The Fearless Vampire Killers (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Robert Cashill

Produced by Gene Gutowski; directed by Roman Polanski; written by Gérard Brach and Polanski; cinematography by Douglas Slocombe; edited by Alastair McIntyre; production design by Wilfred Shingleton; art direction by Fred Carter; costume design by Sophie Devine; music by Krzysztof Komeda; starring Jack MacGowran, Polanski (uncredited), Sharon Tate, Ferdy Mayne, Fiona Lewis, Iain Quarrier, Terry Downes, Jessie Robins, Ronald Lacey, and Alfie Bass. Blu-ray, color, 107 min.,1967. A Warner Archive release.

If only Quentin Tarantino’s revisionism extended to film history as well. He’s more or less a stickler on that score, so in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood his Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) is obliged to take in a matinee showing of The Wrecking Crew (1969), her penultimate credit. (She’d filmed the obscure 12 + 1 earlier that year.) Tate brightens the fourth and last of Dean Martin’s mostly terrible Matt Helm spy spoofs but anyone curious to see it after its Hollywood cameo will likely shut it off after costar Nancy Kwan is introduced as the villainous “Wen Yu-Rang.” A more apt choice might have been Tate enjoying the earlier The Fearless Vampire Killers, perhaps with its director, her husband Roman Polanski, in tow.

Besides messing with the sacrosanct time-movie continuum, however, one or both would be stuck watching the hack job executive producer Martin Ransohoff had made of Polanski’s film. The producer lopped off nearly twenty minutes, added a cartoon prologue, and not only dropped the director’s preferred title (Dance of the Vampires) but also added a subtitle to the alternative one, resulting in the unwieldy The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck. “Baronet Shows Picture Its Author Disowned” read the headline of Bosley Crowther’s dismissive New York Times review when it limped into release in New York in November 1967.

Disowned—but didn’t dislike. Polanski recalled the location shoot in the Italian Dolemites as a pleasant one, allowing him to do his own skiing on camera as part of his (uncredited) co-starring role, and Ransohoff did bring his future wife into his life when he insisted she be cast over Polanski’s choice, Jill St. John. (The producer gave Tate her initial walk-on appearances and first major role, in 1966’s Eye of the Devil.) Tate is said to have clinched the part when Polanski scared her into a good scream, and he was hard on her when the shoot commenced. Whatever was going on in their much-scrutinized union, however, their growing affection is palpable on screen, and they married in January 1968.

Her role in The Fearless Vampire Killers isn’t all that much, requiring her to take two sexy bubble baths and giving her maybe as many lines as Robbie has in Hollywood. But it’s a part in a good movie, restored to Polanski’s edit in this resplendent Warner Archive Blu-ray, and in and out of her costumes she’s striking, playful, and game for anything. This was the director’s first color film, and in a bright red wig and burgundy ball gown for the final “dance of the vampires” the pallid beauty stands out amidst the blood that flows freely during this horror comedy.

The Fearless Vampire Killers is the most opulent Hammer horror film that Hammer never made. Taking its cue from the studio’s Dracula cycle and Gothic entries like The Gorgon (1964) the movie also draws from the surrealist paintings of Marc Chagall, and fashions a unique vision of a snowbound Transylvania in the mid-nineteenth century, where the cold seems to be the only bulwark against everything rotting away. Superstition abounds, and when Professor Abronsius (Jack MacGowran, who costarred in Polanski’s Cul-de-sac the previous year) sees the garlic festooned throughout the tavern where he and his loyal assistant Alfred (Polanski, who takes no credit for his performance) are lodging, he’s convinced it must be nearby. And so it is, at the castle of Count von Krolock (Ferdy Mayne)—but the doddering Abronsius, labeled a “nut” by the colleagues who’ve abandoned him to his quest to destroy vampirism, and the kind-hearted bumbler Alfred aren’t exactly in the league of Dracula hunter Van Helsing. As in the subsequent Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and many of Polanski’s films, innocence is no match for evil, and the two inadvertently cause more trouble than they thwart. Innkeeper Shagal (a tip of the hat to the artist) protects his lovely daughter Sarah (Tate) from the plague but ends up on the menu once von Krolock ravages her in her bath and abducts her through the skylight, which sends Abronsius and a smitten Alfred in pursuit. After fumbling about they break into the castle, unprepared for the annual vampire’s ball that closes the film.

