After the great success of. Horror of Dracula, Hammer studios wanted badly to make a sequel.
However, Christopher Lee, so effective as the count in Horror, refused to star. Lee was afraid of being typecast forever as Dracula.
Hammer’s answer was to use a misleading title and then state in a prologue that Dracula is dead, but his many disciples live on. Brides of Dracula is the story of one disciple, Baron Meinster. You get a sense throughout this movie that Hammer did not want to change a successful formula. They used the same director,
Terence Fisher, writer Jimmy Sangster (along with two other
screenwriters) and the other star of Horror, Peter Cushing, again playing Dr. Van Helsing.
What they got was the same intensity, possibly more. The music tended to be melodramatic, over-the-top at times. But it adds to the atmosphere. And you feel a sizzling tension between the vampire, Baron Meinster, and his mother, who has kept him prisoner for years.
In Brides, you feel right away that the countryside is a dangerous place, especially after sunset. Everywhere is mist, but it has a foul appearance to it, especially where it hangs over ponds and swamps. (In Horror of Dracula, Jonathan Harker notices the silence surrounding Dracula’s castle: No birds sang.)
Even at the inn, the atmosphere is tense. The student-teacher, Marianne feels like an outsider the minute she enters.
As thunder crashes, the tension increases with the
arrival of a strange, severe-looking, aristocratic old woman
dressed all in red and black. She speaks one word to the old
couple, “Wine.” She is the Baroness Meinster, and immediately invites Marianne to share a drink, then to spend the night in her castle. The landlord and his wife are clearly shaken and abruptly offer Marianne the chance to stay at the inn. But Marianne has already accepted the baroness’ hospitality.
You first see the castle in a low-angle shot, showing
it perched on a mountainside. Inside, it is exquisitely decorated, suggesting a great family. fortune. Yet somehow Marianne still appears to be in danger. Greta, the baroness’ one servant, gives off suspicious, controlling vibes; you get the impression that
she will bully anyone who lets her. For a moment, Marianne
steps onto her balcony. From there she can see a man standing outside in another wing of the castle.
Instead of denying what Marianne saw, or trying to avoid it, the baroness speaks freely about the man, her son. “My son is ill,” she says. When Mariann asks if he is ill in his mind, the baroness does not deny it. She says that he has caused her endless pain. Once the castle was a place of grand parties and gatherings, but those days are long-gone, because of her son. You canl hear a mix of great sadness, regret, and bitterness in her words. She has not seen him or spoken to him in years, she says; he is fully in Greta’s care.
Marianne goes to sleep then wakes suddenly, her mind on the man she glimpsed before. She finds her way to his room. For a long time he does not step out of the shadows. He asks Marianne to come closer, explaining that he cannot come to her. It is then that Marianne sees he is held prisoner by a long silver chain.
The baron says that his mother has kept him chained
and told people that he is dead; that she is motivated to
keep the fortune, land, and castle that would be his inheritance. As Marianne does, you wonder now if the baroness is the insane one, the monster. Marianne agrees to find the key to the chain. As Marianne walks from the baroness’ room back to the baron, his mother seems to stalk Marianne, the lighting on the baroness’ face making her look truly evil. But Marianne is able to throw the baron the key.
As Marianne finds the baron, his mother condemns her, “You little fool, you don’t know what you’ve done.”
The baron speaks with quiet assurance, “She can’t harm you
now.” Then,” Mother, come here. Now mother, come along with me.”
Like Marianne, you can only guess what happens next. But you get a clear enough idea when Marianne speaks to Greta, now hysterical. Greta tells her that the countess is dead. “He’s free, the cunning devil… She’s dead and he’s free.”
Baron Meinster (David Peel)
Marianne leaves. Greta, still hysterical, speaks a long while to
the dead baroness. She is able to sum up her twenty years with the family into a few minutes of monologue.
