Every chapter I stole from somewhere else

In Chapter 18 of Dracula, Bram Stoker offers a brief summary of the villain's identity: 'He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land. If it be so, then was he no common man, for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the "land beyond the forest".'

The vagueness allows Stoker to gloss over a detail: Vlad III was the Voivode of Wallachia, a mostly lowland principality to the north of the Danube in present-day southern Romania. Transylvania, where Stoker's count has his home, is an entirely different (albeit neighbouring) region, a part of medieval Hungary. Stoker rightly thought the legend of Vlad the Impaler was too good to pass up, so he fudged his history a bit. And we don't mind because he did it in the service of a novel that presents, despite awkward, overheated prose and reactionary politics, a good story.

You know what's pretty much the opposite of a good story, though? Dracula Untold. Seriously.

In the fifteenth century, Vlad Dracula (Luke Evans) rules the principality of Transylvania [sic] as a vassal of the Turkish Empire. When the Turkish envoy Hamza Bey (Ferdinand Kingsley) demands that 1,000 Transylvanian boys - including Vlad's own son (Art Parkinson) - be turned over to the Turks for training as Janissary soldiers, as Vlad himself was, the Prince is distraught. After his attempt to plead personally with Sultan Mehmed II (Dominic Cooper) fails, Vlad refuses to budge, killing the Ottoman party tasked with bringing back the hostages and plunging Transylvania into war.

Realising he lacks the strength to fight off the Turkish army, Vlad visits the monstrous denizen of a mountain cave (Charles Dance), who lends him his vampiric powers. If Vlad manages to resist the craving for human blood for three days, he will return to his normal human self. If he gives in, however, he will become an immortal bloodsucking fiend forever. Realising he has little choice if he is to save his people, Vlad accepts the wager and turns into a superpowered, if increasingly sinister version of himself.

It would be difficult to argue that Dracula was exactly crying out for an origin story. (Not impossible: I for one would love to see a historical fantasy series set in the fifteenth-century Balkans on TV.) But dredging up the making of a hero has been the fashionable way to rekindle audience interest in washed-up properties since Batman Begins in 2005 (Sam Raimi's 2002 Spider-Man was an origin story too, but saw no need to go on about it). Christopher Nolan's Batman films also gifted us the flawed, introspective hero that's spread like measles throughout corporate filmmaking. It's an approach that works fantastically for Batman, but for other characters - like, it turns out, Dracula - it's potentially lethal.

Combine a cookie-cutter origin story, a dark and brooding protagonist and the burden that Dracula Untold is the first film in the Marvel-aping rebooted Universal Monsters cinematic universe, and you have a recipe for disaster. The franchise angle forces the film to end on a bizarre and awful modern-day scene, while its slavish paint-by-numbers approach causes Dracula Untold to run into a serious problem: namely, that Dracula's appeal isn't as a hero, glum or otherwise. What people pay for when going to see a Dracula film is a charismatic immortal villain. Attempting to tell the story of how a virtuous aristocrat became an undead monster isn't impossible. But it would at the very least require the courage to make your protagonist, you know, evil by the end of the film. Instead Evans's Dracula stubbornly remains the same reasonably decent concerned dad, whether he's celebrating Easter with his adoring subjects or slaking his thirst on the blood of thousands of mooks. Worrying about audience sympathies causes writers Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless to simply give up on character development entirely.

But then, Dracula Untold isn't trying to tell the story of how a monster came to be because, apart from the most cursory of nods, it isn't a horror film. It's a superhero picture, if the shameless and uninspired cribbing from the conventions of the DC and Marvel films of the last decade didn't give that away, and a particularly asinine example of the form: cardboard villains, tedious powers and an adherence to formula so rigid that it chokes whatever life should be there right out of the film. There's even a scene in which silver fills in for kryptonite. In the face of so much formula, who could blame first-time director Gary Shore for falling asleep at the helm?

The film borrows extensively from what has come before. The opening scene, for example - in which voiceover narration explains to us scenes of boys being put through gruelling military training that includes a lot of whipping - is a bafflingly close retelling of the start of 300. Frank Miller's anti-Persian tirade provides the backbone for much of what follows, although Dracula Untold lacks the earlier film's full-throated fascist propagandising. Its Turks are mostly uninspired generic baddies, although the ominous crescents on their tents and repeated references to their menace to the capitals of Christian Europe are quite enough, in the age of Anders Behring Breivik, to qualify as grossly irresponsible. The film is, not to put too fine a point on it, racist trash, its obvious brainlessness aggravating rather than lessening its offensive pandering to fashionable prejudice.

Then there's Vlad's leading of the Transylvanian people to the safety of a monastery in the mountains, borrowed among other antecedents from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. It's indicative of the film's gross lack of any sense of scale: the whole of Transylvania seems to consist of at most a couple of hundred people located in a single castle, and the entire war between Vlad and the Ottoman Empire is over in the required three days (in the real world, meanwhile, a medieval army would take well over a month to cover the distance between Istanbul and Vlad's historical capital of Târgoviște).

Nothing in Dracula Untold, in short, feels like it takes place in a plausible approximation of the real world. It looks fake, too: I left the film convinced its backgrounds were entirely computer-generated only to find out it was shot on location in Northern Ireland - a popular filming location in the age of Game of Thrones though not, alas, one famed for its scenic mountain ranges. The cold metallic colour palette chosen by cinematographer John Schwartzman seems an odd fit, too, for the backwoods medievalism the story would seem to require.

