Author: David Huckvale

In 1971, Hammer Films, who had jolted the horror genre back to life in Britain fourteen years earlier with The Curse of Frankenstein (dir. Terence Fisher, 1957), were still prolific, producing (some might say with dangerous complacency) traditional, Gothic costume dramas such as Countess Dracula (dir. Peter Sasdy), with Ingrid Pitt as a blood-drenched Hungarian hag, who sacrifices virgins to make her young and beautiful in a medieval castle. Twins of Evil (dir. John Hough) cast Peter Cushing as a Puritan vampire hunter in a Gothic never-never land (in fact, the inevitable Black Park so often exploited by the studio for its sylvan shudders). There was a sex-change involved in Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (dir. Roy Ward Barker) but the setting was Victorian London, as it was for Hands of the Ripper (dir. Peter Sasdy). Meanwhile, director Don Chaffey took audiences back in time rather further for the prehistoric romp, Creatures the World Forget. The only two Hammer films with a contemporary setting for that year were On the Buses (dir. Harry Booth) - a big screen version of the popular TV sitcom - and an update of Bram Stoker’s novel The Jewel of Seven Stars, for Seth Holt’s Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb. This ill-fated but nonetheless intriguing film has much to recommend it, and screenwriter Chris Wicking’s decision to remove Stoker’s tale from its original Edwardian setting might well be said to have foreshadowed the contemporary milieu of The Omen (dir. Richard Donner) in 1976, which Mark Gatiss has called “the first horror blockbuster.”1 Contemporary settings and a much more realistic agenda were a way of making horror movies more engaging to an audience sated with period settings, obvious supernatural monsters and a style of movie making that was becoming all too predictable. Alas, Hammer failed fully to adapt to the wind of change, making only few contemporary horror films (such as Dracula A. D. 1972 in 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula, just under two years later, both directed by Alan Gibson). Hollywood, however, was unflinching in its approach to the possibilities of what one might term supernatural realism. In their recollections, those involved in the new wave of horror refer to realism as the key to their overall intentions. The screenwriter for The Omen, David Seltzer, remembered that his aim was “to do something preposterous and it’s going to look real.” Gregory Peck, who brought, in Seltzer’s words “a straight face” and “incredible dignity”2 to the film said that “if we can convince them with this ****, we all deserve Oscars!”3 Seltzer does not believe in the devil, but William Friedkin, who directed The Exorcist three years before, took his supernatural theme rather more to heart. He claimed that the film “strongly and realistically [my emphasis] tries to make the case for spiritual forces in the universe - both good and evil. [...] It’s about real people in a real street in a real town,” and continued, “I knew that this was going to be - or needed to be - something more than just another horror film. This had to be a realistic film about inexplicable events.”4 He therefore aimed to transfer the screenwriter William Peter Blatty’s similar aim of documentary reality to the screen, and thus changed horror films for ever. The decade began with a contemporary vampire film, which went on to inspire Hammer’s groovy but less daring approach to updating vampire narratives. The film in question was Count Yorga - Vampire (dir. Bob Kelljan, 1970), in which Robert Quarry, an enthusiastic horror film fan himself, played the eponymous role. Yorga has left his native Bulgaria to refresh himself in contemporary Los Angeles, shots of which open the film. He presides over a seance, fascinates a young woman, attacks her, outwits with her concerned menfolk and is eventually dispatched, though not before he has infected another victim. Combining camp, cool and brief but shocking moments of bloody horror, Quarry’s performance is unnervingly effective. Formally, sometimes even theatrically dressed, with an understandable penchant for scarlet and black, he cuts a suave, ironic but also genuinely frightening figure, assisted by his grotesque, disfigured and presumably resurrected servant Brudah (Edward Walsh). Amid the somewhat chilly modern furnishings of Yorga’s home are more traditionally Gothic details, such as crimson candles, and even a kind of throne in the basement, which Quarry’s commanding presence manages to make weird rather than absurd. The contemporary setting of the film is matched by up-to-date techniques such as the use of a hand-held camera, which immediately lends the narrative a quality of cinéma verité, predating the impact hand-held camera work had on the television police series Hillstreet Blues, by fully a decade. Kelljan also effectively uses montage with voice-over dialogue for a conversation between the two male leads early on in the film, the action of which shows them walking