“Based on a true story.” This phrase has become laughable due to its very ubiquitousness. Making matters worse, it’s generally true that “Based on a true story” is rarely true - it’s usually one big lie created to draw the suckers in. In the case of “Dracula A.D. 1972,” the horror behind it all has some bearing in weird history, and even though “Dracula A.D. 1972” didn’t sell itself as being “Based on a true story,” this Hammer romp has its origins in a spooky London graveyard.
Beginning in the late 1960s, a group of “Swinging London” youth began roaming the Highgate Cemetery in North London in search of occult activity. By 1969, New Age fads, mysticism, tarot readings, drugs, and rock and roll were all the rage among the fast-living counterculture crowd. As a result, people like David Farrant and Sean Manchester became cult leaders in their own right, with small armies of loyal followers ready and willing to turn on, tune in, and drop out. These two men, who were part of what Farrant called the British Occult Society, claimed in 1970 that a large grey figure was roaming around Highgate at night. Farrant and Manchester soon found their claims being repeated in such fine publications as the Daily Mail and the London Evening News (one such article, entitled “Mr. Blood in Cemetery Hunt for Vampire,” appeared on Saturday, March 14, 1970). This touched off a media frenzy, and soon hundreds of people, including the Essex schoolteacher Mr. Alan Blood, were spending their nights in Highgate in the hopes of finding a real vampire.
For the remainder of 1970, Blood, Manchester, and Farrant continued to hold speeches and ghost hunts in and around Highgate and journalists continued to document their doings. On Wednesday, September 30, Farrant told the Daily Mail that, even though he had been charged with entering enclosed premises for an unlawful purpose, he was not going to rest until the vampire of the cemetery had been caught. The former occult scientist Farrant had by then recast himself in the mold of Abraham Van Helsing - Count Dracula’s nemesis in both Bram Stoker’s original novel and in the many Hammer films starring Christopher Lee as the Count and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing.
This of course never happened. No vampire was ever caught, and by the mid ‘70s, the Highgate case ceased to be news. The Satanic panic of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was starting to taper off by 1972, but plenty of film producers and directors were still ready and willing to cash in on tabloid tales about young hippies cavorting around with the undead. “Dracula A.D. 1972” is one such movie, and reading its synopsis is like reliving the days when the British Occult Society were leading camera crews on fruitless chases through the very same cemetery that houses the final resting place of Karl Marx - a wholly different kind of vampire.
Like many Hammer films, “Dracula A.D. 1972” opens with a prologue. This one takes place in the Victorian year of 1872. Dracula and Van Helsing are once again battling, and this time the scene of their confrontation is London’s Hyde Park. According to the voice-over narration, this is the final confrontation between the two enemies, which means that things don’t look so good for old Dracula. In fact, in keeping with the Hammer tradition of offing the Count with inventive and ingenious methods, the opening scene of “Dracula A.D. 1972” has Van Helsing (once again played by Cushing) using a broken carriage wheel as a heart-piercing stake against Lee’s blood-eyed vampire. In a blatant bit of foreshadowing, after Dracula has been rendered to dust, a stranger wearing muttonchops and a black top hat is seen collecting up the Count’s ashes and placing them into a thin vial, which is then tucked neatly inside of his coat.
It is at this point that “Dracula A.D. 1972” makes a radical departure from its ancestors. Previously, Hammer’s Dracula films had been set exclusively in the Victorian age and had typically Central European backdrops. In “Dracula A.D. 1972,” not only is the backdrop London, but it is modern London, and the opening montage’s use of jets, highways, and storefront windows makes this abundantly clear. In several interviews, director Tim Burton, who often lists “Dracula A.D. 1972” as one of his favorite films, has stated that the appeal of “Dracula A.D. 1972” is its combination of Hammer’s trademark brand of horror with the highly stylized trappings of “Swinging London.” Any viewer with a decent set of eyes can understand the attraction that Burton sees, and in truth “Dracula A.D. 1972” is one of the very best time capsules that Hammer ever released
While “Dracula A.D. 1972” may be one of the studio’s most visually appealing films, it is certainly not one of its most clever. Borrowing liberally both from the Highgate case and a previous Hammer film called “Taste the Blood of Dracula” (1970), “Dracula A.D. 1972” revolves around Cushing’s Lorrimer Van Helsing (a direct descendent of Lawrence and yet another one of Hammer’s benevolent occult scholars), his granddaughter Jessica Van Helsing (played by the beautiful and buxom Stephanie Beacham), and a group of young decadents who are lead by Johnny Alucard (played by Christopher Neame). Alucard, who looks like the descendant of the mysterious man with muttonchops, is hip on the idea of performing a black mass, and before long he convinces the others in the group to go along with him. Of course “Alucard” is just “Dracula” spelled backwards, and Neame plays his character like a little dictator - a mini Mussolini waiting for final approval from Lee’s Hitlerian Dracula.
Alucard doesn’t have to wait long, for his planned resurrection of Dracula in the abandoned churchyard of St. Bartolph’s goes according to plan. The ceremony is a bloody one, and the most willing participant of the group - Laura Bellows (played by the ridiculously sexy Caroline Munro) - winds up dying because of her enthusiasm. Even though the newly reborn Dracula feasts upon Bellows, he makes it clear that Jessica Van Helsing is the woman he really wants.
From here, “Dracula A.D. 1972” becomes the usual, albeit a slightly more groovy 1970s horror film. There are the requisite bumbling cops (played by Michael Coles and David Andrews), a few vampiric transformations (Alucard himself and Bob Tepper, Jessica’s boyfriend, who is played by Philip Miller), and of course the seduction of Jessica by Dracula. In the end, Dracula and Van Helsing once again fight it out to the death, and as always Dracula gets the sharp end of the stake. This time around he falls into a stake pit prepared in advance by Van Helsing, and as his body turns to dust, the screen reads: “Rest In Final Peace.”
While not one of the more critically acclaimed Hammer films, “Dracula A.D. 1972” has had a surprising influence on popular culture. From Tim Burton to the British heavy metal band Warfare (who released an entire album dedicated to the horror films of Hammer Studios in 1990), “Dracula A.D. 1972” holds some pop culture weight and this is mostly due to its place as the hippest of the Hammer films. With a rock and roll soundtrack and a script that relies on snappy, psuedo-cool dialogue, “Dracula A.D. 1972” presents the early 1970s at their most alluring. And even though it was made by somewhat conservative men well over thirty (director Alan Gibson and screenwriter Don Houghton among them), “Dracula A.D. 1972” feels like one of the first horror films to be created by and for the hard rock and heavy metal generation. This alone ensures its popularity with the doom metal crowd, plus, as Andrew Roberts says: “you just can’t beat a really bad British film.”
Words: Benjamin Welton