It was like making another movie. It so


happens that – and I suppose it was fate in a way – that it was a Hammer picture.


Why did you agree to make this film? The script. And I think it would have been the same no matter which company would have made it. It was not a feeling of “I have been here before.” The nearest approach to it – al- though it’s a different story – would have been a film I made with Susan Strasberg called Taste of Fear [a.k.a. Scream of Fear]. That’s what this is, a psychological thriller.


Are you interested in making another film with Hammer? Oh, yes. Everything depends for me now on the story, the script, the director, the cast and the part. Can I do something which will make its mark and which people will remember after they’ve seen the film? That applies, I think, to every film I do. I don’t do long parts in films anymore, and I don’t take immense journeys, like I did [for] Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, to New Zealand and Australia. But those are the reasons why I accept a job.


Wicked Ways: Lee’s vampire embraces Lucy Westerna (Soledad Miranda) in Jess Franco’s Count Dracula, and (below) a baby-sacrificing outtake from To The Devil a Daughter.


one [Horror of Dracula] and the second [Dracula, Prince of Darkness]. In the sec- ond one I didn’t speak at all because the script was so weird. I told them, “I can’t say these lines.” After that, I was approached again, and again, and again by Hammer, and I turned them all down. I said, “You’re getting away from Stoker’s story, I’m hardly being asked to do anything, and my screen appearances are limited. It’s not Stoker’s Dracula, I don’t want to do it.” Then I got these telephone calls [from then-Hammer head James Carreras], and every time I said no. And they told me, “You’ve got to do it.” And I would say, “No, I don’t have to do it. Why are you insisting?” The answer I got was, “Well, we’ve already sold this to the American distributor with you in the part.” This was before I even saw a script or was asked. Then, worst of all, I was told that if I didn’t do these films, I would be putting very large numbers of people out of work. That’s the only reason I did them.


If you had to do it all over again, would


Hammer is, of course, celebrated for its classic gothic tales. Is there a place for that type of horror film nowadays? How do you think genre filmmaking has changed? Well, I never really looked upon them as “horror” films, I looked upon them as fantasies. But there is always a place for that genre; it’s possibly the most popular in cin- ema. But I haven’t done a “horror” film for many, many years. My last film for Hammer [prior to The Resident] was shot in 1975, and was To the Devil a Daughter with Richard Widmark and Nastassja Kinski. There is a place for unsettling films today and a lot of them are being made, but the ones that I don’t even watch or would wish to appear in go into such specific and horrifying detail. The screen seems to be awash in blood and mutilation, which I find very unattractive. It doesn’t keep the audi- ence guessing, which is the most important thing of all. That’s why Taste of Fear is such a good film. The audi- ence doesn’t know what is going on, and at the end it’s made clear. It is kind of like a Hitchcock film; he didn’t tell you everything until the ending. He was one of the great- est, and he made some very frightening films. I person- ally always try to surprise the audience by doing something or saying something that they don’t expect. Today, they don’t have to, it’s all there on the screen from the very beginning.


I always thought of the classic Hammer films as being kind of like fairy tales, in a way. They have a quality to them that many of the more graphic films don’t have. I’ve used that phrase before too: fairy stories, fantasies. Many of them were criticized heavily by the press, but now, of course, they’ve become classics.


What’s your favourite classic horror movie? I can tell you what I think is the most frightening film I have ever seen: Rose-


mary’s Baby. And the best film I’ve ever seen would be The Night of the Hunter. They are both wonderful, wonderful films.


Would you say that the “horror” genre still interests you today as an actor? If it’s done by suggestion. Only if it’s done by keeping the au- dience in suspense.


It’s well known that you became disillusioned with play- ing Dracula so many times… Not all that many. Some people seem to think I played him over ten times. I did become disillusioned, and said so pub- licly in my autobiography. But I think you should know why. I never played the part on the screen – except in the Spanish film Count Dracula – the way Bram Stoker described him. I never was able, except in that one film, to deliver Stoker’s lines or words. I didn’t even look like the character Stoker described: an old man with white hair dressed entirely in black, without a single speck of colour. Hammer gave me a cape. The first cape was black, and from then on, they decided to line it with scarlet. There was an eight-year period between the first


you have been more firm in your refusal to play Dracula those last few times? Yes. I think I would have. Play it once for Hammer and once for Jess Franco, with a proper budget so we could really have told Stoker’s story. I do say Stoker’s lines in that version, not enough, but many of them. Nobody’s done it, you know. Nobody has done the story exactly as Stoker wrote it.


The Franco film that you mentioned, 1970’s Count Dracula, does indeed contain more elements from the book than any other film version I’ve seen. You’re quite right. I was an old man who got younger and younger with blood. And that of course, was the idea behind it.


There was also some very good talent in it. Klaus Kinski and Herbert Lom… Neither of whom I met.


Yes, I read that you had filmed your se- quences with Herbert Lom on com- pletely different days. I don’t even think he had arrived be- fore I finished. Nor did Klaus Kinski, I think.


Your most famous collaborator, of course, was Peter Cushing, who played Professor Van Helsing to your Dracula on several occasions. And for your last two Dracula films, Dracula, A.D. 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula, many critics at the time said the re-teaming of you both were their only saving grace. Oh, those were a big mis- take and I’ve always said so – about bringing the char- acter into the modern era. But, who am I to criticize? I thought that it was a de- generation. And it was.


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