Dracula Has Risen from the Grave

I have to admit that another genre I haven't watched all that much of is the Hammer horror film. A bunch of them were distributed by Warner Bros. in the US, which is how they could show up in TCM's 100th anniversary salute to Warner Bros. With that in mind, and seeing that a couple of them were about to leave the Watch TCM app, I decided to watch Dracula Has Risen from the Grave.

Apparently, Dracula (Christopher Lee) was killed off in the previous movie in the series, which I haven't seen. But his spirit lingers over the village where his castle is located, and this leaves the villagers terrified. So the Monsignor (Rupert Davies) heads off to the castle to perform an exorcism, which it is hoped will destroy Dracula once and for all. Fat chance, of course, since we wouldn't have a movie otherwise.

What happens here is that as the Monsignor is performing the exorcism, there's a thunderstorm that passes directly overhead, and the priest accompanying the Monsignor is knocked down during the storm, getting a concussion and some lacerations. The blood just happens to flow right into the ice in which Dracula had been buried alive and presumed frozen, so once Dracula tastes the blood, he's very much alive again, and boy is he pissed.

This Dracula, however, doesn't seem to turn people into vampires by biting them, instead making them slaves who are forced to do his bidding. Dracula learns from the priest that it was the Monsignor who did the exorcism, and that the Monsignor has a lovely niece Maria (Veronica Carlson) whose sould Dracula wants because even Dracula apparently has a sex drive.

Meanwhile, Maria has a new boyfriend in the form of Paul (Barry Andrews) who hs shown up in town and is willing to marry Maria. But he's an atheist, which understandably bothers everybody else who finds out about it. And of course, not having any religion, it's going to be hard to do the religious rituals everybody else believes are necessary to deal with a vampire.

Perhaps it's necessary to see the Hammer horror films in sequence, since there are so many with Dracula and so many with Frankenstein; not having seen the previous Dracula movies, it's possible that I was missing key info that contemporary viewers would have known. In any case, I found the movie OK, but certainly nothing great.

One thing it did have going for it was a great visual style. Apparently director Freddie Francis used particular color filters to make the movie, with various locations getting various filters. Whatever he did, the color scheme was definitely noticeable to me.

Perhaps people who are bigger fans of horror movies will enjoy Dracula Has Risen from the Grave more than I did, or maybe I just needed to be in the right mood or watch it in October. In any case, I'm not certain when I'll be visiting more Hammer horror films.