With the growing number of horror festivals springing up all over the UK, organisers increasingly have to pull off something a bit special in order to lure in the fans. Mayhem in Nottingham certainly caught my attention when they announced plans to revive a lost Hammer Dracula script by having it read live on stage. This is particularly appropriate in the year we lost Christopher Lee, the brilliant actor most associated with the Count (somewhat to Lee’s dismay), and who Hammer planned would don the cloak had the production gone ahead.
To head the reading Mayhem have secured the services of Jonathan Rigby. An astute choice, as he’s not only among the foremost scholars of Gothic cinema, but an acclaimed actor in his own right. “The idea came about, as far as I’m aware, when it was realised that the Hammer archive at De Montfort University holds a number of unproduced scripts,” Jonathan told me. “[The script we are staging] is The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula and was written as the follow-up to Scars of Dracula. Anthony Hinds delivered his first draft in September 1970. Hammer had a contractual obligation to give Warner Bros first refusal on its Dracula pictures during this period, so EMI’s distribution of Scars… caused considerable friction.
“The Hammer/Warner Bros programme was supposed to get back on track with The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula, a story conceived by Hinds as a way for Warner to spend a large amount of rupees frozen in its Indian account (and thus appease them in the wake of the Scars… debacle). However, the success of Count Yorga, Vampire prompted Warner Bros to ask Hammer if it could attempt something similar, so in 1971 the production of what became Dracula AD 1972 took precedence. This was followed by The Satanic Rites of Dracula, which also had a modern-day setting. The India script was still being worked on – presumably because the situation with Warners’ frozen rupees had yet to be resolved – and was now going by the slightly altered title The Insatiable Thirst of Dracula.”
“Once again, a gimmick took precedence, as in 1973 Hammer produced The Legend of 7 Golden Vampires for Warner as a way of cashing in on the craze for kung fu films,” adds Jonathan. “By this time the Indian story had been radically overhauled by Don Houghton and Chris Wicking as Kali – Devil Bride of Dracula. This was offered to Warner as a follow-up to 7 Golden Vampires…, but by this time the distributor had lost interest. Hammer abandoned the idea of shooting a film in India and instead concentrated its efforts on producing a film about Vlad the Impaler, based on Brian Hayles’ 1974 radio play Lord Dracula.”
After such a tortuous history, might it have been a good thing that viewers were spared another Hammer Dracula? Being blunt, is The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula actually any good? Jonathan’s confident that the script suggests the potential for a classic Hammer vampire chiller: “It’s set in the 1930s and is certainly more epic than Hammer were used to. There’s a major train journey complete with teeming termini at either end (a bit like Horror Express), a colossal Indian carnival scene with hundreds and hundreds of extras required (and a very nice death for a vampire-conniving Maharajah), hordes of devil worshippers a la The Kiss of the Vampire and The Devil Rides Out, a Black Hole of Calcutta-style pit in which Dracula’s female victims are dumped half-drained, a car chase between a rickety Morris tourer and the Maharajah’s coffin-bearing Rolls-Royce, and an apocalyptic ending in the ‘evil is propagated’ style that was fashionable (though not so much at Hammer) in the early 70s.”
Reading the script inevitably led a Hammer expert like Jonathan to envisage what The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula might have looked like had it actually been filmed: “It’s very easy to spot the lines that Christopher Lee would have refused to speak! Joanna Lumley or Judy Geeson would have been good casting for the heroine at the time (as in Psycho, she’s searching for her vanished sister), and there are plenty of great roles for Indian actors, obviously. There’s also a dance sequence reminiscent of the sitar scene in The Reptile. Tony Hinds was stationed in India during the war and this experience fed not only into The Reptile but also The Ghoul. Unquenchable…, however, is actually set in India and thus takes fuller advantage of his local knowledge.”
The Mayhem Festival’s decision to stage the script live is a bold, imaginative one. It’s also perhaps the only way to recreate the inimitable style that made Christopher Lee and his films with Hammer so unique. You cannot go back in time to recreate the era, so why not employ the theatre of the imagination to conjure this Gothic masterpiece that never was? “Hammer’s Dracula endures through a combination of factors, chiefly the definitive potency of Christopher Lee’s performances and the beautifully upholstered Victorian-Edwardian milieu in which Hammer placed him,” concludes Jonathan. “I must say I’m looking forward to bringing this script to life; it’s a forgotten link in the Hammer chain and I’m sure it will fascinate all horror fans.”
Mayhem Horror Festival takes place at the Broadway Cinema in Nottingham between the 15th-18th of October. For further details click here.