It's tired hackwork, is what it is, and the utterly uninspired performances reflect this. Evans tries, but he has literally nothing to work with; of all the people onscreen, only Charles Dance manages to have some fun with a scenery-chewing, genuinely effective performance. Say what you will about corporate filmmaking, but it guarantees at least a certain professionalism. Dracula Untold, alas, has literally nothing to offer beyond that base amount of competence. It's a product so soulless that it's difficult to be upset no-one involved in it managed to care.

The courtship of Mr Dracula

I don't know Francis Ford Coppola, obviously. But Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) suggests something about the director behind the project: namely that, stung by the middling reviews and accusations of cash-grab filmmaking that dogged him in the wake of The Godfather Part III, Coppola decided to make the most spectacular, overtly 'artistic' picture he could. And if the result was a film that would inspire devotion from some and bile from others, so much the better, for no-one could accuse him of playing it safe for guaranteed box-office returns.

Obviously, that may just be a fiction. But it would explain some of the eccentricities in Bram Stoker's Dracula, a film so chock-full of odd choices that it barely resembles a coherent narrative at all. An undead love story invented from scratch, perching precariously atop an almost slavishly orthodox retelling of Stoker's novel; milquetoast, bland performances right next to unfettered scenery-chewing; out-there visuals that never cohere as an aesthetic - Dracula has it all, and then some. It's a film of a thousand ideas, many of them clashing with each other in what could not possibly be classified as a success, but rather an endlessly watchable, legitimately fascinating failure.

The plot: in the fifteenth century, Prince Vlad of Wallachia (Gary Oldman) fights the invading Ottoman Empire. While he is gone, his wife Elisabeta (Winona Ryder) receives a false report of his death and kills herself in despair. Overcome with rage and grief upon his return, Vlad curses God, drives out his priests and becomes an immortal bloodsucking fiend.

In 1897, Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) travels to Transylvania to seal a real estate deal with Count Dracula (Oldman). Arriving at Castle Dracula after an unsettling journey, he soon finds the count a strange host: besides being the only person Harker ever sees, Dracula also appears oddly obsessed with blood and medieval history and nurses a worrying hatred of mirrors. Harker soon realises that he has become the count's prisoner. His purchase of Carfax Abbey in London completed, Dracula departs the castle for England...

... where the psychiatrist Dr Jack Seward (Richard E. Grant) is troubled by his patient Renfield (Tom Waits), who rambles about 'the master' and has taken to devouring spiders and small insects. Meanwhile, wealthy socialite Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost) has become engaged to Arthur Holmwood (Cary Elwes), despite also being courted by Seward and Holmwood's friend, Texan Quincey Morris (Billy Campbell). Lucy becomes ill after being found wandering outside at night by her friend, and fiancée to Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), who happens to look exactly like Elizabeta. Lucy's strange case leads Seward to consult his mentor Abraham van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins). Meanwhile Mina's seemingly chance acquaintance with a recently arrived Transylvanian prince turns into a mutual obsession...

There are too many Dracula adaptations out there to claim that Bram Stoker's Dracula is the most faithful of the lot, but it undoubtedly hews far, far closer to the text than other well-known film versions. The film does actually reproduce the whole of Stoker's novel from beginning to end, missing virtually none of its beats (and if this seems like nothing special for an adaptation, please consult the 1931 and 1958 films). In places this is faithfulness for faithfulness' sake: the character of Quincey Morris remains exactly as inessential as he is in the novel and could easily be merged with Arthur Holmwood, but Coppola chooses to keep him in there. The devotion to the source material extends to seemingly trivial details earlier versions saw fit to dispense with.

And yet! The narrative structure of the novel is presented pretty much unchanged, but the story is completely different. Where Stoker wrote a Gothic horror novel about a sworn group of men fighting the vampiric villain who targets 'their' virtuous women, Coppola's is a tale of irresistible love/lust between an immortal lover and the reincarnation of his true love. The novel is terrified of female sexuality (Lucy's attempts to attack Holmwood are one with her amorous advances, forcibly interrupted by Van Helsing in his dual role of vampire hunter and chaperone), but the film's Lucy acts downright shockingly liberated (to put it politely) to begin with. Meanwhile, the overtly physical love between Dracula and Mina does not bring the latter to perdition, but helps the former renounce evil.

Adopting the novel's structure but repudiating its reactionary ideas does not, to me, work particularly well: it  turns the film's heroes into fools for at least the film's third act, when they're supposedly racing against time to stop evil. It also forces Oldman to portray two totally different characters: a hammy centuries-old monster liberally quoting Bela Lugosi's performance in the role (literally: his line readings of "I am Dracula. Welcome to my home" and "... What music they make" blow Lugosi's right out of the water, besides being a lot of fun for the actor), and a sensitive romantic lead. Both are fairly compelling, but they're impossible to reconcile as a single figure.

That decision also amplifies the tendency of the other performances to feel like they're from totally different films: Keanu Reeves's bland presence is frequently criticised, but his is a thin straight man part in which he acquits himself reasonably, mind-bogglingly horrible 'English' accent aside; Grant's twitchy Seward, a theoretically rational scientist who runs a nightmarish Bedlam while addled on then-newfangled drugs; Hopkins's Van Helsing, insane on a level that's occasionally amusing but clashes so badly with the other performances that several scenes he's in just fall apart; Elwes, a little unsure if his performance is an homage to or a parody of Errol Flynn. Ryder is, I think, the standout: her accent, too, is weak, but she never ceases to be convincing as the story's heart.

