Hammer Time: Count Dracula Edition, Pt. 2—Dracula Has Risen from the Grave

Drac is back, and he’s pissed! My retro viewing of the Hammer Films Dracula movies continues with 1968’s Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (originally posted August 14, 2010).

At the end of Dracula: Prince of Darkness, we saw Dracula sinking beneath the icy waters surrounding his castle. After a brief prologue, Dracula Has Risen From the Grave jumps forward to a year after Dracula’s watery “death.” The people of Kleinberg, a nearby village, still cower in fear of the count’s evil, so the monsignor compels the ineffectual village priest to accompany him to exorcise the castle. Oddly, everyone is always wondering how to get to the castle and scaling cliffs to do so—instead of simply taking the road to the castle from the village of Karlsbad, as featured in the previous film. Karlsbad must be on the opposite side of the mountain from Kleinberg, and no one had Google Maps back then.

The monsignor performs his ritual, and wedges a large metal cross in the front door of the castle, but the priest ends up taking a fall, receiving a head wound and breaking the ice covering Dracula’s face. Soon the blood dribbles onto the count’s lips, and he is revived, taking the priest under his power. Strangely, the body of Dracula is in a mountainous landscape instead of in the moat surrounding his castle in Prince of Darkness. My retcon imagines that the moat was fed by a stream, and his body has drifted down the stream to its current location.

When Dracula learns what the monsignor has done, he decides to wreak his vengeance by turning the monsignor’s niece. This puts him in conflict with the niece’s boyfriend, an avowed atheist. Obviously standard vampire lore has Christian elements in its use of crosses and holy water as weapons, so as soon as the atheist turned up, I was concerned how this plot element would be used. When, eventually, the atheist stakes Dracula, the repenting priest tells him he has to say a prayer as well, even though the unorthodox scientist Van Helsing never needed anything but a nice stake and mallet to destroy a vampire. Here, however, Dracula is able to pull the stake out himself since the prayer didn’t seal the deal; the atheist and a fallen priest weren’t able to give it the necessary level of spiritual oomph.

Dracula takes the niece with him back to his castle, where she removes the cross and tosses it over an escarpment. The boyfriend and priest have pursued, and the atheist scraps with Dracula, pushing him over the cliff edge, where Dracula is impaled upon the metal cross. This would seem to be a definitive death for the vampire by the usual rules, but again he survives, struggling to get himself off the cross. The priest redeems himself by reciting a prayer, and then, and only then, does Dracula again meet his end. Just his blood, ring, and cape remain. The atheist, looking down on the scene, crosses himself.

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave is a likable entry in the series. As most of the films of the time period, it moves more leisurely than contemporary audiences are used to. A lot of time is devoted to developing the troubled romance of the atheist and the monsignor’s niece, leaving Dracula less to do than I would have liked. But it sure is nice to have Dracula speaking again after his mute performance in Prince of Darkness. The death on the cross is a nice bit of business, although the addition of a necessary prayer flies in the face of previously established continuity. It does give a nice redemptive arc for the fallen priest, though.

The atheist, predictably, sees the light by the end, but it is a subtle arc, and doesn’t come across in the “see, stupid atheist, how wrong you are” kind of way that unbelievers in the audience might expect. After all, he does witness some serious supernatural evil that would shake the worldview of any skeptic. And he has a great line during an argument with the monsignor early in the film. When the monsignor asks him, “You deny the existence of god?” he replies, “I don’t deny it, I just don’t believe it. It’s my own opinion, sir.”

Of course, the sexual component of the film has increased a bit; with each film, and the advancing years, Hammer upped the ante. A pub waitress is quite the active young woman and the atheist, frustrated by his upright girlfriend and the monsignor, nearly falls to her ways. Soon she is hot for Dracula, however, which—as you might likely surmise—didn’t end well for her.

Next up, Dracula will return yet again in Taste the Blood of Dracula. Stay tuned.