“This beautifully produced, superbly scenic, and excitingly photographed spoof of old-fashioned horror films is as dismal and dead as a blood-drained corpse,” pronounced Crowther, who, though half-right concerning the film’s technical mastery, was by then the Abronsius of film critics, dismissive of the new blood. The Fearless Vampire Killers isn’t a spoof, like Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974)—it has its flip side (“Fangs by Dr. Ludwig von Krankheit” reads one credit) but takes its horror seriously while tapping into veins of ethnic and sexual humor foreign to Hammer and Universal. In the film’s funniest sequence Magda, Shagal’s maidservant (Fiona Lewis, who would make her mark in the genre with additional credits like The Fury and Strange Behavior), attempts to ward off her transformed employer with a crucifix. “Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire!” cackles Shagal, played by the Jewish comic actor Alfie Bass. Later, Alfred is cornered by von Krolock’s son Herbert (Iain Quarrier, another Cul-de-sac holdover and close friend of Polanski and Tate, who left filmmaking after her murder), who’s interested in more than the hapless hunter’s corpuscles. “A gentle, sensitive youth,” comments the elder von Krolock of his heir, rolling his eyes a bit.

Played with regal hauteur by the German-British actor Ferdy Mayne (misidentified by Crowther as “Ferdy Wayne”), the Count is the film’s most developed character, or rather the one with the most comprehensible lines. The other parts are more broadly sketched: Abronsius mutters (MacGowran was redubbed for the cut version) and Alfred pratfalls (Polanski is quite good at physical comedy), while Sarah and Magda fulfill their basic function as damsels in distress. The distress is more explicitly depicted than usual: Sarah’s abduction ends with a sight gag (crimson bubbles in her tub) but the preceding ravishment is quite brutal. The impression is that this kind of stalking has been going on for generations, with Sarah a prize catch after the “single meager woodcutter” von Krolock was able to rustle up for the last annual soirée. The vampires and the villagers are in an advanced state of decay, inbred and unkempt save for the two ladies; the Count’s hunchbacked servant Koukol, with his alarming buckteeth, is in the worst shape (boxer Terry Downes played the part), but a general air of ill health and malaise hangs like soot over the white expanses of snow and ice. Someone has to break the stalemate between the victimizers and victims, allowing good or evil to flourish and restore the blighted land, and in a typically mordant Polanski finale someone does—let’s just say the closing shots give Tate something to sink her teeth into.

The Warner Archive Blu-ray of The Fearless Vampire Killers is delectable, with the widescreen framing retained; without it, numerous images composed for Panavision, like a chase featuring sleds made from coffins, a splendid, Buster Keaton-type gag where Alfred runs from (then back into) Herbert, and the ballroom with mirrors that separate the living from the undead, is unintelligible. The audio spotlights an entrancingly off-kilter, chorale-driven score by Krzysztof Komeda, whose shivery lullabies for Rosemary’s Baby are classic; his accidental death in 1969 added to Polanski’s annus horribilis and was a blow to the music world. The disc also includes the slaphappy original trailer and a ten-minute promotional piece, Vampires 101, with British comedian Max Wall explaining the movie’s rules of vampirism. Also featured as a bonus is that extended cartoon prologue; it’s the only one of the “fixes” that works, and its inclusion turns out to be welcome.

For Polanski The Fearless Vampire Killers was undying. In 1997 he directed a stage musical adaptation, finally entitled Dance of the Vampires, in Europe, which is still being revived. Unlikely to return is the misbegotten Broadway version, minus his input and with much more American meddling, which I saw in 2002. It was terrible, though fun-bad in a way few musical flops are; highlights included a chorus line of tapdancing garlic cloves and groaners like Herbert showing Alfred around the castle, pointing to the denizens swarming overhead—“these are my bats. Would you like to see my balls?” Let’s draw a veil over that and applaud the restoration of the original film, which requires no revisionism to recall the couple at its center in a happier time.

Robert Cashill is a Cineaste Editorial Board Member.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 2