Dracula 1972 AD and Beyond

Recently reading Fred Saberhagen’s 1975 novel The Dracula Tape, brought to mind a pair of movies set just a little earlier in the decade. These were Dracula AD 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula both produced by Hammer films in 1972 and 1973 respectively. These were the last two films where Christopher Lee played Dracula for Hammer. Just as Batman has the Joker, and Sherlock Holmes has Moriarty, Dracula has Van Helsing, and it’s fitting that Hammer studio’s long-time Van Helsing, Peter Cushing, was along for the ride. These movies were interesting to watch, since I’ve long cited Christopher Lee’s portrayal of Dracula as an inspiration for the Desmond Drake character in my Scarlet Order Vampire novels.

Dracula AD 1972 opens with Dr. Lawrence Van Helsing’s final confrontation with the count. As one might gather from Van Helsing’s name, we’ve already deviated from Bram Stoker’s novel. The two are fighting on a coach when it hits a rock and both are thrown clear. Van Helsing soon discovers that Dracula has been impaled on the broken spoke of a wagon wheel! The good doctor finishes the count off. Dracula falls to dust just before Van Helsing succumbs to his injuries. Unfortunately, one of Dracula’s minions shows up and collects the wheel spoke which impaled Dracula along with a healthy sample of vampire dust. Soon, we skip ahead to 1972, where a group of young people are partying in a London estate. When they’re kicked out, the leader of the group, who looks suspiciously like the minion who collected Dracula’s remains, invites the group to an abandoned church. He wants to conduct a black mass “for kicks.” The ritual is performed. The leader, who goes by the name Johnny Alucard—another tie to a novel I read recently—succeeds in bringing Dracula back. It looks like the world may be lost, but fortunately, one of the people in the group is young Jessica Van Helsing played by Stephanie Beacham. She’s the great granddaughter of Lawrence and the granddaughter of Lorrimer who, like Lawrence, is played by Peter Cushing. In this film, Dracula seems tied to the abandoned church and relies on his minions to do all the work for him. This makes it comparatively easy for Lorrimer to track him down for the final confrontation. The movie’s pacing and style felt like a tribute to the earlier movies in the Hammer Dracula franchise, but it added little new to the lore.

Hammer followed this film with a sequel called The Satanic Rites of Dracula. The movie was retitled Dracula and his Vampire Brides for release in the United States. As one might gather from the British title, more dark rites are in process. Only this time, the people engaged in the rites are from Britain’s business, political and scientific elite. Top investigators attempt to infiltrate the proceedings to find out what’s going on. They get some info and turn to Scotland Yard’s Inspector Murray who helped to crack the last weird case involving dark rituals. Inspector Murray turns to his friends Lorrimer and Jessica Van Helsing for help. This time Jessica is played by Joanna Lumley, but otherwise, our repeat characters are portrayed by the same actors as before. We soon learn that Dracula is no longer tied to the church where he had been trapped in the last movie. He’s now a top London businessman called D.D. Denham. Dracula has grown so old that all he really wants is an end to his immortal existence. However, being Dracula, he isn’t content to just find a way to die. He has to take out humanity as well and he’s found people willing to help. Fortunately, Murray and the Van Helsings are there to save the world. While the first film felt like a tribute to early Hammer Dracula films, this one played more like later films with more explicit violence and nudity. I liked the idea of Dracula as a businessman in the 20th century and Christopher Lee’s D.D. Denham certainly feels not a little like Desmond Drake from the Scarlet Order novels.

Even though the second film felt campier than the first and had several problems, I tended to like it better. The first film relied on many tried and true Dracula tropes, but the second film embarked on new territory, doing more to make Dracula himself the kind of character he would be in the present day. I only wish that Christopher Lee’s Dracula had been given more to do along with a stronger ending than the one he received in the final film. Still, if you’re a fan of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, it’s worth seeking these films out.

