Die, Monster, Die! (1965)

aka Monster of Terror

A letter calls American absolvent of SCIENCE CLASS (the film does indeed only ever call whatever he studied “science”, as if it were a 50s monster movie) Stephen Reinhart (Nick Adams) to the home of his girlfriend Susan Whitley (Suzan Farmer) in the UK. The locals from the nearby village dance the usual gothic horror dance about the house, either not speaking to the stranger seeking it at all or making insinuations towards something terrible connected to it. Once Reinhart does manage to get where he is going, said home turns out to be a lavish estate, yet one surrounded by an area of scorched vegetation and decay.

Susan’s father Nahum (Boris Karloff) knows nothing of any boyfriends coming to visit, for Reinhart’s visit seems to have been cooked up by Nahum’s ailing wife Letitia (Freda Jackson), who is mysteriously always hidden behind bed curtains that look like mourning veils, and by Susan. Letitia wants dearly to get her daughter away from the house, away from the decay of her surroundings as well as from a father who has become increasingly obsessed with occult studies and experiments on plants as well as on something hidden away in the house’s basement. Nahum’s keeping with the family tradition there, for his grandfather was doing the very same thing, becoming increasingly deranged in the process.

Despite being more of the mopey kind of American, Reinhart’s love for Susan – who has somehow managed not to notice how creepy and weird her household is – drives him to poke around in things clearly not meant for poking.

Seen as an adaption of one of H.P. Lovecraft’s finest works, “The Colour Out of Space”, the AIP/Anglo-Amalgamated co-production of Die, Monster, Die! – a film clearly not afraid of punctuation – is pretty dreadful, its attempts to reform the tale into something better fitting the mold of Roger Corman’s Poe adaptations losing much of what makes the story so special. I do understand the difficulty of coming up with a way of representing a living colour we do not have any words for in our human languages cinematically, but the monster the film eventually uses is plain ridiculous, and ripping the tale out of the world of an American rural farmer family and pressing it into service of another tale of Karloff doing experiments is the least creative thing anyone could have done with it. Coming from a script written by Jerry Sohl, who really could do better and knew better, it’s particularly disappointing.

When I’m trying to ignore how much this misses the point of HPL and look at the film as just another AIP gothic, though one set in then contemporary times, keeping at least this part of the Lovecraftian method, I can find some enjoyment in the thing. Haller’s not a terrible dynamic director, but his experience as a production designer – particularly for Corman’s Poe adaptations – is seen in most every shot in the first two thirds of the film. Haller is very adept at suggesting the appropriate mood of wrongness and decay through all kinds of neat little details in the sets, and uses the foggy and wet locations to great effect too, creating a wonderful and focussed mood of all the good d-words.

Well, it is too bad that it is Nick Adams wandering through these places, looking a bit like a rodent with very weird hair, and only ever distracting from that with a performance that’s wooden even for the romantic lead in an AIP gothic. The – British – rest of the cast is fine, of course, the elderly and ill Karloff doing the best with the weak dialogue he is given and managing to inject a degree of dignity and pathos into the proceedings by the sheer power of his personality; he’s certainly, as was so often the case, miles above the script there.


But for the first two thirds of the film, the good atmosphere and Karloff do outweigh the bad, suggesting this to be a bit of an underrated little film, not a top notch AIP gothic, but fine enough. Alas, there’s a final act that seems hell-bent on sabotaging everything good that came before, the little plot there is breaking down under the sudden need to get some monsters in, which, in the end, leads us to a climax in which Karloff mutates into a guy wrapped in what looks rather a lot like aluminium foil and chases the rest of the cast through the house, with and without an axe, while Haller suddenly seems to lose all ability to make things look creepy. It’s terrible. So terrible indeed that it overshadows all the decent and better bits that came before, turning Die, Monster, Die! into the kind of film that’s best treated by turning it off once it gets into its third act and making up one’s own ending.

