Crew
Director – Freddie Franciss, Screenplay – August Rieger, Based on an Idea by Karl Heinz Hummel, Producer – Pier A. Caminneci, Photography – Gerard Vandenburg, Music – Jerry Van Rooyen, Art Direction – Hans Zehetner. Production Company – Aquila Film Enterprises.
Cast
Pia Degermark (Betty Williams/Countess Clarimonde Catani), Ivor Murillo (Josef), Thomas Hunter (John Larsen), Ingrid van Bergen (Miss Niessen), Joachim Kemmer (Brother Martin), Oskar Wegrostek (The Abbott), Ferdie Mayne (Count Dracula), Lyvia Bauer (Gabrielle), Daria Damar (Kirsten)
Plot
Hollywood star Betty Williams inherits a castle in Transylvania. Upon arriving she notes an uncanny resemblance between herself and her ancestor Countess Clarimonde Catani. She plans to sell the castle but decides to stay on after seeing the handsome Brother Martin at the neighbouring monastery. However, Clarimode is a vampire and is awakened from her coffin in the basement by workmen come to install a sauna for Betty. Clarimonde places the bite on Brother Martin. After Betty romances John Larsen, a teacher at the local girls’ boarding school, Clarimonde sets her sights on claiming him and others. There are confusions between Betty and Clarimonde, especially after Clarimonde adopts a blonde wig to resemble her. Chaos ensues as others are infected by the vampire bite.
The monster comedy began way back with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), which led the two idiots on to several other encounters with Universal’s in-house monsters. The Vampire Happening would appear to be the first in a spate of such comedies that came about in the 1970s that were sparked by The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) – this shows a debt of inspiration to that film in the casting of Ferdie Mayne as Dracula. Hammer Films had had huge success throughout the 1950 and 60s with the revivals of the Dracula and Frankenstein film. By the 1970s this had turned into parody and spoofing of the genre with the likes of Tender Dracula (1974), Vampira/Old Dracula (1974), Dracula, Father and Son (1976), Love at First Bite (1979) and Mama Dracula (1980), while Freddie Francis later returned with another comedy Son of Dracula (1974).
A former Academy Award-wining cinematographer turned director, Freddie Francis (1917-2007) was one of the prime creative movers within the Anglo-Horror Cycle. He directed both Dracula and Frankenstein films for Hammer, although his best work was in a string of their psycho-thrillers during the 1960s. He also made the first of Amicus’s horror anthology films with Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) and several of their subsequent efforts. (A full list of Freddie Francis’s genre films is at the bottom of the page).
I have a great deal of time for Freddie Francis and regard him as an eminent stylist. What must be said here and in Son of Dracula is that he is not a comedy director. The level of comedy in The Vampire Happening film is excruciating – a lot of running around a girl’s school, the castle and a convent, while everything culminates in good deal of comic bumbling around a big costume ball. Much of the plot is based around Pia Degermark not realising that her dead ringer ancestor is a vampire who rises from her coffin in the dungeon and goes around claiming victims where everybody gets the two of them mixed up, especially when the vampire Pia starts putting on a blonde wig. In between that, the two indulge in assorted dalliances with local menfolk, which create complications when the men and then others end up being given the bite. (In John Brosnan’s The Horror People (1976), an interviewed Freddie Francis stated that he wished he hadn’t been involved with The Vampire Happening – “that was a mistake”).
The Vampire Happening also falls into the 1970s fad for the sex comedy and there is plentiful opportunity to get all of the women in the cast to take their tops off throughout. Much of it feels like Benny Hill routines but where everything takes place at a snail’s pace instead of sped-up camera. On the plus side, the film is actually shot at a real castle (Castle Kreuzenstein in Austria), which provides an authentic feel that no set-bound recreations ever manage.
Freddie Francis’s other genre films are:- Vengeance/The Brain (1962), Paranoiac (1963), The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), Nightmare (1964), Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), Hysteria (1965), The Skull (1965), The Psychopath (1966), The Deadly Bees (1967), They Came from Beyond Space (1967), Torture Garden (1967), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny & Girly (1969), Trog (1970), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Craze (1973), The Creeping Flesh (1973), Tales That Witness Madness (1973), Legend of the Werewolf (1974), Son of Dracula (1974), The Ghoul (1975), The Doctor and the Devils (1985) and Dark Tower (1987).
Full film available here