Thevampire moviesthat proliferated in the ‘70s weren’t your run-of-the-mill graveyard spookfests. Spurred by both a global horror (for example,’70s British folk horror) and the exploitation boom brought about by loosening censorship codes and by theFrench New Wave movementthat responded to both phenomena, this medieval monster got noticeably… freakier.
In a period shaped by political change, particularly in the aftermath of myriad revolutions (geopolitical, sexual, and otherwise),artists and capitalists alike took advantage of the vampire as a figure ripe for social commentary, satire, and dangerous erotic charge(vampires are famously seductive). Across the globe as well as across Hollywood, bloodsuckers held audiences hypnotized in films that remain salient (and sometimes scary) today for their daring, often confidently experimental, or at least confidently gonzo, approach.
10 Greatest Westerns Of The 1970s
With classics like El Topo and McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the 1970s marked the end of the western genre’s heyday and the dawn of the anti-western.
This experimental, largely silent Spanish film is a metacommentary on the vampire film as a genre.Cut from footage and behind-the-scenes footage from Jesús Franco’sCount Draculastarring Christopher Lee, it meditates on the constructed nature of fear, abstracting the concept of mythmaking through its use of stillness, extra footage (of cars, trees, etc.), and behind the scenes moments of planning. It’s short, scrappy, and playfully intellectual, still telling the story of Dracula even as it pulls the meat off its bones.
Interestingly, this scrappy avant-garde gem wasdirected by Pere Portabella, a Catalán politician who helped draft the Spanish Constitution after the fall of Francisco Franco’s government.
Dracula A.D. 1972
Cast
Dracula A.D. 1972, directed by Alan Gibson, follows the resurrection of Count Dracula in 1970s London after a black magic ritual. Dracula’s servant, Johnny, lures victims for him, including Jessica Van Helsing, whose grandfather confronts the Count in a battle of good versus evil.
Dracula A.D. 1972, thesixth British Hammer Dracula film starring Christopher Lee(who began playing the role in 1958), takes the franchise in a different direction.Setting the film in the London mod/hippie scene, its comedic tone, groovy soundtrack (mixing funk and noise music), and psychedelic milieu make it an interesting and occasionally odd watch.
It was commissioned in tandem with its sequel,The Satanic Rites of Dracula,as a means of cashing in on the era’s fascination with all-things occult, particularly in the wake of a real-life churchyard desecration in London’s Highgate Cemetery in 1968.
Replete with occultism, black magic, and hammy groaners delivered by men in suede vests and headbands,Lee’s talent for comedy is just visible under the surface of his iconically creepy take on the character.It was commissioned in tandem with its sequel,The Satanic Rites of Dracula,as a means of cashing in on the era’s fascination with all-things occult, particularly in the wake of a real-life churchyard desecration in London’s Highgate Cemetery in 1968.
Stephanie Rothman’sDaughters of Darknessis a lush,beautifully produced example of the lesbian vampire subgenre that boomed in the 70s, from microbudget quickies like the since-reclaimedVampyros Lesbosto commercial theatrical products like Hammer FIlms’The Vampire Lovers. The only film directed by a woman on this list, Rothman’s take on the lesbian vampire stories that originated with Sheridan Le Fanu’s novellaCarmillaand the legend of the serial killing, “vampiric” Countess Bathory, is composed and mysterious.
Its rather perfunctory plotting is buoyed by arresting production design and a fantastic lead performance from famous French arthouse starDelphine Seyrig(who worked with directors like Alain Resnais, Chantal Akerman and Francois Truffaut), whose presence marks this otherwise B-movie as a film with an artistic vision.
This Tobe Hooper-directed cult-favorite miniseries has had such a direct impact on the vampire genre, and is so cinematic in its form, that it deserves a place among the best vampire films of the decade.Adapted from Stephen King’s take on the Brahm Stoker tale, this beloved update styles its monster like an expired, entirely silent Nosferatu, with mottled skin and milky eyes.
Gripping in its artificiality and tensely plotted, this cult classic is a perfect vampire movie for a dark and stormy night.
Where other vampire films of this decade are more revisionist,Salem’s Lottreats the monster with a young boy’s earnest reverence for lore, even if it’s the kind learned by flashlight between the dripping, lurid covers ofTales from the Cryptin the ‘50s. Gripping in its artificiality and tensely plotted, this cult classic is a perfect vampire movie for a dark and stormy night.
Jaromil Jireš’ softcore coming-of-age vampire film uses fairytales as inspiration for its bloodsucking aristocrats.A prime example of the Czech New Wave’s dreamy, hyper-stylized political filmmaking, it’s as beautiful and delicate as it is confrontational and openly anti-clerical.
