Dracula A.D. 1972 (dir. Alan Gibson, 1972)
Hammer Film Productions made a killing putting out horror movies based on public domain characters: Frankenstein, Dracula, the vague and uncopyrightable concept of a resurrected Mummy. Hammer made icons out of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, whose turns as Dracula and Van Helsing in that series of films are among the most memorable in popular culture.
And then there’s Dracula A.D. 1972, which tried to do something a little different from the tried-and-true formula.
It’s not even really a bad idea, bringing Dracula into a contemporary setting. Bram Stoker’s novel owes much of its success and place in the popular imagination due to the way that it tapped into the anxieties of Victorian society: sexual transmitted diseases, the new roles of women in society, that classic English xenophobia borne of the fear of being treated by foreigners in the exact manner that they’ve treated the rest of the world. And after six prior films had thoroughly exhausted all the possibilities contained in the nineteenth century, maybe setting something during Edward Heath’s tenure as Prime Minister would be a welcome change of pace?
Unfortunately, putting Dracula into the early 1970s means enduring some of the most interminable music ever recorded. Even if you enjoy the movie for the romp that it is, you will resent the very existence of the band Stoneground and the inclusion of their two song set in it. You will question every good thing you ever thought about popular music in that era, because they are just that bad.
The film’s prologue set in 1872 establishes one of the more pathetic deaths of Dracula ever made: killed by the spoke of a broken wheel after a carriage accident while battling Lawrence Van Helsing [1]. Dracula is reduced to ash, but some of his remains are scooped up by a minion of Dracula played by Christopher Neame with plans for the inevitable return of his master.
Flash forward one hundred years. Peter Cushing now plays Lawrence’s descendant Lorrimer, who is still an academic who knows an improbable amount about the occult. His granddaughter Jessica (Stephanie Beacham) has fallen in with the self-styled ‘Johnny Alucard,’ also played by Neame and who looks, I should mention now, exactly like Robert Webb of Peep Show fame. He’s also more or less as competent as Jez, and his ritual to bring Dracula back to life goes about as well as you’d imagine with him becoming the vampiric servant rather than Mark Corrigan’s flatmate in Croydon.
It’s not a good film by any measure, but it is very enjoyable for audiences in 2019 to marvel at the post-psychedelic, pre-punk London in all its ridiculousness. There’s a conservative, even reactionary quality to the film as the ‘counterculture,’ such as it is, are depicted as hedonistic, selfish, and easily led, but hey, that’s not exactly wrong and is more than fitting with the paranoid and anxious qualities of Stoker’s original novel. Also, you get to see Dracula die in the end in an even more undignified manner. So that’s fun.
[1] Fans of the Hammer films will no doubt note that this takes place outside of the continuity of the earlier entries in the series, which are set later in the century and featuring Peter Cushing instead playing the traditionally named Abraham Van Helsing instead of ole Larry here.
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