Hammer horror gets eroticized in this surprisingly effective lesbian vampire odyssey.
is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previousa 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?
In few genres will you ever have a chance to observe social mores evolve in a more dramatic way than in the Hammer Film Productions vampire films of the 1950s-1970s. Beginning with the very successfulin 1958, Hammer managed to reinvent the old Universal Monsters for a new era, chiefly through bringing old tropes to a new, EastmanColor light.
They weren’t wrong—not in the late 1950s, anyway. But as entertainment and pop culture barreled headlong through the turbulence and pronounced societal shifts of the 1960s, it didn’t take long before even Hammer’s “new” way of doing things seemed a bit staid in comparison. The New Wave was arriving in Hollywood, and auteurs such as Herschel Gordon Lewis or George Romero were redefining shock value in films like.
The film is a veritable who’s who of female Hammer stars of its day, including Ingrid Pitt, Madeline Smith and a blonde Pippa Steel, who even regular Hammer viewers might mistake as fellow Hammer beauty Veronica Carlson, who looks quite similar. The film belongs to Pitt, however, playing the sultry Carmilla as an undead fiend who seems pathologically driven to seduce literally everyone around her, be they man or woman.
The script, meanwhile, can be rather unwieldy, introducing elements it never pays off like a mysterious vampire on horseback who is always observing from a distance, seeming to will Carmilla on to commit terrible acts. His presence is never explained, or even directly addressed.
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