The film's enormous problems with its tone extend to the visuals, which are proudly overblown and lush but incoherent, throwing around idea after idea just to see what sticks. Some are fantastic: Castle Dracula, looking like a sinister enthroned figure against the backdrop of the Carpathians; vampire Lucy in her gorgeous and terrible shroud; the count suddenly dissolving into a mass of rats. Others are much less successful (Dracula's costume and makeup in his initial appearance are strikingly different from the usual 'You'll know I'm a vampire because I wear a cape' interpretations, but they're somewhat awful on their own merits).

It all adds up to a film that has a thousand things on its mind: being an homage to earlier iterations of the material (Coppola quotes without restraint from the genre's classics); half-baked explorations of fin-de-siècle signifiers like the cinematograph and absinthe-fuelled decadence; a young-and-sexy updating of Dracula for the MTV generation; a visual playground for an undoubtedly creative team; occasional questionable forays into horror-comedy (there's a particularly tasteless cut - you'll know it when you see it) -

- and, somewhere in there, an honest-to-God vampire picture that disregards an ossified cinematic tradition around Dracula to arrive at a totally new look at the count. Coppola foregrounds the beastly, feral nature of Dracula, his menacing presence - tinged with temptation - outside civilisation's hall and its hearth-fire in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. It feels at times as if Coppola is adapting not Stoker, but a take Angela Carter might have devised on Dracula.The result is a film that's unlike any other bloodsucker film out there. Unfortunately, its extravagant ambition never coheres. It's not boring for a second but, alas, that doesn't mean it's any good.

My castle is in the hills above the village

After Dracula made boatloads of cash in 1958, a sequel was a foregone conclusion. Initially, it was to be strictly formula. Both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were approached to reprise their roles, but Lee declined, and the screenwriting team (Jimmy Sangster of Dracula, helped out by Peter Bryan, Edward Percy and producer Anthony Hinds) had to cobble together a new script. The result, released in 1960, is a thoroughly good Gothic horror film, but boy, do the seams ever show.

Some of that, of course, is just a marketing ploy: naming a film The Brides of Dracula (with the poster advertising 'the most evil, blood-lusting Dracula of all!', no less) when the prologue immediately explains that Dracula is (still) dead is at least a tiny bit cynical. Sexing up the property by using a premise designed to have lithe young women wander around in nightgowns is as shameless, but it's not like vampire fiction was ever particularly wholesome.

A young schoolteacher, Marianne Danielle (Yvonne Monlaur), is on her way to a new job at a girls' boarding school in Transylvania when, through shenanigans inexplicable and foreboding, her coach driver abandons her. She accepts the offer of a seemingly lonely aristocrat, Baroness Meinster (Martita Hunt), to spend the night at her château. (Note to self: refuse any invitation that begins with, "My castle is in the hills above the village...")

At Château Meinster, Marianne discovers that the baroness is not quite alone: she keeps her son (David Peel) chained up in one part of the castle, ostensibly because he is mad. During the night, though, Marianne frees the baron after he tells her his mother has locked him away to keep his land and titles for herself. To nobody's surprise, this is a terrible idea. Although Marianne does not understand it yet, the younger Meinster is in fact a vampire, kept confined for years and fed a steady diet of young women by his mother, who could bear neither to let him loose nor to dispatch him. Now that he is loose, he quickly takes off with the aid of his nanny, Greta (Freda Jackson).

The following day, Doctor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) finds a traumatised but otherwise unhurt Marianne in the woods. He asks her detailed questions about her experience, but fails to tell her what's going on. After dropping Marianne off at the girls' school, Van Helsing investigates the Château Meinster. There he encounters the baroness, who has been turned into a vampire by her son against her will. Van Helsing stakes her in her sleep, but finds the young baron's coffin missing. That the threat isn't over becomes obvious when a young girl in the village nearby dies from a neck bite. And soon, Marianne is engaged to be married...

The plot of The Brides of Dracula starts strong, but descends into a frustrating muddle by the second act before hurtling towards an outright nonsensical conclusion. If Van Helsing had told anybody except the village priest (Fred Johnson) about the vampiric goings-on lives might have been saved, but I'd forgive that contrivance if  The Brides of Dracula didn't also feel like two separate stories stitched together: one about a lonely mother who keeps her vampire son locked up, the second about a hypnotic vampire who draws young women into his coven. Most frustrating are the half-developed characters. Freda Jackson (from Nottingham! fist bump) turns in an outstanding performance as Greta, whose sour-faced demeanour hides a fanatical devotion to Baron Meinster. She's rewarded with a terrific soliloquy early on; thereafter, the script decides she'll be a cackling goon, and she is eventually killed off in a decidedly underwhelming fashion.

Jackson is splendid, but she's far from a lone standout. Hunt's Baroness Meinster is as impressive, all austere aristocratic dignity covering desperate love for and fear of her monstrous son. Cushing turns in another excellent performance, settling into the role and beginning to hone his characterisation of Abraham Van Helsing, battling the forces of evil with science! Yvonne Monlaur, drop-dead gorgeous in a very sixties way and working an adorable French accent, hits all the right notes; it may not be a performance for the ages, but it's enough to regret Monlaur retired from acting only a few years later. The problem, really, is the villain: Peel is good as a brash young baron but never develops a take on monstrous bloodsucking, and he absolutely lacks the astonishing physical presence of Christopher Lee. Where Dracula was a terrifying battle against evil, its sequel just has me rooting for Cushing to beat up a blue-blooded punk.

