of the British censor to the famous scene in this movie with Ingrid Pitt in the bath and then romping nude with Madeline Smith. The censor described it as sick and unnecessary. In reality of course it’s one of the most crucial scenes in the entire movie. It’s the scene that establishes the erotic nature of Carmilla’s vampiric seduction of Emma. If the censor had had his way and the scene had been removed the whole film would have been totally pointless. Without that scene it would have been just another tired retread of the Hammer formula.

Like all Hammer gothic horror films it takes a drearily straightforward good vs evil stance and as in all Hammer gothic horror films this is undermined by the dullness and unattractiveness of the good guys, and by the fact that they seem so vengeful and vindictive. This was a problem even with the Dracula movies but when you have a villain who is an exciting sexy female it’s impossible not to hope that maybe this time the forces of good will lose. It’s also another Hammer film in which we can’t help feeling that there’s an extreme hostility to any woman who experiences sexual feelings. In fact in this movie we get the feeling that a major motivation for the good guys is to prevent Emma from becoming sexually awakened. By the end (particularly in view of a late plot twist which I won’t reveal) all my sympathies are with Carmilla.

Peter Cushing’s greatest achievements as an actor were in my opinion in Hammer’s Frankenstein movies where he got to play a villain, but a complex villain. He did an absolutely superb job. Unfortunately in his appearances in their vampire movies he always ended up playing incredibly simplistic and incredibly unpleasant heroes who came across as vindictive sadists.

The question that then arises is, was there some intention here to subvert the traditional good vs evil gothic horror movie that had been Hammer’s speciality for so long? Are we meant to be on Carmilla’s side? Sadly, I doubt that Hammer had any such intention. What makes the movie interesting is, paradoxically, the contrast between Ingrid Pitt’s exciting and perverse sexuality and complex and ambiguous characterisation on the one hand and the grinding conventionality of everything else in the movie on the other.

Without Ingrid Pitt this would have been a very tired second-rate Hammer movie, little more than a succession of creaky vampire movie clichés. Her performance is almost enough to make this movie what it should have been, the movie that would really have revitalised the Hammer gothic horror movie.

The Vampire Lovers is an odd mix of boldness (the open treatment of the sexual nature of vampirism, the fact that this vampire has emotions) and timidity (everything else in the movie). It looks forward to the 70s and it looks back to the 50s. Recommended, but mainly for Ingrid Pitt.