PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological, psychological
Following 1958’s HORROR OF DRACULA,
Hammer’s next exploitation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula mythos appeared in a film
with no Dracula, or rather with a Dracula manqué named Baron Meinster, against
whom Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing contends.
Scuttlebutt has it that Christopher Lee would not reprise the master
bloodsucker for what Hammer was willing to pay.
Thus BRIDES starts off by informing the audience that, contrary to the
film’s title, Dracula remains dead but that the vampire cult that spawned him
and others remains an ever-present menace.
Possibly CULT OF DRACULA might have been a more appropriate title for this
film. The men behind this opus— among whom were two of the key creators of
HORROR OF DRACULA, director Terence Fisher and scripter Jimmy Sangster— could
not have known whether or not there would be further appearances of the master
vampire. It’s possible they
envisioned more encounters between Van Helsing and the far-flung vampiric
cult. Whereas Stoker’s book dimly
alludes to a Satanic school, the Scholomance, which may have schooled the Count
in his evil, Sangster’s script emphasizes that the vampire cult is a last
survival of pagan religion, striking back against the dominant forces of
Christianity through the revival of the undead.
The script for HORROR eschewed the
novel’s slow build toward Jonathan Harker’s horrified realization of his host’s
monstrous nature; instead, the Harker of HORROR is Van Helsing’s “secret
agent,” out to destroy the Count before his evil can spread. As I noted in my review of that film,
Harker’s visit to Dracula’s castle duplicates the novel’s Oedipal fascination
with Dracula’s wives, albeit cutting it down to just one wife in the film. Before the audience knows that Harker has
come to the castle on a search-and-destroy mission, he seems to be an innocent
coming to the rescue of the Count’s maltreated paramour.
What was a deception in HORROR is
the simple truth in BRIDES. Marianne, an
innocent young French schoolteacher, passes through a small town in Transylvania on
her way to her next employment.
Circumstances come about (possibly through manipulation) in which her
stage stops in that town, but Marianne can find no good lodgings until she’s
invited to stay at the castle of the aged Baroness Meinster. At first it appears that the Baroness and her
aged female servant Greta are the castle’s sole occupants, but soon Marianne
discovers the presence of a young man as well.
The Baroness spins a story to the effect that she confines her son to
the castle because he’s mad. Marianne
nevertheless seeks out the imprisoned youth.
Meinster’s soft-spoken demeanor and good looks convince the
schoolteacher that he’s unjustly imprisoned, so the young woman comes to his
rescue, stealing the key to Meinster’s chains.
Shortly afterward, Marianne learns the truth from the Baroness: that
because she was indulgent and allowed Meinster to fall in with an exceptionally
bad crowd, Meinster became infected with the disease of vampirism.
While Meinster avenges himself upon
his mother for his years of imprisonment by converting her to the ranks of the
undead, Marianne (rather improbably) gets away. She's so traumatized by the events that she selectively forgets what has happened to her. Thus, when she falls into the company of
Van Helsing, who’s been summoned to the area to seek out the solution of a new
vampire outbreak, she has nothing to tell him.
The script’s vague on the matter of Van Helsing's advent. Logically, the vampire hunter had to be in progress some time before
Meinster obtained his freedom.
The script does allow one “out” in that prior to being vampirized, the
Baroness admits that she satiated her son’s unholy bloodthirst by securing
young women for him to consume. By this
method the Baroness could keep her son with her in a semblance of life rather
than destroying him as she should have.
However, when Van Helsing arrives at his destination, he only
investigates one case of a woman rising from her grave. What happened to the others to whom the
Baroness alludes? Did she and her only
servant manage to put them down before they could become vampires? For that matter, did the Baroness intend
Marianne to become food for Meinster? If so, the Baroness and Greta do a
particularly poor job of keeping watch over the schoolteacher, and apparently
miss an easy opportunity to drug Marianne during their first and only dinner
together.
While Van Helsing investigates,
Marianne proceeds to her place of employment, but Meinster follows her to her new ladies’
school. Soon he’s enthralled Marianne
and several other females—the “brides” of the title. Van Helsing contends with the new
vampire-lord and almost gets vampirized himself, but by film’s end the crusader
vanquishes the corruption, climaxing with Hammer’s most spectacular
vampire-execution.
In DREADFUL PLEASURES James
Twitchell takes the hyper-Freudian position that Dracula and all his kindred
represent the tyrannical father, always oriented on keeping all the community’s
young women for himself. This might
apply moderately well to HORROR OF DRACULA, but BRIDES breaks with the pattern
by emphasizing a tyrannical son-figure. Meinster’s youth isn’t even an illusion
created by vampiric powers: he really is just a nasty young man who happens to
be undead. The script doesn’t work very
hard to portray Meinster as a formidable new villain, and in some ways the
psychology of the Baroness is more interesting.
After her husband perishes, does she compensate for the husband’s loss
by allowing her son every indulgence?
After he’s become a vampire, the Baroness supplies him with young
women. Are these surrogates for her own
incestuous desires? That might explain
her laxity with Marianne, which ends up with the release of her son, who immediately
vampirizes the Baroness rather than Marianne. In
her final scenes as a vampire before Van Helsing executes her, she seems rather
less than tormented by her fate.
Meinster’s battle with Van Helsing is physically impressive, but he’s
such a bland villain that it’s not surprising that Hammer didn’t continue to
spawn more “sons of Dracula.” Within a
few years, Dracula himself returned with a vengeance, and any vestiges of a
far-flung vampire cult would remain subordinate to his mythic authority.
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