The lack of a compelling villain means The Brides of Dracula is ultimately a notch below its predecessor, but in other ways it surpasses that film. Take the production design. Where Bernard Robinson's work in Dracula was a little musty he goes gloriously over the top here, sticking dragons and gargoyles all over the already impressive Neo-Gothic architecture of Oakley Court; and since in Gothic horror 'crazier' almost always means 'better', this is a very good choice indeed. There's more action too, awkward in places though it is; and we get the most rocking Peter Cushing moment yet, in which he neutralises the effect of a vampire bite by cauterising his own neck wound.

Despite being a bigger, sexier and more action-packed sequel The Brides of Dracula also makes some significant adjustments to the series mythology: shapeshifting, explicitly ruled out in the 1958 film, enters the series here, with a not-terrible giant bat effect. Vampires now need human servants to watch over them during the day (they learnt from what befell Dracula's original bride, I presume). Elsewhere, what was hinted at in Dracula is more fully developed, first and foremost the notion of vampirism as 'the cult of the undead', 'a survival of one of the ancient pagan religions and their struggle against Christianity'.

Certainly, Baron Meinster's coven has the character of an extremely patriarchal religious community, and in portraying it as supernaturally wicked The Brides of Dracula inadvertently ends up critiquing patriarchy even while exploiting it to pander to the audience. It's a good film, is what I'm saying in a roundabout way: it doesn't blow the roof off the horror film, but it's a very fine example of the developing Hammer template.

Horror... from beyond the grave!

Faced with the mythic stature of Hammer Film Productions in British pop culture, it's amusing to consider how little the company's rise had to do with stodgy English reserve. Hammer's first real horror film, 1955's The Quatermass Xperiment, was so named to cash in on the X certificate, and that was a sign of things to come: for the next two decades Hammer churned out lurid low-budget films that aimed to titillate as well as terrify. The closest analogue is the Italian film industry of the same period, which has a similar track record of sleazy horror films made quickly using the same actors again and again, to tremendous profits.

But where the Italian horror industry - at least in retrospect - was centred on directors, Hammer Horror is most firmly associated with its stars: and no stars more famous than Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, first working together in 1957's The Curse of Frankenstein (as Victor Frankenstein and the creature, respectively) and teamed up again in the following year's Dracula, because that's how Hammer did things.

That intro may not sound like Dracula is a great work of art, but it is: as a B-movie and as a film qua films it runs laps around the tedious and overpraised Lugosi film, which it absolutely refuses to be shackled by. As such, Jimmy Sangster's screenplay adapts Bram Stoker even more freely than the reworked-for-the-stage approach behind the 1931 film, into something that shares some names with Stoker's novel but little in the way of locale or plot.

Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) arrives at the castle of Count Dracula (Christopher Lee) in Transylvania. Ostensibly tasked with reorganising the count's library, Harker is on a secret mission to destroy the vampires. He succeeds in staking Dracula's bride (Valerie Gaunt) but is overpowered and turned by the count. Anxious about the fate of his confederate, Abraham Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) just walks into Castle Dracula during the daytime (in this film, everybody hangs out at Castle Dracula like it's a popular stop for a picnic during a Sunday afternoon stroll) and dispatches the newly vampiric Harker, but finds Dracula himself gone.

Meanwhile in Germany (or, you know, somewhere: see below), Arthur Holmwood (Michael Gough) and his wife Mina (Melissa Stribling) worry about the worsening health of Arthur's sister Lucy (Carol Marsh). The well-meaning but inept Doctor Seward (Charles Lloyd Pack) is unable to determine the cause of her ailment. Van Helsing arrives to tell the family of the death of Lucy's fiancé Jonathan Harker, but stays to look after Lucy. When his cryptic instructions are ignored, Lucy dies and is buried, but it isn't long before the revenant begins preying on her niece Tania (Janina Faye).

Having been told what's going on, Arthur joins Van Helsing in hunting Lucy down, but rejects the professor's suggestion of using his sister to find Dracula. (Arthur's conflict - let his sister's wretched undeath go on and endanger others in the hope of catching Dracula, or put her to rest at once? - is played to the hilt; it's a terrific plot element invented wholecloth by Sangster.) Instead, Lucy is staked. But it isn't long before the count has selected his next victim - Mina - and Arthur and Van Helsing are engaged in a desperate race against time to track down the count and take him out once and for all.

That's quite a lot of changes: some characters disappear (poor Quincey Morris, forever cut out until Francis Ford Coppola had a heart in Bram Stoker's Dracula). Others are changed radically and relationships restructured (Seward as a GP, Harker as a vampire hunter, Arthur Holmwood as Mina's husband rather than Lucy's fiancé). The geography of the film is likewise different; none of it takes place in England, but where it is set is not quite clear. Given all the border business the Holmwoods presumably live somewhere in southern Germany; but it's best to assume that the whole story takes place somewhere in the composite Europe of the British imagination, a land full of medieval castles and superstitious peasants. Certainly, considering all the locals speak in clipped British stage accents despite being (a) peasants and (b) German, it's not easy to pin down.

Cushing, too, doesn't bother pretending to be Dutch. But it's a great performance: driven and professional, he is far more scientist than crazed medicine man. And if his talk of biology (it's an exposition-heavy film, with Cushing's scenes doing the heavy lifting of explaining the series mythology) weren't enough, there's hardly a clearer indication of Van Helsing as the champion of scientific modernism than the fact that the film assigns him Dr Seward's phonograph. Carol Marsh's Lucy is another very good performance, but Lee of course is the standout, despite the fact that he doesn't even appear very much. But director Terence Fisher makes his scenes count. From an iconic gallery entrance quoted by George Lucas in Revenge of the Sith to a latex-heavy disintegration scene, he's an all-round terrific villain: a real monster only incidentally inhabiting a human body, instead of Lugosi's aristocratic twit.

