1885, and Jonathan Harker arrives at the castle of Count Dracula to take up a job as a librarian, cataloguing the Count’s extensive books and papers, but in his diary he reveals his true purpose, to end what he calls Dracula’s ‘reign of terror’. A woman he meets that night in the castle asks for his help in escaping, but as he does so she reveals herself to be a vampire, Harker only being saved by the intervention of the Count himself. The next morning Harker realises he bears the mark of the vampire himself, and plans to destroy the Count, who sleeps in a coffin, but as he prepares to drive a stake through him, the vampire Count awakes. Days later Professor Van Helsing arrives at the Klausenberg Inn, asking after Jonathan, and is surreptitiously given his diary by the innkeeper’s wife. Arriving at the castle, and seeing a funeral coach leaving, he finds Harker in a coffin and, realising what he must do, drives a stake into him. In Karlsbad Van Helsing tells Arthur and Mina Holmwood of Harker’s death. Harker’s fiancee Lucy Holmwood being ill with anaemia and being treated for it by Dr. Seward, but that night when Count Dracula arrives at her window, she willingly admits him. Seeing how ill her sister is becoming, Mina consults Van Helsing, but is too late and the next morning Mina is dead, and Van Helsing gives Arthur the diary of Jonathan Harker to read so he understands what they are dealing with. Discovering the funeral home where the Count’s coffin was headed, Van Helsing and Arthur head there, to find the coffin already gone, but to his horror they realise that Mina has fallen under the Count’s spell. Keeping guard on t he house that night, Dracula still manages to get into Mina’s bedroom, draining her further and causing Arthur to have to give her a blood transfusion to keep her alive. Wondering how the vampire could have got past them, they realise that with the aid of the housekeeper, Gerda, his coffin is in the cellar, but he escapes before they can stop him and abducts Mina. Knowing he will be heading back to his castle, Van Helsing and Arthur give chase, knowing that they have very little time left to save Mina and destroy the evil Count. A stripped-down but terrifically efficient version of the Bram Stoker story, or, at least the bare bones of it, screenplay writer Jimmy Sangster admits that the spare nature of the script and omission of such parts of the story as the trip to England, landing at Whitby, and the omission of such characters as Quincy P.Morris and the deranged Renfield altogether were due more to Hammer’s parsimony rather than any radical ideas on his account, the company telling him the number of main characters and locations he could have, meaning the film is set in some vaguely Germanic Middle-Europe and the tightness of the budget giving little leeway for any inventive (read expensive) flourishes. The result, running a very tight 81 minutes, is a quite remarkable and fast-moving version of the story, one of the biggest hits of the decade at the British box-office and one of the films, along with the previous year’s The Curse Of Frankenstein, also starring Cushing and Lee, directed by Terence Fisher and scripted by Sangster, but is a more stylish and atmospheric film, the pace and speed of the narrative far exceeding the static and more ghoulish Frankenstein. Of course one of the main assets was the casting of Christopher Lee as the Count, making the vampire a tall, elegant and handsome man, far different from the universal movies of the 30s and 40s, in which the vampire who Stoker imbued with a certain allure was generally portrayed by the likes of Bela Lugosi, John Carradine or Lon Chaney Jr., fine actors all, but Lee had the one thing which was the key to the vampire’s magnetism in a definite seductive quality. Dracula essentially showed some of the core of Hammer at their very best, from director Terence Fisher, a sometimes troubled man who had also made some fine films for Hammer before they concentrated on horror, including the very interesting sci-fi drama Four-Sided Triangle, as well as editor Bill Lenny, cinematographer Jack Asher, art director Bernard Robinson doing a superb job on limited funds and a fine score by James Bernard, all of whom would work for Hammer for years to come. Even five decades on the final destruction of the vampire by the rays of the sun and the power of a crucifix made by two candlesticks is surprisingly impactful, and done entirely as physical make-up effects, and being all the more convincing for it. Lee would eventually go on to complain persistently that his casting as Count Dracula had hampered his career, turning down 1960’s Brides Of Dracula, but then returning to play the character six more times for Hammer, even in their deeply flawed but still quite interesting modern-day productions Dracula AD 72 and The Satanic Rites Of Dracula, while Cushing played Van Helsing, or his descendants, a further three times, never giving a bad performance even when the script bordered on the risible, and the foundations laid down by Frankenstein and Dracula made Hammer one of the most prolific and profitable British film companies through the Sixties, the decline coming in the mid-Seventies as audience tastes changed, but both this andFrankenstein are classics of British gothic horror, showing what can be done with talent and verve instead of an unlimited budget.