A fully restored 4K version of 1958s Horror of Dracula starring Christopher Lee as Bram Stoker’s nightmarish creation will be released into cinemas, in time for Halloween, John Gore owner of the Hammer Horror Films label, tells Deadline.
Hammer is now a part of recently formed John Gore Studios.
Horror of Dracula will also be available on home entertainment, dates TBC.
Gore explains that footage cut by censors and distributors at the time of its original release was discovered in a Warner Bros. warehouse.
Newspaper items of the period report that women, and a few men apparently, were fainting during screenings when Lee’s vampire character lunged rather vigorously at the necks of his victims, the creature’s fangs dripping with blood. Such scenes were deemed too gory. It was also the first full color production of a Dracula film, and that blood sure looks gruesome.
Only those who saw the film on its release in Japan would have seen the uncut version.
“It was the fangs that scared them,” Gore suggests. “People were screaming, which was the point,” he argues.
Horror of Dracula’s director Terence Fisher, using a script by Jimmy Sangster, wanted gory spectacle and that’s when Hammer decided to introduce Dracula’s fangs. “Think of every Halloween, and you see all those fangs, that’s a Hammer and Christopher Lee invention,” Gore contends.
HORROR OF DRACULA, Christopher Lee on poster art, 1958
However, it’s only fair to point out that the fearsome cuspids in question were actually created by Hammer’s makeup guru Philip Leakey in consultation with Lee. “It all started when Christopher Lee said, ‘I want more teeth with this,’ so they came up with something that had some bite.”
Bela Legusi , Gore continues, bore no fangs when he played the fiendish titular role in Tod Browning’s 1931 landmark Dracula, beautifully shot by Karl Freund (Key Largo, I Love Lucy) and insists that the count in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 classic Nosferatu “was like a rabbit,” with no bite at all.
“That thing that we just associate with vampires everywhere all came up with Lee and the makeup guy,” he adds.
When Gore, a Broadway and international theater powerhouse, took control of Hammer less than three years ago, he says that he wanted to find ways to honor Hammer’s horror legacy.
“We managed to get the uncut original Christopher Lee Dracula. So we’ve just been remastering that now. So there’s like three minutes missing. Hammer’s business was based on the censor. Getting that X-rated certificate was crucial to marketing, but they could only go so far because the censors didn’t like what they saw — all that blood,” and the film had just over three minutes deleted.
HORROR OF DRACULA, Christopher Lee, Melissa Stribling, 1958
“So Warner Brothers, they have this massive, massive storage near LAX where everything from the 1920s onwards is there. I mean, there’s like 10 Batmobiles and God knows what. And they found the director’s cut of the original 1958 Dracula. So we will be unlocking that and the world will get to see the bits they weren’t seeing, which is mostly to do with how Dracula dies at the end,” Gore discloses.
Other reintroduced footage, Gore continues, “is a bit that’s so famous, it’s where Christopher Lee descends on the woman and is about to bite her. It’s so sexual and they had to trim that because it just looked like it was nothing to do with vampires,” he says trying to describe the scene with great delicacy.
“So they had to trim a bit of the sexual stuff and then how he’s destroyed at the end. They cut quite a lot out because they went, ‘It’s too gruesome.’ And now that’s back in. All the crucial points that were axed are now back in.”
Vampire fangs used by Chrstopher Lee in ‘Horror of Dracula.’ Courtesy: National Science & Media Museum
Silver Salt Restoration oversaw the upgrade of the picture which also starred Peter Cushing as vampire hunter Doctor Van Helsing. “You could go to 8K, but we go to 4K because if you go any higher it can be a bit too exacting,” Gore warns.
The film will re-released into cinemas in the run up to Halloween in October.
Christopher Lee in ‘Horror of Dracula,’ Hammer
Gore says that he and his team are looking at the entire Hammer catalogue and exploring how the mammoth vault of movies might be further exploited.
“We’re working on the whole lot. It’s a long list. Everything that Hammer’s made, we’re looking at versions of vampires, werewolves, mummies, everything that was ever done, looking at new ways into it, really. So no, it’s great to own it. I loved it as a kid, and now I get the chance to dig into all these things,” Gore says with relish.
Hammer shot or co-produced 165 productions, some forty were Hammer horror pictures. Others were B crime thrillers like River Patrol,Who Killed Van Loon, the Dick Barton secret agent tales and dozens of pictures involving dangerous dames up to no good.Titles such as The House Across the Lake, Stolen Face, The Rossiter Case and Bad Blonde. And don’t think that blokes weren’t up to their necks in dastardly deeds. There’s Room to Let , The Jack of Diamonds, Five Days to name but three.
Gore was at the Cannes Film Festival for the Cannes Market where he held industry screenings for My Duchess starring Dame Joan Collins and Isabella Rossellini, both giving their all in a movie that reveals the sad, final years of Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor.