Dracula isn't perfect. The relatively grounded production design can't keep up with the terrific matte paintings and surreal castle interior of the 1931 film: all things considered, the film looks a little bit too much like a 1950s postcard of rustic holidays on the continent. If those holidays occasionally ended in a bloodbath, that is: Dracula thoroughly earns its notoriety with fairly gut-churning violence. Ultimately, what Fisher does with the limited resources at his disposal is impressive. Fifties horror films, let's be honest, tend not to be all that scary to us enlightened moderns. But the combination of Lee's animal menace, Fisher's fantastic horror direction and James Bernard's awe-inspiring score turns Dracula into a genuinely terrifying experience.

The short end of the stake

You and I are mostly fed unimaginative, reactionary tripe at the cinema. Hackwork is like a tumour: it really exists to no end than to leave you wanting more of the same - and more, and more - until it consumes all in its path. Hollywood now produces infinite iterations of the same basic concepts, frozen in a capitalist paradigm to which creativity and risk are synonyms.

Okay, so that's not true, or at least an unfair generalisation: while certain narratives and cinematic languages occupy a hegemonic position, alternative ways of doing cinema make it through all the time. They're marginalised, but they're there. That first paragraph, though, is precisely the sort of response Stake Land - a film of whose existence I would never have learnt were it not for idly clicking on cross-references at 2 a.m. - induces in the viewer.

Because you see, Stake Land is pretty great, an indie-horror film with guts and ideas and gorgeous cinematography; but after making the rounds at festivals in 2010 and receiving a limited release in a couple of countries, the film managed to scrape up a grand total of $18,469 domestically ($33,245 internationally). And I should mention Stake Land's director Jim Mickle was in a relatively privileged position: he managed to get a budget of $4 million, which is by no means bad when a lot of talented filmmakers can't get the funding to make feature-length films at all - or, you know, anything.

(Sure, these films often manage to cover their costs because fans seek them out on home video, and that's great. But it limits their audience to those who already know what they're looking for: the horror ghetto, a particularly insular and unfairly maligned community. The point is that you and I never get a chance to go to the cinema and say, 'What shall we watch? Hey, Stake Land sounds kind of cool, let's check it out!')

Anyway, Stake Land takes place in a world in which a mass outbreak of vampirism has turned most people into either blood-drinking night-dwellers or non-walking corpses. As the film begins, the family of Martin (Connor Paolo) are preparing to flee to a less densely populated area. They're slaughtered by a sudden vampire attack, but Martin is saved by Mister (Nick Damici), a gruff, taciturn vampire hunter. (Why yes, it did remind me of Wesley's brief stint as a 'rogue demon hunter' on Angel, but that's all the Buffyverse references we'll make here.) The two strike up an unlikely friendship as they travel north towards Canada, now referred to as 'New Eden', where legend has it no vampires exist.

Along the way they have to navigate the dangerous physical and political landscape of North America. While national governments have to all intents and purposes collapsed, many towns still hold out, armed to the teeth and suspicious of strangers. Global catastrophe has also allowed fiefdoms to be carved out by demagogues like Jebedia Loven (Michael Cerveris), whose Brotherhood believes that vampires are a punishment sent by God, and also, it seems, that one should be awful to everyone for no reason. (Post-doomsday cults are always called the Brotherhood. Remember that the next time you're in the wasteland stuck for something to do, and decide to start your own new religious movement. Also, child brides. Gotta have those.) For company and protection, Martin and Mister are eventually joined by a Catholic nun (Kelly McGillis), a pregnant singer (Danielle Harris), and an ex-marine (Sean Nelson).

The film's strongest element are the astonishing visuals. It's easy to compare Stake Land to Zombieland, another film about a ragtag bunch of strangers on a roadtrip through a post-apolyptic America swarming with hungry ex-people. But the films couldn't be more different. It's not just that Zombieland is a comedy. While not ugly, Z-Land is ultimately filmed in a fairly straightforward point-and-shoot way. Mickle and cinematographer Ryan Samul, by contrast, deliver one carefully composed image of striking gorgeousness after another:

Stake Land's vampires are magnificently ugly beasts. Largely unintelligent  - they hunt in packs, but are incapable of speech and easy to trap - they most closely resemble the nosferatu of Vampire: The Masquerade, or indeed their silent-film progenitor. Brutal killing machines, they share none of the deceptive simulation of human beings that usually makes vampire fascinating.

Well, there's a reason for that. The script, written by the director and co-star Nick Damici, is a bit undecided on what it wants to be, but either way isn't really interested in vampires. They exist primarily as a backdrop to explore how society would respond to near-total collapse of its structures, and what that tells us about human beings. It's ultimately hopeful: yes, some people do become homicidal fanatics, but most learn to take a pure joy in each other amid the utter horror that is Vampireland. (Proceeding purely from theme rather than what its monster is called, that makes Stake Land a zombie film, but let's not quibble.)

The simple plot - moving north, avoiding trouble - allows the filmmakers to take us through a variety of post-apocalyptic communities, showing new societies arising in the wake of disaster. Hence, I think, the beauty. As a wacky mixture of Zombieland and Badlands with a dash of Into the Wild, Stake Land is fundamentally introspective, even contemplative; and since Martin's voiceover narration is mostly used for exposition, the visuals have to do the heavy lifting. And that they do. The outdoors photography of the wilderness in the later part of the film is especially memorable.