through various Los Angeles locations. Crucially, this general approach also required something quite different from the resonant and Romantic musical style of traditional horror film music, such as that by Hammer films’ James Bernard. Consequently, Yorga’s composer, William Marx (the adopted son of harp-playing Harpo Marx), followed the approach that Elisabeth Lutyens had virtually pioneered in the previous decades on her scores for Amicus portmanteau horrors such as Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (dir. Freddie Francis, 1965). This was to confine his orchestrations to chamber music proportions, thus creating a more intimate, even claustrophobic style. Marx exploits spare string writing often featuring solo timbres, playing atonal material. Indeed, in the opening shots narrated by George Macready, and during the seance that follows it, the string writing is suitably reminiscent of the second movement Adagio of Schoenberg Third String Quartet. Occasionally, these string textures are expanded with the addition of harp or percussion (as in the final killing scenes set in Yorga’s cellar). Flutes also join in during the seance, as they do during the initial drive to Yorga’s creepy mansion; but Marx saves fuller string resonance for the love scene between Erica (Judith Lang) and her boyfriend. Later, there are touches of more traditional horror timbres, such as the use of an organ and low register flute when Yorga paces through his domain at night. String glissandi also accompany Yorga raising a storm, but Marx restrains his use of these more hackneyed effects. Sometimes all he needs is a snare-drum rhythm as in the scene during which the menfolk drive over to Erica’s flat only to find her assuaging her new-found thirst for blood by feasting on a kitten. Before Yorga makes his attack on Erica in the camper van in which she and her lover find themselves stranded, Marx and Kelljan remove music altogether from the soundtrack and rely on sound effects to do the work of raising dramatic tension. Cicadas, and barking dogs provide the crescendo and musical punctuation that a traditional vampire film score would have used at this moment. The result is not only more naturalistic but in 1970 it would also have been much more unnerving, in much the same way that the replacement of music with naturalistic sound effects in Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula would have been to audiences who had been accustomed to wall-to-wall musical accompaniment in so-called ‘silent’ films. (At one moment, Yorga even plays the piano himself, ironically strumming the film’s ‘love’ theme and perhaps referencing the way in which so many silent films in the past were once accompanied.) Later, eerie wind effects help heighten to mood entirely without the aid of music. Silence, in particular, is also an extremely effective tool, especially when the Count stares at his opponents in the particularly unsettling way that Robert Quarry perfected for this role. And during Yorga’s surprise attacks, hands out-stretched and fangs bared, Marx relies simply on a kind of electric bell effect, the unexpected nature of which very successfully heightens the intended shock. Again, silence is used with particular success immediately after this effect: Yorga staggers back, impaled and bloody, but complete silence reigns for a good ten seconds before his exaggerated screams and final death agony. Wind effects return to even greater impact in Kelljan’s sequel The Return of Count Yorga the following year, the most notable element, from a musical point of view, being the main attack scene, in which a group of female vampires burst into a contemporary living room and slaughter nearly everyone in it. Significantly, there is not a note of music for this scene, which is played out entirely with naturalistic sound effects - screams, footsteps, furniture being moved, etc. It has a similar effect to the brutal murder scene in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966), for which Bernard Herrmann originally scored a cue in his habitually intense symphonic style, but which Hitchcock ultimately rejected. However, the effect of Herrmann’s score has subsequently been demonstrated, and while heightening the dramatic effect it might also be said to weaken its brutality by reassuring the audience that this is a “only” film with the kind of film music we have grown to expect at such a moment. By removing the music, the action becomes much more disturbing and “real.” The Return of Count Yorga also experimented with electronic manipulation of musical sounds, such as fazing, which was still a relatively unfamiliar and hence unnerving sound on film soundtracks in 1971, and this general approach towards manipulating recorded sound were to inform Jerry Goldsmith’s much more elaborate soundtrack for Paul Wendkos’s The Mephisto Waltz (1971). Adapted from Fred Mustard Stewart’s novel of the same name, Wendkos’s film is entirely structured around Franz Liszt’s famous work of the same name, which is the party piece of an...