Dracula: Prince of Darkness

Plot

The film opens with a flashback to the end of the earlier story, showing Van Helsing using sunlight to destroy Count Dracula. Only the memory of the vampire's evil lingers. The main plot picks up in 1895. A priest named Father Sandor stops local officials from treating a dead woman as a vampire.

He scolds the priest in charge for spreading fear of vampires and points out that Dracula was killed a decade earlier, in 1885. Sandor then goes to an inn and tells four English tourists—brothers Alan and Charles Kent, along with their wives, Helen and Diana—to stay away from Karlsbad. They ignore him and head there anyway. Their coach driver gets scared and abandons them two kilometers from their destination as night falls.

They spot a castle, and a carriage with no driver takes them there. Inside, they find a table set for four and their luggage already unpacked in the bedrooms. A servant named Klove says his late master, Count Dracula, ordered the castle to always be ready for guests. After eating, the Kents go to their rooms.

Later, Alan hears a noise and follows Klove to a crypt. Klove kills him and mixes his blood with Dracula's ashes, bringing the Count back to life. Klove then lures Helen to the crypt, where she becomes Dracula's first victim. The next morning, Charles and Diana cannot find Alan, Helen, or Klove.

Charles takes Diana to a woodsman's hut and goes back to the castle to search. Klove tricks Diana into returning. Charles finds Alan's body in a trunk in the crypt.

Night falls, and Dracula rises. Diana meets Helen, who is now undead and attacks her. Dracula appears and orders Helen away from Diana.

Charles fights Dracula until Diana realizes her crucifix can hurt vampires. Charles makes a larger cross and forces Dracula to flee. They escape in a carriage, but it goes off the rough road and crashes, knocking Diana unconscious. Charles carries her through the woods for hours until Father Sandor finds them and brings them to his abbey.

Production

In the film, Dracula only makes a few hissing sounds and never speaks. Christopher Lee later explained that he refused to say any of the lines written for him in the script, telling Hammer he would not utter them. Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, however, offered a different version in his memoir Inside Hammer, stating that he simply did not write any dialogue for the vampire because, in his view, vampires do not chat. The film was later adapted into a novel by John Burke for his 1967 collection The Second Hammer Horror Film Omnibus.

Production took place at Bray Studios, and the movie was shot back to back with Rasputin, the Mad Monk, sharing many of the same sets and cast members, including Lee, Shelley, Matthews, and Farmer. Barbara Shelley recalled an incident where she accidentally swallowed one of her fangs during a scene; due to the tight schedule and lack of a spare set, she had to drink salt water to bring it back up. In some markets, the film was released as a double feature with The Plague of the Zombies, and audience members received plastic vampire fangs and cardboard glasses with zombie eyes as a promotional gimmick.

Reception

In North America, the film brought in $364,937 in rentals, while in France it attracted 854,197 admissions. It was released as a double feature with The Plague of the Zombies. Fox records show the two films needed $1,500,000 in rentals to break even and actually earned $2,345,000, turning a profit. The Monthly Film Bulletin noted a few welcome changes, such as the Instant Vampire method used to revive Dracula and his drowning death instead of the standard stake, but otherwise called it the same old hash.

Variety predicted the picture would satisfy fans of the genre and perform well, praising Terence Fisher’s skilled direction and John Samson’s workmanlike screenplay, which offered mild thrills without too many misplaced laughs. The Hammer Story: The Authorised History of Hammer Films described it as perhaps the quintessential Hammer horror, though it added that little in it was new to audiences. On Rotten Tomatoes, Dracula: Prince of Darkness holds an 82% approval rating based on 22 reviews.

Home media

The film was among the earliest Hammer horror titles to appear on DVD in the United Kingdom. In January 2012, the studio’s restoration blog revealed that StudioCanal UK would issue a Zone B Blu-ray on 5 March that year. The disc would feature a 2K restoration from the 2-perf cut negative, carried out at Pinewood, and present the movie in its original 2.35:1 Techniscope ratio. A preview of this restored version took place on 24 February 2012 at the Old Vic Tunnels in London, hosted by The Flicker Club.

The event included an introduction by Marcus Hearn and a reading from Bram Stoker’s novel by actor Stephen Tompkinson. In the United States, Millennium Entertainment (later Alchemy) included the film in a Region 1 DVD set called the Hammer Horror Collection, a two-disc package with The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires and Frankenstein Created Woman. It also appeared on a Region 1 double-feature disc paired with The Satanic Rites of Dracula. On 18 December 2018, Scream Factory announced a Collector’s Edition Blu-ray of the film.

Did You Know?

• The film was adapted into a 15-page comics story by Donne Avenell and John Bolton, published in The House of Hammer #6 (June 1977).
• Father Shandor, Demon Stalker, written by Steve Moore, became a recurring feature in House of Hammer and later moved to the anthology comics title Warrior.