Stake Land is unfortunately let down by a weak villain. I don't think that's Michael Cerveris's fault: with a script so eager to sell us on evil fundamentalists, he can't really do much. I'm always perplexed by the portrayal of fundamentalist Christians in films. See, I disagree with the loony fringe of my faith when I meet them, but it seems like Hollywood screenwriters have never met a Christian, fundamentalist or otherwise, and just sort of assume they must be mad and eat babies. So again, I could be offended by the way Mickle and Damici caricature Christianity, but really the Brotherhood does not resemble anything existing in the real world - and there's no reason it should: a catastrophe of the scale portrayed here would certainly change the contours of mainstream Christianity and spawn a plethora of cults.

Connor Paolo turns in a sensitive performance in a thankless role: as the audience substitute, his job is mostly to observe and react to Damici. Shorter than Taylor Momsen - who's three years his junior- during their Gossip Girl days, he looks too slight and adolescent to break into leading-man roles anytime soon, but he's a talented actor. Damici - a poor man's Josh Brolin by looks - is pretty much pure awesome, while Danielle Harris is left a bit stranded (she was originally to be Damici's love interest, but her youthful appearance scuppered that storyline).

With beautiful cinematography, engaging characters and a streak of humour (says one character of a vampire who regularly forages near her house: 'It's Walter again. I went to high school with him, and I haven't been able to get a clean shot. He's such an asshole.'), Stake Land is definitely worth your while. It's by no means purely original, but as a synthesis of concepts it brilliantly breaks some of the patterns we're used to in vampire films. It's ironic that there should be a real renaissance of creativity in the genre at the same time as Twilight is raking in the cash, but c'est la vie.

Viva Bava, Part 3: Figure in black which points at me

This series has repeatedly discussed the profound influence Mario Bava and his imitators would have on the American horror film of the 1970s and 1980s, but the flow of ideas went both ways. I've already referred to the importance of Psycho, but it is to the series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations by American International Pictures and Roger Corman, beginning with 1960's House of Usher, that Bava's next feature is most obviously a homage.

By 'homage', I only partly mean 'rip-off'. I tre volti della paura, released in August 1963, is not one of Bava's best films, but though not a masterpiece it's much more interesting than it appears on the surface. It's conducting a cinematic dialogue between Gothic horror and the emerging giallo, and points both to Bava's roots and to his future; not to mention that its importance in the development of exploitation horror is vastly underrated.

Oh, and when AIP released it in the English-speaking world they decided to give it a title reminding audiences of Bava's previous hit, Black Sunday; and thus a film whose original title means The Three Faces of Fear (translated literally for most European markets) became Black Sabbath, and as such a couple of Birmingham lads, members of a band called Earth, spotted the film's poster at a cinema across the street from band practice. They realised the occult theme attracted crowds, renamed themselves, and the world was given a great many awesome guitar riffs.

Black Sabbath is an anthology film composed of three horror stories unrelated by plot. They were put in a different order for release in America, and 'The Telephone' was butchered to remove a lesbian subplot, but thankfully it's the Italian original that has survived. In that version, the film opens with an absolutely delightful soliloquy by Boris Karloff - yes, that Boris Karloff - obviously having an amount of fun one can't usually obtain legally, standing in front of a vaguely scary-looking background while discussing whether creepy-crawlies attend cinemas (they do, apparently) and introducing the horrid tales we're about to see unfold.

We begin with 'The Telephone', the first Italian thriller film shot in colour, which is set entirely in the Paris apartment of Rosy (Michèle Mercier), a callgirl who receives phone calls in which a man threatens to kill her. Rosy realises the anonymous caller is likely to be Frank (an uncredited Milo Quesada), a recently escaped convict her testimony condemned to prison. Terrified, she asks her former lesbian lover Mary (Lydia Alfonsi) to come over so she'll feel safer, but unbeknownst to her it was Mary, masking her voice, who was making the calls all along just to be able to spend some time with Rosy. Unfortunately for both of them, the real Frank is out on the prowl too.

In the second segment, 'The Wurdalak', Vladimir, an aristocratic fop (Mark Damon, of House of Usher), rides through the wilderness of an unspecified region of eastern Europe (portrayed, as it was in Black Sunday, by Italy) when he discovers a headless body with a precious dagger in its back. He comes up to a house where Giorgio (Glauco Onorato) informs him that the dagger belongs to his father Gorca, meaning that the dead body must be the wurdalak, an undead monster Gorca had set out to hunt.

The household otherwise consists of Pietro (Massimo Righi), Giorgio's kid son Ivan (the actor's name isn't listed), as well as his wife Maria (Rica Dialina) and his sister Sdenka (Susy Andersen, the name adopted by Maria Antonietta Golgi - it was the sixties, remember, and Bava himself assumed an English nom de plume on occasion). These last two seem to cast a lot of longing glances at each other, or maybe I just want that to be true because, with due respect, they're both extraordinarily fit.

Anyway, Gorca (Boris Karloff) soon returns, but he seems changed, harsh and cruel while refusing food. His sons' suspicions that he has himself been turned into a wurdalak are confirmed when Gorca kills Pietro and drags off Ivan because, in the best idea the film takes from the Aleksey Tolstoy story this segment is based on, the wurdalak attacks those he loved in life. Vladimir, revealing himself as the hateful scumbag he seemed from the first, persuades Sdenka to run away with him because, he claims, he loves her, but will they manage to escape the growing wurdalak clan? (No.)