Keep in mind this movie was made in 1960, with many limitations in effect on what movies could not show, not mention, only hint at. I think any aspiring screenwriter could do a lot worse than to listen to Greta’s words, for the way they hint at family dysfunction, with so many suggestions, implications, so much between the
lines. “Twenty years…You encouraged him. You drank with him and his friends, laughed at their wicked games…brought women to him…”
Critics have read many suggestions in these words: Bisexuality, procuring victims after the baron became a vampire, just for starters. But the more subtle suggestion: an incestuous relationship between mother and son (in all senses of the word). Whatever the relationship was like once, it degenerated into hatred and a vicious struggle for power, stalemated for years until Marianne’s arrival. The contempt the Baron feels for his mother is
obvious in his voice. Their years of separation have only made the situation uglier.
Next morning, Marianne is found unconscious on the road by Dr. Van Helsing. The story now takes a new turn: Van Helsing matching wits with Baron Meinster. As in Horror of Dracula, Van Helsing is a man of great courage, knowledge, and dedication. In absolute contrast, Baron Meinster is ruled by his passions.
But you soon learn that he has an ally; Greta’s devotion to the Meinster’s is unchanged, even after the baron has turned his own mother into a vampire.
After the baron kills a woman from the village, she is buried in the churchyard. In a truly chilling scene, the undead woman struggles to get out of her coffin and through the soil above it. Greta stands above her, and like a sinister midwife, urges her to push herself free. Even Van Helsing’s eyes open wide.
As in Horror, Van Helsing is dedicated (some would say, fanatically) to wiping out the plague of vampirism. Though not a particularly pious man, he sees this struggle as one between absolute good and absolute evil. He calls staking the dead village woman, “an act of healing.” When he meets the baroness, now a vampire herself, she asks Van Helsing if he knows who she is. “I know who you were,” he tells her calmly.
Van Helsing–again, the only one to offer protection from
the Undead
She has become a tragic figure, telling Van Helsing she now must
do all the wicked things her son tells her to do; there is no
salvation for her. Again, Van Helsing tells her salvation is still possible.
Marianne sees Meinster’s powers–former friend, now a
vampire
In the end, Van Helsing must face the baron, along with Greta and
two other vampires: the woman from the village, and Gina, another student-teacher at Marianne’s school. Van Helsing
shows true courage after Baron Meinster bites his neck, cauterizing the wound with a red-hot iron, then cooling it
with Holy Water.
At least one critic has called Brides of Dracula the best movie Hammer ever produced. I wouldn’t quite go that far, but the
direction, acting, and especially the screenwriting are all excellent. As big a Hammer fan as I am, I seldom remember much of their dialogue.
Here, there are some memorable lines. Marianne says good night to the baroness, adding, “God bless you.”
“If only He could,” the Baroness replies.
David Peel, better known on-stage than in movies, is excellent in a demanding role, requiring (among other things): charm, vengefulness, pleading, gloating, bloodlust, pain, viciousness, even vulnerability. Terence Fisher’s direction underlines Marianne’s struggle to find the truth behind the family’s masks. Marianne is trusting, probably too much so, and her ability to judge from intuition is limited. Fisher shows you the anguish in her confused search to find the truth.
It’s hard to believe now, but at the time, the director Fisher, and Hammer films were widely attacked forthe violence they showed onscreen, the sexual innuendo they hinted at. Years later, Fisher, and screenwriter Jimmy Sangster’s work was put into clearer perspective, and many critics began to praise them.
Both Sangster and Fisher wanted to show just how corrupt and foul vampirism was. Here, the evils of vampirism are often overshadowed by the festering illness of the the Meinster family. In Brides, you get the feeling this illness must be disinfected, or cut out like a cancer.
. 
Baron Meinster’s disciples
Fisher made a point of showing what that surgery was like, without much subtlety. He believed that suggestion cannot show this visceral ripping, this tearing out. Long before TV had er, Fisher and Sangster showed you the operating room, up close and personal. Ultimately this is what Van Helsing meant when he tells the dead girl’s ( bitten by the Baron) father that unearthing her body and staking her will be “an act of healing.”