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)

Despite the dire warnings of the rather not superstitious and pretty worldly abbot Father Sandor (Andrew Keir) to keep away from the place, a quartet of British travellers – Helen (Barbara Shelley as the stick in the mud one who just might be right this time around), her husband Alan (Charles Tingwell), his brother Charles (Francis Matthews) and his wife Diana (Suzan Farmer) - on an educational jaunt through the Continent decide to make their way towards the village of Karlsbad.

Curiously enough, their hired local coach driver leaves them by the side of the road quite a bit away from the village as well as from the castle dominating the area. The good man seems to rather prefer not to stay in the area after dark. Things become even more peculiar from there on out: a driver-less horse carriage appears, but when the travellers attempt to drive it to the village, it races them straight to the castle. Let’s call it “Castle Dracula”, why don’t we? There, the strangeness still doesn’t end – having delivered our protagonists, the carriage races away again, with the traveller’s luggage still on board. At least the front door of the castle is open.

Despite Helen’s protests, the party enters, only to find a place that seems empty, yet also set for four visitors. Even more disturbing, the travellers’ luggage has somehow made its way into bedrooms in the castle.
After a bit, a decidedly creepy man named Klove (Philip Latham) appears and explains he’s keeping the place always ready for guests to continue the tradition of hospitality established by his late master, the always welcoming Count Dracula (Christopher Lee). That doesn’t explain even half of the weirdness going on, of course, but what’s a weary traveller to do?

Not surprisingly, Klove’s idea of hospitality is to murder the travellers to revive his late master with their blood, so, “running” would have been a good answer to that one, I believe. As it goes, only half of our protagonists will survive the night to flee to Father Sandor’s abbey, only to learn that the revived Dracula is not the kind of guy who keeps away from holy places once he’s set his fangs on a female neck.

The things I find most impressive about Hammer’s third Dracula film in ten years (marking the beginning of the films as a regular series, for better or worse, and given the quality of the films up to Scars, really for better), and only the second one to feature Christopher Lee’s count is how little happens in the first half of the movie, and how small the scale of its plot actually is. Or rather, how much trust Jimmy Sangster’s script has in director Terence Fisher’s ability to get by on sheer atmosphere alone, and how good the script itself is at making the small scale feel huge and eventful.

Both men are on top of their respective game here. Sangster manages to use strong brush strokes to create surprisingly multi-dimensional characters whose fates feel actually horrifying because they are so undeserved, fates they could have done little to avoid. For these characters act plausible enough to a weird situation. Even the romantic couple of the film doesn’t so much feel bland and a bit stupid but like people confronted with a situation they couldn’t have been prepared for without the knowledge they are in a horror movie; and that kind of meta lies far in the future. The script escalates wonderfully too, the slow first half making room for a second one that’s basically a thrill a minute, Lee’s this time around wildly animalistic Dracula (whose lack of dialogue may or may not have been caused by Lee hating Sangster’s dialogue, or by Sangster not writing any dialogue for Lee because he was sick of Lee’s complaining about is writing, or just by Sangster knowing his job quite well, depending on which story you prefer to believe) staying a believably horrific threat throughout.

Fisher for his part indeed does get by on an ability to build an atmosphere of fine, gothically inclined dread for the first half of the movie, turning out many a moment that still has a certain nightmarish quality all these decades later. I’m particularly fond of Dracula’s resurrection scene, a scene I couldn’t imagine being done any better by anyone, my beloved Italians included. And once it’s time for the more outwardly exciting second half of the film, the director rises to that occasion too. Judged by the number of memorable scenes alone, it’s difficult to call Prince of Darkness anything other than one of Hammer’s masterpieces.

Add to that Sangster’s script, a generally good cast (with Shelley and Keir the not surprising stand-outs to me), Christopher Lee doing his snarling best where he too often seemed to phone his performances in once he decided a film was under his dignity (but not enough under his dignity to not take the money), a Van Helsing replacement in Sandor who works particularly well because he isn’t like Van Helsing at all, and the film’s certainly not becoming worse.