In 'The Drop of Water', set in Victorian London, a nurse (Jacqueline Pierreux) is called late at night to the home of an elderly medium who has just died. While preparing the dead body, she is tempted by the precious ring on the dead woman's finger and nicks it, when a glass of water tips over and drops of water fall to the floor; she's also annoyed by a fly. While at home, she is haunted by dripping water and supernatural occurrences all over her flat.

'The Drop of Water' is the weakest of the three segments by far, brought down by a boring, derivative story. The other two are excellent, but before we get to that we need to appreciate the glorious ending, in which the fourth wall is not so much broken as smashed down and danced upon. The closing soliloquy is delivered by Boris Karloff atop a horse; and before we know it Bava zooms out, the horse is revealed to be mechanical, and Karloff laughs maniacally while PAs run past him with branches on what we can now very clearly see is a film set. It is one of the most surreal, delirious, incredible scenes I've ever seen in a film, and I can't believe they cut it from the American release.

There's thus a lot of tongue-in-cheek self-referentiality to Black Sabbath that I like very much - and so did Karloff, who declared his segments the most fun he'd ever had in a film. The horror veteran's presence is one of Black Sabbath's greatest assets, not just in his demented soliloquies but also in his more serious turn as a blood-sucking grandfather (the only time Karloff played a vampire, incidentally).

The episodes pretty much stand or fall with the actors: 'The Telephone' is anchored by Mercier (alone for half the running time) and Alfonsi, 'The Wurdalak' can rely on Karloff, Onorato and Dialina even as Damon is an annoying, bland disappointment, while Pierreux's weak performance dooms 'The Drop of Water'.

'The Telephone' is the most obviously proto-giallo of the three segments. There's a shot of Rosy's stalker peering through the curtains that is very reminiscent of Norman Bates, with an attending focus on the eye that also marks Black Christmas a decade later and countless horror films since. It's also here that the fetishism of the gleaming knife, absent from The Girl Who Knew Too Much but characteristic of the later giallo, is developed, and a later stylish murder in which a character is strangled with a stocking is a sign of things to come.

The superficially less proto-anything 'Wurdalak' really points both to Italian Gothic horror and the gialli of the future. The scene in which Vladimir is introduced to Gorca's entire family is, let's face it, a 'meet the meat' scene. It's basically a bodycount picture in Gothic trappings: the killer does not have an aim in the pursuit of which he may kill people (as in Black Sunday, where Asa is trying to resurrect herself by draining Katia's life force) but the killing is itself the aim; and the way in which individuals are isolated and picked off one by one is distinctly slasherish. The idea of Boris Karloff as the original slasher villain, though inexact, is too tempting to just be dropped, even as the final scene is not at all in that later tradition but rather cribbed from Dracula:

And then insensibly there came the strange change which I had noticed in the night. Her breathing grew stertorous, the mouth opened, and the pale gums, drawn back, made the teeth look longer and sharper than ever. In a sort of sleep-waking, vague, unconscious way she opened her eyes, which were now dull and hard at once, and said in a soft, voluptuous voice, such as I had never heard from her lips, 'Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come! Kiss me!'

Arthur bent eagerly over to kiss her, but at that instant Van Helsing, who, like me, had been startled by her voice, swooped upon him, and catching him by the neck with both hands, dragged him back with a fury of strength which I never thought he could have possessed, and actually hurled him almost across the room.

'Not on your life!' he said, 'not for your living soul and hers!' And he stood between them like a lion at bay...

I kept my eyes fixed on Lucy, as did Van Helsing, and we saw a spasm as of rage flit like a shadow over her face. The sharp teeth clamped together. Then her eyes closed, and she breathed heavily. (p. 116)

Even with such literary references, it's encouraging to see that Bava's exploitation instincts were being honed. There's a head prop, crafted once again by his father Eugenio, that is far better than anything they managed to create for Halloween: Resurrection almost forty years later, and in general the gore (of which there is little) is of the excellent quality one has come to expect. 'Exploitation' means something else too, though, and indeed Black Sabbath is quite desperate to emphasise its actresses' heaving bosoms; 'The Telephone', being a half-hour segment of the lovely Mercier in a nightgown, is pretty much just a delivery system for titillation.

It's a beautiful film, shot by Ubaldo Terzano and Bava himself to emphasise otherworldly indigoes and dark blues. I praised Bava's black-and-white cinematography in The Girl Who Knew Too Much, and I'm sad to see there'll be no more of the exquisite contrasts of that film; but his mastery of colour here almost makes up for it. It's an important film: transitional, certainly, 'lesser' Bava, perhaps, but no less entertaining for that.

Viva Bava, Part 1: A riot is an ugly thing, and it's just about time we had one

This is the first post in a series exploring the films of Italian horror maestro Mario Bava. Not, I should clarify, a proper retrospective. Italian genre cinema of the post-war period being what it is, Bava's filmography is an extraordinarily ragged mess. As a workhorse, Bava did shedloads of second-unit direction, uncredited work and films that have nothing to do with the origins of the modern horror film I'm interested in tracing here.

Bava's father was a cinematographer, and the young Mario earned his spurs shooting other people's films in the late forties and fifties, when pepla, Italian sword-and-sandal pictures in which strongmen like Hercules and Maciste performed deeds of heroic valour, were ripping off  American epics like The Ten Commandments. Bava himself directed his share of pepla, from Hercules in the Haunted World (Ercole al centro della terra) to the Viking-themed Erik the Conqueror (Gli invasori).

