Ladies Night Part II

Part II (of four): Creatures and Cleavage


After two decades of churning out low-budget, negligible fare since its establishment in 1934, England’s Hammer Film Productions mined gold from the mid-‘50s to the ‘70s with a mother lode of one Gothic horror nugget after another.

Hammer acquired the rights to remake several of Universal Pictures’ monster movies, beginning with "The Curse of Frankenstein" (1957) and "Horror of Dracula" (1958), each followed over the years by numerous sequels. The films belied their low budgets by utilizing quality British actors (specifically, the frequently employed Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing) and deceptively lavish-appearing sets and atmospheric locations.




What set the English Hammer remakes apart from their Hollywood predecessors was, first and foremost, the exploitation of Technicolor for violence and gore (in his portrayals of Dracula, Christopher Lee, above, would often endure wearing painful, crimson-lined contact lenses to enhance the character’s bloodlust) and secondly, the introduction of previously unseen eroticism in the horror genre, earning Hammer the reputation of "creatures and cleavage." In the Dracula films, beautiful damsels in revealing bodices would appear to abandon themselves in the throes of orgasm as victims of the vampire’s fangs.




"Frankenstein Created Woman" (1967) found Hammer incorporating the sexuality of its Dracula franchise into the equally successful series of Frankenstein films. In her only major movie role, Playboy centerfold Susan Denberg (Miss August 1966) is featured as a crippled girl who drowns herself following the execution of her beau, who was accused of a murder he didn’t commit. Dr. Frankenstein (played for the fourth time by Peter Cushing) transfers the soul of the executed lover into the girl’s body, a body she/he now uses provocatively to wreak bloody revenge.





In 1971, Hammer offered an intriguing variation on Robert Louis Stevenson’s frequently filmed 1886 tale The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Written and co-produced by Brian Clemens, who was the main script writer for the popular TV series "The Avengers," "Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde" depicted the evil side of the beneficent doctor as a sensuously beautiful woman who commits Jack the Ripper-like murders of prostitutes for the female hormones Jekyll requires to continue his experiments.



The sinister seductress is played by Martine Beswick (above, with costar Ralph Bates), an exotic beauty 007 fans remember fondly as one of the fiery combatants in a gypsy catfight in "From Russia with Love" (below) and as ill-fated Bond girl Paula Caplan in "Thunderball."



Although ads warned viewers, "The sexual transformation of a man into a woman will actually take place before your very eyes!", a scene in which a newly transformed, bare-breasted Hyde stares into a mirror and beholds her new anatomy was cut from U.S. showings (below). Beswick later recalled it as one of her favorite scenes, noting, "Sister Hyde is born and realizes she doesn’t even know what a woman is in real life, that she is here, and looks at herself and discovers that she has breasts…and has no idea what they are." When a man walks in on her, Hyde, in Beswick’s words, "gets it, she realizes that this is a power, that this is what people want, and from there on, she’s off…Wow! I have power here!"



By the 1970s, as the popularity of Hammer horror declined, the studio’s mindset moved from erotic suggestion to overt nudity, replacing heaving bosoms in plunging necklines with naked, heaving bosoms. In the 1984 book Eroticism in the Fantasy Cinema, Beswick told author Bill George, "It was actually much more subtle when Hammer first started, there was a sort of innocence attached to it…when they started to add nudity as opposed to eroticism, it passed into just exploitation." She explained, "Hammer was sort of going downhill and they were kind of trying to push it over into what was going on at the time, which was a lot of nudity…I think the films suffered. I came out OK, I won a Best Actress at the Cinema Fantastique in Paris (for ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde’), which I thought was very nice."

Despite the title, Hammer’s "Countess Dracula" (1970) was not related to earlier Dracula films or to Bram Stoker’s original novel. Polish-born Ingrid Pitt stars as the beautiful Countess Elizabeth Bathory (below), who manages to stay young only by bathing in the fresh blood of young virgins.



