Unlocking DRACULA AD 1972
A Classic Horror Film in Context
David Huckvale
203 pp., $39.95
McFarland and Company, Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640
Www.mcfarlandpub.com
Also available at Amazon.
Regardless of your own feelings about Hammer’s rebooting of their Dracula franchise in modern day, this relentlessly thorough (and admirably cultured) investigation of the many different departments and layers of Alan Gibson’s 1971 film is bound to rewire your feelings about it.
Huckvale brings all of his authority as a cinephile, an historian and musicologist, and as a dedicated reader of multi-centuried fiction, poetry and philosophy to make a case that DRACULA A.D. 1972 and its sequel [THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA, 1973]—often dismissed as camp, anachronistic, backward, or as a middle-aged men’s look at a world they no longer understand—“are Hammer’s most interesting Dracula films, and the ones that in fact most successfully adopt the approach of Bram Stoker’s novel.”
This is quite a goal, considering that Hammer's opening salvo in this series—Terence Fisher's DRACULA (US: HORROR OF DRACULA, 1958)—is generally considered to be the finest of all Dracula films and one of a handful of genuinely seismic releases in horror film history. As faithful to the Bram Stoker novel as it could be within its economy, Fisher's film also "rewrote the book" in any number of other ways.
Of course, the degree of Huckvale's success will differ from reader to reader, but I can’t imagine that anyone attentive to his arguments won’t have their minds nudged more in the film’s favor by his passion. His case is admirably sustained not just by personal feelings but by a remarkably well-read accumulation of pertinent literary quotations, a microscopic monitoring of the film’s seemingly quirky rendering of its time period, and his own neighborly access (via writings and 21st century locations photography) to the principal setting of Chelsea itself, whose residents circa 1972 included the likes of Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff.
The book begins with a section of preparatory chapters which address matters of contemporaneity, the establishment of firm definitions of camp and kitsch, and more to help calibrate the reader’s sense of context. This is then followed by more particular discussions of the occult and its currency in the designated period (a strong case is made for ROSEMARY’S BABY and other occult films preceding it causing Dracula to be identified here less as a common vampire than an occult figure on par with the Devil Himself), along with admirably detailed and loving essays on the dynamics and techniques brought to the film and series by Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing; appreciations of the input of the other cast and outstanding crew (cameraman Dick Bush, art director Don Mingaye, and composer Michael Vickers); and even an almost forensic overview of the specific cars used in the films and what they say about the characters assigned to them. Huckvale is a popular Blu-ray commentator on film music, known for transcribing scores and performing them on piano, and his deconstruction of the Vickers score is on a far more scholarly and descriptive plane than most accounts of Hammer music, pointing out its debt to jazz player Stan Kenton, its use of “spy chords” and tritones, and other particulars to such a shot-by-shot degree that the reader is advised to audit the film’s soundtrack while reading to derive the full effect. He even notes when the soundtrack and soundtrack CD (as re-recorded by Philip Martell) are in disagreement and where non-Vickers material imported as musical bonding agents point to unidentified library tracks.
The final chapter of the book is in some ways the most disarming in that it brings in a surprising discussion of the durability of the horror genre, which Huckvale credits to the “conservative” and “reactionary” tendencies of such entertainment, especially Hammer product, which indulges the audience’s desire for unholy allure before snatching it away, thus adhering to a simple us Good vs Evil polarity. Once this is established, Huckvale introduces a surprising comparison of DRACULA A.D. 1972 with Jean Rollin’s somewhat contemporaneous film LES FRISSONS DU VAMPIRE/THE SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRE (1971), whose similarly modern, colorful and psychedelicized imagery tells a similar story with an ethic more in line with irony, anarchy and chaos - to such a degree that many horror fans, lacking a grounding in writers like Nietsche, Sartre and Beckett, often aren’t equipped to know what to make of it. In this way, Huckvale ties a bow on his book on the very moment when he raises the subject to what promises to be an even more invigorating level of discussion.
The book concludes with a short but immensely instructive set of notes on directing by the film’s often unfairly dismissed director Alan Gibson, which prove him a far more conscientious and premeditative creator (I won’t say “artist”) than has been recognized till now. Though written from a stance of kindliness and authority, this book embodies something very on point in relation to its time: a revolution. It's an upraised sword against lazy thinking, knee-jerk biases, and unvalidated preferences. As such, Huckvale proves himself a Van Helsing - a soldier not of Christ but of insistently tested theories and evaluations - whose valor and rigor can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the best of them.
Don’t be misled by the page count; there’s a lot of book here.
(C) 2026 Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