I shan't consider those films here, nor will I discuss his forays into Spaghetti Western (Roy Colt and Winchester Jack/Roy Colt e Winchester Jack) and crowd-pleasing comic-book adaptations (Danger: Diabolik). I'll restrict myself instead to the horror films credited to Bava, although I may come back later for The Devil's Commandment (I vampiri) and Caltiki - The Immortal Monster (Caltiki - il monstro immortale), both of which Bava salvaged when the temperamental director Riccardo Freda walked off set.

That means that the first film for our consideration is Bava's official directorial debut, 1960's La maschera del demonio. Titled Black Sunday and The Mask of Satan in the United States and Britain respectively, the film was an international box office smash, although it barely made back its production costs in Italy itself. The Mask of Satan (which I keep misspelling 'The Mask of Stan') fell foul of the British Board of Film Censors, who refused to grant the film a rating; it was thus not seen in the UK until 1968. Despite concern over its outré gore effects, Bava's debut immediately found a devoted fanbase including many critics.

We open with an execution: in seventeenth-century Moldavia, a vampire witch, Princess Asa Vajda (Barbara Steele in her star-making turn, even though the opening credits misspell her name as 'Steel'), is about to be burnt at the stake together with her accomplice Javuto (Arturo Dominici) by her brother. She places a curse on his descendants before a heavy mask bristling with spikes on the inside - the titular mask of Satan - is hammered on her face, killing her in a scene that's no less harrowing fifty years on.* A heavy downpour, however, prevents the customary destruction of the body.

Two hundred years later, we meet Dr Thomas Kruvajan (Andrea Checchi) and his assistant Dr Andre Gorobec (John Richardson), who are crossing the Moldavian landscape by coach on their way to an academic conference. They bribe Nikita the coachman (Mario Passante) to take a shortcut through the woods the locals fear is haunted. The carriage breaks down, and while Nikita fixes the damage the scientists explore nearby ruins, where they discover the tomb of the long-dead witch, who's prevented from rising again by a cross fixed to her sarcophagus.

After Gorobec has gone outside again, Kruvajan is attacked by a 'bat' that's obviously a rag waved into shot by a PA. In the process of subduing the beast, the clumsy professor manages to smash the cross into pieces and injure himself a minute later, dripping blood onto the witch's face when he attempts to remove the satanic mask (which, as we know, is just bad archaeological practice). I mean, seriously. What is with these people? Having both fed the vampire and destroyed the safeguard holding her in place, our idiot scientists travel on to a nearby village, not before meeting Katia (also portrayed by Steele), the beautiful daughter of Prince Vajda, with whom Gorobec is instantly smitten.

Asa, reanimated but too weak to leave her coffin, commands Javuto to rise and do her work for her, which he does by attacking Prince Vajda (Ivo Garrani). He's warded off with a cross and flees, but when Katia and her brother Constantine (Enrico Olivieri) call Dr Kruvajan to help their delirious father, the scientist is abducted by Javuto and turned into a vampire by Asa. Now Gorobec must figure out what's going on before Asa is able to consume Katia's life-force and rise to resume her satanic service.

The Mask of Satan is elevated to classic status by Bava's stylish direction. It's difficult to single out moments, but an absolutely terrific pan after the carriage drives off near the beginning of the film that feeds into Bava's use of branches as a visual theme is among the most impressive. Bava, acting as his own cinematographer, uses the monochrome colour scheme to highlight contrast and emphasise shadows: when a door Kruvajan has passed through falls shut revealing Asa's griffin symbol, it's one of the most beautiful black-and-white scenes I've ever seen, confirming the sinister undertones we already suspected in a single striking image.

The film's stunning special effects, courtesy of Bava himself and his father (one wonders what Eugenio Bava, a deeply religious man who also created sacral art, would have made of his son's later splatterfests), make it worth watching even now. For a film from 1960, The Mask of Satan is quite extraordinarily gory: a vampire is staked through the eye, another is burnt to death, and bugs and scorpions crawl over the undead witch's face before she is reanimated in a really terrific sequence, to become the iconic spike-scarred face below.

Unfortunately The Mask of Satan is bedevilled (ho ho) by cheapness. A portrait referred to as 'canvas' in dialogue is obviously goddamn paper glued on wood, and they would have done well to omit animals: supposedly frightened Dobermans are cheerfully wagging their tails at the actors, while an allegedly panicked cow is peacefully masticating, suggesting the set was a less terrifying experience than the final product. (And look, I'm the descendant of a long line of farmers, and no-one milks their cows late at night.)

Nor are the performances all that great, and they're butchered by absolutely dire English dubbing, complete with wildly inconsistent accents. The exception is Steele who - despite being, as she says, 'drunk, barely over eighteen, embarrassed... not very easy to be around' and annoyed with Bava's very exploitative insistence on emphasising her body - makes a good Katia and an outstanding bloodsucking sorceress. (The film seems to think 'witch' and 'vampire' are synonyms, and presents a decidedly heterodox spin on both.)

There's a moment in The Mask of Satan in which the inglorious future of horror cinema is suddenly glimpsed. In the film's third act, Prince Vajda's servant Ivan (Tino Bianchi) is killed by being strangled from behind with a piece of rope. The way this murder is filmed is very giallo, slasherish even: it could be straight out of Twitch of the Death Nerve or Friday the 13th, and just for a second, the road that led from the shores of Italy to America's grindhouses is laid bare. 

*Tim Burton cites the influence of The Mask of Satan on his work. I'm no Burton fan, but it helps that Sleepy Hollow, my favourite Burton feature, is the one that bears the mark of Bava most clearly.