The words of the actor in voice-over blended with the words Cushing recalled dimly from the script.
How the creature, driven by its wretched passion, takes a form by which to attract its victims…
How, compelled by their lust, they court their prey…
“Driven by their inhuman thirst—for blood…”
Cushing shifted in his seat. Why were cinema seats so desperately uncomfortable?
The camera tracks in towards a drunk who has staggered out of a tavern and stands urinating against a wall. His stupid face opens in a lascivious grin. Back inside the tavern, his scream chills the air and everyone freezes in horror—the way Hammer does best. The serving wench runs to the door and opens it to find the drunk with twin punctures in his neck. Lifeless, he falls…
Peter Cushing looked at his watch. Tricky to see in the dark. The merest glint of glass. Hopeless. Hearing the screech of a sword drawn from its scabbard, he lifted his eyes back to the screen.
Douglas Wilmer waits in the chapel for the apparition to return to its grave. As his eyes widen, the camera pans to a diaphanous shroud more like a sexy Carnaby Street nightgown than anything from the nineteenth century, and the naked, voluptuous figure beneath it. The camera rises to the face of a beautiful blonde. She steps closer and wraps her arms around the frightened, mesmerised Baron. When her cleavage presses against the crucifix hanging round his neck she recoils sharply, her lips pulled back in a feral snarl. Close up: bloody fangs bared in a lustrous, female mouth. With a single swipe of his sword he decapitates her. Moments later, her severed head lies bloody on the castle flag stones at his feet. The lush music of Harry Robinson, as romantic as it is eerie, wells up over the title sequence proper…
Still the seat beside Cushing remained empty. He lit a second cigarette. By now he was wondering if he would be sitting through the film alone. Perhaps his attempt to entice the creature hadn’t been as clever as he’d thought.
The pastiche Strauss made him cringe every time. He’d never been impressed by the tatty ballroom scene at the General’s house. The Hammers were always done cheaply—the ingenuity and commitment of cast and crew papering over inadequate budgets—but now they were starting to look cheap. It worried and saddened him. Like seeing a fond acquaintance down on their uppers. Byronic Jon Finch looked heroic enough, he had to admit. He didn’t look bad himself as a matter of fact, in that scarlet tunic and medals…
Peter Cushing as the General looks on, presiding over his party. He kisses the hand of the delightful Madeline Smith, bidding her and her father, George Cole, goodbye. Or rather: “Auf wiedersehn.”
Until we meet again. Obviously. The audience knows he will appear later in the picture. He’s one of the stars, after all.
He watched Dawn Addams as the Countess introduce her daughter Mircalla, played with languid hunger by Ingrid Pitt—plucked from her brief appearance in Where Eagles Dare after Shirley Eaton (from Goldfinger) was deemed too old, even though they were actually the same age. Perhaps Eaton, he thought, simply hadn’t given Jimmy Carreras what he wanted, as Ingrid with her European eroticism undoubtedly had. Poor Ingrid, who’d spent time with her family in a concentration camp—(“concentration camp: that’s true horror”)—and for whom he’d organized a cake and champagne on the anniversary of her father’s birth: Helen had wheeled it onto the set and Ingrid had blown out the candles with tears in her eyes.
Peter Cushing asks the Countess if she would like to join in the waltz. “Enchanted,” comes her reply.
“The invitation to the dance.” A voice in reality: one he recognised all too well.
Without turning his head, he saw the usherette’s torch hovering at the end of his row of seats. A silhouette moved closer, given a flickering penumbra by the fidgeting and then departing beam. The donkey jacket seemed almost to be bristly on the shoulders, like the pelt of some large animal, especially with the long, flesh-coloured hair running over its collar.
Eyes fixed on the screen, Cushing felt the weight of Les Gledhill settle in the cinema seat beside him. He detected the strong whiff of carbolic soap and Brut after shave, a multi-pronged attack to cover the daily tang of blood and gutted fish.
Jon Finch is waltzing with the General’s niece, Laura, and Ingrid—Mircalla—is looking over at them. Laura thinks she is eyeing up her boyfriend but he says no, it’s her she’s looking at. A sinister man enters the ballroom dressed in a black top hat and a red lined cloak. His face is unnaturally pale. He whispers to the Countess, who makes her apologies to the General. She has to go. Someone has died.
Peter Cushing as the General tells her, “It’s my pleasure to look after your daughter, if you so wish.”
Sitting beside him in the auditorium, Gledhill’s face was entirely in darkness.
“Don’t tell me you’ll tear down the curtains and let in the light. You’re not exactly as frisky as you were back in the fifties, are you?”
“I thought you didn’t watch my films.”
“Only when there’s nothing better on. They’re okay for a cheap laugh, I suppose. All they’re good for nowadays.” The General says goodbye to the Countess and watches her depart in her coach. Ingrid stares out. The pale, cloaked man on horseback in the woods gives a malevolent grin, showing pointed fangs. “Things have moved on, haven’t you noticed? Blood and gore, all the rest of it. Nobody’s scared of bats and castles and bolts through the neck.” Mircalla fondly places a laurel on the General’s niece’s head. Puts a friendly arm round the young girl’s bare shoulders. “They’re just comedy. Nobody’s afraid of you anymore.”
Cushing chose not to point out that their Frankenstein’s monster never had bolts through its neck. “I believe I still have a small but devoted following.”
“I can see. We can hardly move for your adoring fans.” The man he spoke to knew as well as he did that they were the only people in the audience. “They’re dying, these old films. Everybody knows it. The last gasp. It’s tragic.”
“I think you’ll find this film has been a box office hit. Significantly so, in fact. It’s rejuvenated the company.”
“Really. Look around you.”
“You’ve got to remember it’s already been released for five months. And this is a backwater town. And a matinee.”
“You’re living an illusion, mate.”
“Am I?”
“You need to get a grip on reality, old feller. Before you lose it completely. Choc ice?”
Cushing imagined it was not a serious inquiry.
Peter Cushing’s beautiful niece is sleeping now. Swooning in some kind of ‘wet dream’—if that was the expression. He remembered that this was one of the many scenes that Trevelyan and Audrey Field, who had been campaigning against Hammer for decades, were unhappy about, even with an X certificate. The censor had strongly urged the producers to keep the film “within reasonable grounds”—meaning the combination of blood and nudity, the very thing Carreras was gleeful about now they’d entered the seventies (“The gloves are off! We can show anything!”). In monochrome a hideous creature crawls up the bed. Wolf-like eyes out of blackness become Ingrid Pitt’s—Mircalla’s. To Cushing the girl looks as though she has a bearskin rug crawling over her. Nevertheless, the dream orgasm so worrisome to the BBFC is curtailed with her scream.