In it, Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová), a pure young girl, faces off with a band of sexually and capitalistically voracious quasi-religious figures and members of the ruling class. She floats from place to place, evading their long-fingered clutches,in a series of vignettes that’s at once unsettling and arrestingly beautiful. The film is like a storybook come to life–– a little too close to bedtime.
Spanish director and visual artist Iván Zulueta’sArrebato(Rapture) uses vampirism as a starting point for its surreal and narcotic tale,rather than a literal plot-engine. In this semi-experimental midnight movie (its original release was less than two weeks, only eventually succeeding after late-night runs), posits cinema itself as a vampiric, addictive entity.
The central cast, a horror director (Eusebio Poncela) and his girlfriend (Cecilia Roth) devolve into a slurry life of heroin and long-exposure photography.The film is psychosexually dense,rife with longing, lust, and malaise. As time passes, these urges are transferred over toArrebato’s true heart, the eerie, semi-sentient film they shoot and edit constantly, which seems to suck their life-force like the drugs they snort and inject.
Blacula
Blacula is a 1972 film directed by William Crain. It features an 18th-century African prince who is transformed into a vampire while in Transylvania. He reawakens in 20th-century Los Angeles, encountering residents and a woman he believes embodies his long-lost wife.
At the height of the blaxploitation cycle of the mid-1970s,several horror films were added to the subgenre proper even as more experimental films likeGanja & Hesshappilytoed the line between arthouse psych-out and grindhouse softcore in their style.
Blacula,the most famous and loved of the era’s horror-blaxploitation, is cheerfully gory, playfully tongue-in-cheek, and maximalist in tone and approach. WhereGanja & Hessplays vampire lore as a tragic and agonizing metaphor for racism,Blaculatakes the opposite tact, blending humor and scares to turn the succubus in the pointy cape (WIlliam Marshall) into a Baadasssss avenger, an African prince who Count Dracula bit in when he came to discuss their working together to end the slave trade. The film is raucous, raunchy, and very fun.
Martin
Martin is a 1976 horror film directed by George A. Romero. It follows a young man, who believes he is a vampire, as he struggles with his blood-craving urges while living with his elderly cousin in a small Pennsylvania town. The film examines themes of identity and isolation.
Like almost all of George Romero’s horror confections afterNight of the Living Dead,Martin,his vampiric metaphor for drug addiction and deindustrialized social alienation was underseen and underappreciated,subject to a limited US release and a strange tangle of complex distribution: For example, one odd result of these machinations means the Italian recut,Wampyr, boasts a soundtrack by Argento collaborators, Goblin, while, there is no American Region 1 blu-ray of Romero’s original cut ofMartinto this day.
Whether or not this is true, he murders women with shots of heroin and drinks their blood.
The film is a queasy peek into the life of a young man, Martin (John Amplas), who thinks he’s a vampire.Whether or not this is true, he murders women with shots of heroin and drinks their blood. An older man, Cuda (Lincoln Maazel), who believes in vampires, hunts Martin. Quiet and liminal, Martin is a bittersweet small-town tragedy in a horror film’s threadbare, hand-me-down clothes.
The story ofGanja & Hessis as winding and nonlinear as the film’s own narrative.This avant-garde gem of Black cinema, which stars Duane Jones (best known forNight of the Living Dead), was screened at Cannes and beloved by critics, only to suffer a hack job recut and gimmicky, softcore VHS release following its poor box office run.
This film’s meditations on Black cultural erasure, assimilation, and clerical hypocrisy are delivered like a string of half-remembered dreams just before waking, perpetually swaying from soft contemplation and eroticism to shocking, graphic violence.It’s daring, often called “before its time,” and remains sharply modern and unique. The original cut ofGanja & Hesshas been restored and appears regularly at repertory houses and museums.
German auteur Werner Herzog took on the myth ofNosferatuat the end of the decade, in an adaptation that synthesizes many of the aesthetic pleasures of the international artistic vanguard of the moment. His moody, nihilistic, proto-goth take on this FW Murnau film stars Isabella Adjani, whose work in films like Polanski’sThe Tenantand, later, Andrej Zulawski’sPossessionmark her as an unmatched talent, fighting the powers of darkness in apocalyptically plague-ridden Wismar, Germany.
The film’s vampire is played by long-running Herzog foil (and frenemy) Klaus Kinski, whose work is defined by a heated, edgy unpredictability, who stalks a ghostly city, a lonely figure of tragic pathos.The film is moving, morbid, and magnetic.
