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her young brother-in-law’s generosity to the natives as he buys endless rounds of drinks for all the patrons. Amidst all the merry-making a large gruff figure enters the inn and berates the townsfolk for stringing up garlic flowers.
    “There are no devils and even if there were, these wouldn’t keep him out!”
    He introduces himself as Father Sandor, a cleric of Kleinberg who criticizes social etiquettes and explains away a carbine rifle as putting venison on the table. When he hears that the young company is headed for Carlsbad, he warns them to stay away from the castle that is not marked on any map.

As the film trails on, we discover that Alan Kent and his wife are mere cannon fodder to be instrumental in bringing the Count back to life. There is an eerie sequence with a driverless carriage that takes the four to the castle in the Carpathians after their original coach driver has decided against travelling at night and leaving his charges stranded in the middle of nowhere. On closer inspection they find that the castle is ready to receive guests and their own luggage has been deposited in the various bedrooms. As the guests settle down for the night, Fisher guides his camera stealthily around the uninhabited castle that suggests the restless spirit of the Count and the horrors to come. The servant Klove (Philip Latham), has no intentions of sleep as he prepares a midnight bloodbath. He stealthily drags a large trunk down to the cellars and peppers ashes from an antique box into a large sarcophagus. His thumps and bumps alert his visitors who decide to investigate. Alan Kent is not the first fool to be bumped off in a horror movie, but as his hosts midnight ventures are really none of his affair, I grinned when Klove took him out with a knife between his shoulder blades. When Dracula is revitalized, Klove intercepts Helen to provide his first meal. Very quickly she notices that Alan has been put away very neatly in an old wooden box. Originally, the script asked that his severed head be placed on top of the casket smiling at the audience, but the censor wouldn’t hear of it. Helen screams and turns to face Christopher Lee’s Count Dracula for the first time.

Bereft of dialogue – Lee claims that he refused to speak the lines that were written for him, while Sangster always maintained that he never wrote any – Dracula is reduced to being nothing more than a second cousin to the bogeyman who jumps out at people when the audience becomes restless. One can understand Lee becoming very disillusioned on reading the draft for this script, but it is unclear whether or not he would have had the necessary authority to question its contents at the time. The final third of the movie simply replays his animal savagery from the first film but with considerably less bloodletting. He bites Helen off screen, even though many stills have shown different over the years, and without any explanation opens a vein in his chest for Suzan Farmer to drink his blood. He throttles Francis Matthew’s useless hero two or three times during the course of the movie and, after chasing the heroes and then being chased in turn, he eventually meets his end in the icy waters of the Castle moat – courtesy, in part, of his stand-in Eddie Powell. Dracula is the Prince of Darkness and he was relegated to the shadows for most of this film. However, his performance in this movie elevated him to the rank of the definitive Count Dracula for millions of fans.
    A major plus to the film is when Barbara Shelley is vampirized and turns from a prim and prissy Victorian snob into a raging hellion, snarling and spitting at the monks who hold her down to prepare her for Father Sandor’s graphic staking. Miss Shelley was the third Hammer starlet to succumb to a violent, on-screen, deliverance of the soul. It must also be pointed out that, apart from the grisly slaying of Alan Kent, this is the only blood-letting in the entire film, unless we count the cat