I’ve been hard at work on my third Scarlet Order vampire novel featuring Desmond Drake, who takes inspiration from Christopher Lee’s Dracula. As of this writing, I’ve completed just over 80,000 words of the novel. If you want to be ready when the novel comes out, check out the first two books of the Scarlet Order vampire series at: http://www.davidleesummers.com/books.html#scarlet_order

Revisiting Space: 1999

I’m sure everyone remembers where they were on September 13, 1999. Or, at least, they would remember that momentous day if the events of the television show Space: 1999 had come to pass. In the show, that’s the day a nuclear waste dump exploded on Earth’s moon sending it out of orbit and on a long, harrowing journey out of the solar system. I recently found myself thinking about Sylvia and Gerry Anderson’s series. I remember watching it when it first aired, but it occurred to me that I didn’t remember many details about the series, so I went back and watched most of the first season’s episodes.

The first thing that occurred to me as I watched the series is how much it owed to two sources: Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey and Sylvia and Gerry Anderson’s previous live-action television series, UFO. The show reminded me of 2001: A Space Odyssey in the sense that it’s less about space as a setting for the story’s action as it’s a place where mankind will encounter phenomena that will stretch the mind and maybe even spur the next stage of human evolution. The uniforms, the moon base, and the overall feel of the show reminded me a lot of UFO and I’ve read that some elements of the series were, in fact, originally developed for a second season of UFO, which never materialized.

The science of Space: 1999 is much maligned. Isaac Asimov once famously remarked that an explosion big enough to knock the moon out of orbit would destroy it. Physicist Kevin Grazier has taken a much more balanced approach and calculated the energy it actually would take to knock the moon out of Earth’s orbit. He notes that enough energy to knock the moon out of orbit would be highly improbable and also remarks that getting the moon to leave Earth’s orbit isn’t as hard a problem as getting the moon to leave the solar system. You can read Grazier’s thoughts here: https://www.gerryanderson.co.uk/science-of-space-1999/

In his article, Grazier does point out one way in which Space: 1999’s science was ahead of its time and that was it’s presentation of rogue planets. In the series, the moon encounters numerous planets away from the sun wandering by themselves with no nearby star. Rogue planets were pure speculation when the series was created, but we now know them to be something that does exist. We still do have a science issue in that some of these rogue planets seem to support human-like life, despite the lack of a nearby star.

Part of how Space: 1999 sells its improbable physics is by giving us some of the most believable tech I’ve seen in a science fiction series. The Eagle spacecraft look like the kind of things you might have expected NASA to have developed if they had continued building on the Apollo program. The only real problem with the Eagles is their use in atmosphere and high gravity worlds as the series progresses. I believe them on the moon, but not necessarily flying through dense planetary atmospheres. The comlocks that people use to unlock doors and talk to each other feel like the kind of combination remote control, video cell phone that could have been developed in the 1990s.

One of the things I found remarkable about revisiting Space: 1999 was the quality of the cast. Of course, Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, and Barry Morse all had wonderful, understated performances. They felt like humans coming to grips with the weird reality they found themselves in. I had forgotten that actors such as Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee appeared in the series. Speaking of Cushing and Lee, I had forgotten how well the series did at presenting science fiction horror. The denizens encounter some truly frightening situations such as aliens who take over people’s bodies, or implacable tentacled aliens who dine on people’s flesh and spit out corpses.

One of the episodes I found especially interesting was one called “The Guardian of Piri.” In it, Catherine Schell plays an alien who convinces the Alphans they can have complete contentment if they settle. Much of it reminds me of the kinds of visions John Mark Ellis experiences in Children of the Old Stars and the Cluster’s eventual takeover of Earth in Heirs of the New Earth. The structures on Piri are even spheres, reminding me of the Cluster. Although I don’t remember the episode specifically, it does make me wonder how much the episode seeped into my subconscious and was reprocessed in my story.

So, where was I on September 13, 1999? I was working at New Mexico State University on the 1-meter telescope project based at Apache Point Observatory. We were about a month into a new semester, which meant that I was probably busy getting classroom demonstrations ready. I was also working on the novel Children of the Old Stars and thinking about some of the more metaphysical topics I wanted to explore in my series. You can help me create the new edition of my novel by supporting my Patreon campaign at: https://www.patreon.com/davidleesummers