There was, in fact, a real Elizabeth (Erzsebet) Bathory (below), who achieved infamy as one of history’s busiest female serial killers. She was born in 1560 to a noble and influential Hungarian family (which, at the time, ruled Transylvania). Following her husband’s death in 1604, she, along with four servants, was accused of torturing and killing hundreds of girls and young women. Although she was found guilty of murdering only 80 females, one witness attributed over 650 victims to her unholy cruelty.



In 1610, she was imprisoned in her own castle, where she remained, walled in by bricks in a set of rooms, until her death four years later. Comparisons to Vlad the Impaler (the historic source for the fictional Dracula) led to her nicknames "Countess Dracula" and "Blood Countess," while her notoriety inspired tales of her bathing in the blood of the slain to supernaturally sustain her youth.



Hammer’s trilogy of vampire films about the fictional Karstein family in Eastern Europe - "The Vampire Lovers," "Lust for a Vampire" and "Twins of Evil" - was based on characters created by Irish-born author Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (above). Regarded as a seminal ghost story writer of the 19th century, Le Fanu inspired the popularity of mystery novels and Gothic tales during the Victorian era. Published in 1872, Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla relates the story of a young woman, Laura, who naively draws the attention of the titular female vampire, whose original name was Countess Mircalla (an anagram of Carmilla) Karnstein.




Le Fanu, expectedly, had to depict Carmilla’s sexuality according to the conventionalities of his time, but the lesbian attraction remains the heart of the story. Carmilla chooses only female victims. Although she is nocturnal, sleeping by day in a coffin, she is not restricted by sunlight. She possesses the supernatural abilities to pass through walls and shape-shift into her animal alter ego, an enormous black cat.

Le Fanu himself was inspired, in part, by one account of the aforementioned Countess Bathory by Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, an eclectic British antiquarian, hymnist ("Onward, Christian Soldiers") and author of 1863’s The Book of Were-wolves. Carmilla greatly influenced Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and served as the source for several other films, including Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer’s "Vampyr" (1932), Roger Vadim’s "Blood and Roses" (1960) and Belgian director Harry Kumel’s "Daughters of Darkness" (1971).

According to the editors of the 1989 reference book The Horror Film, "Hammer was looking for a way to revitalize their horror series and hit upon a combination of soft-core sex with lesbian overtones and violence even more graphic than in their previous films."



Ingrid Pitt, the star of "Countess Dracula," who portrayed Mircalla in "The Vampire Lovers" (1970), told an interviewer that "the nudity had been an authentic part of the story…If the script requires nudity, I am not against it. In ‘The Vampire Lovers’ it was essential there was nudity to make a point." She recalled, "There’s this scene with (Madeline) Smith and me in bed…It was really very mild. There’s no point in getting embarrassed about two girls in bed." She declared, "It is wrong to be ashamed of the naked body; The guilt is in people’s minds, not in the showing of the body…My progress as an actress can not be hindered by the truth!"





"The Vampire Lovers" was followed by "Lust for a Vampire" (1970), featuring Danish actress Yutte Stensgaard (above) as the bisexual Carmilla/Mircalla. One critic noted that under the "annoying direction" of Jimmy Sangster, the sequel "collapses into mere silliness." Stensgaard left acting in 1972 and eventually became a Christian, refusing to discuss her brief screen career until a Danish fan tracked her down, leading to interviews and appearances at horror film conventions.



"Twins of Evil" (1971), directed by John Hough ("The Legend of Hell House"), is critically regarded as the best of the Karnstein trilogy. This time, Countess Mircalla is portrayed by German-born Katya Wyeth, but the casting coup had to be the participation of Madeleine and Mary Collinson (above), the first identical twin centerfold models for Playboy magazine. The movie was butchered for U.S. distribution with the removal of crucial sex scenes and violence that had effectively emphasized the trilogy’s theme of the conflict between hedonistic excess and puritanical repression, the latter represented here by Peter Cushing’s portrayal of a zealous witch-hunter.



During its heyday, Hammer dominated the horror film market, reveling in worldwide distribution and phenomenal financial success. The studio shut down production in the mid-1980s. The company announced in 2000 that it would begin making movies again, but it has since remained in hibernation.