Blood of the Vampire (1958)

dir Henry Cass lp Donald Wolfit, Vincent Ball, Barbara Shelley, Victor Maddern

A deceptively titled (the lead character isn't really a vampire) early entry in the 1950s Gothic revival, this begins in Transylvania in 1874 with a burial in a remote mountain cemetery. Before the lid of the coffin is closed, a masked executioner pounds a stake into the heart of the corpse. A strange deformed man watches from concealment, waiting until everyone else has left, then killing the grave digger and (presumably) stealing the body. Later the deformed man, whose name is Carl, pays an alcoholic doctor to put a fresh heart in the body, then kills the doctor.

Later we meet John Pierre, a young doctor whose experiments with blood transfusion cause him to be unjustly convicted of malpractice and murder. Condemned to life in an island prison, he is diverted instead to a huge asylum for the criminally insane. The feared governor of the institution is Dr. Callistratus, who, of course, is the same person whose burial we witnessed at the beginning of the film. Because the wrong blood type was used during his revival, Callistratus suffers from a condition whereby, "one group of cells in my body is destroying the other." To try to find a cure, he's taking blood from unwilling donors among the inmate population, sometimes so much that it kills them. He enlists Pierre to help him in is experiments, granting him freedom to move about the asylum and to live in a comfortable bedroom rather than a dirty cell. When new evidence exonerates Pierre, Callistratus tells the court that Pierre has been killed in an escape attempt. This causes Pierre's beautiful wife, Madeleine, to infiltrate the asylum, posing as a housekeeper.

This is an imitation of the Hammer thrillers which were just beginning to become popular at the time it was made, but is not nearly as satisfying as films such as Horror of Dracula. It has many of the same trappings as the Hammer films, but the script and performances are not up to Hammer's standards (at least those of the legendary studio's best films) and the plot is a muddled mess. As Bill Warren says in his magisterial Keep Watching the Skies, it seems as though the writers put in as many horror tropes as possible, but failed to mold them into a coherent whole. In the end, it's only interesting as an example of Hammer's early influence and for a chance to see frequent Hammer performer Shelley in her first venture into Gothic horror.