The Vampire Lovers (1970) adapts Sheridan Le Fanu’s nineteenth century novella Carmilla in true Hammer fashion. The rich colors, bombastic music that punctuates every dramatic beat and the macabre atmosphere are all present in The Vampire Lovers in great abundance. Co-produced with American International Pictures, The Vampire Lovers has a slightly grander budget than the films Hammer was producing independently at the time. Veteran Hammer director Roy Ward Baker uses the larger, more lavish sets to great effect which imbues the proceedings with an atmosphere that hadn’t been commonly present in Hammer Films since the early sixties.
It’s not the production design that is meant to sell viewers The Vampire Lovers though. Instead, as was typical of the horror genre at the time, it’s the bosoms of the featured starlets that’s meant to sell tickets. So many excuses were contrived in the narrative to pack The Vampire Lovers to the gills with shots of cleavage and bare breasts that it almost becomes comical. Carmilla has clearly been reimagined as the late night fantasy of a teenage heterosexual male.
Hammer’s version of the oft filmed text has Carmilla (Ingrid Pitt) roaming the Styrian countryside murdering innocents for their blood, avenging the death of her vampire clan the Karnsteins. After seducing the killing the daughter of a general (Peter Cushing), Carmilla takes up with a young noblewoman, Emma Morton (Madeline Smith). The heterosexual male fantasy version of lesbianism colors all of the many love scenes between Carmilla and Emma. The performances of Pitt and Smith draw on the stylings of the closeted or coded queer performances in The Children’s Hour (1961), Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), Johnny Guitar (1954) and The Smiling Lieutenant (1931).
As broad and campy as Ingrid Pitt and Madeline Smith are in their roles there lurks a sincerity to the performances that gives their scenes dramatic weight. It’s genuinely affecting when Carmilla, after being kept at bay by garlic blossoms, embraces Emma and lifts her up to take her out into the misty darkness to transform her into a vampire. Vampirism as a code for queer is nothing new, but it’s very rare that such coding in an exploitation film is as moving as this.
The Carmilla of The Vampire Lovers is wholly unique in the vast pantheon of Hammer vampires. Not only is Carmilla bisexual, but her dramatic arc is that of the doomed romance while her very vampiric powers differ from those of other vampires. For instance, Carmilla does not turn into a bat, a rat or a wolf; Carmilla transforms herself into a giant cat when she visits young women in the night to feed. The execution of Ingrid Pitt’s transformation into a cat borders on the avant-garde. It’s worth noting that the tradition of feline transformations in horror films themselves have forever been linked to the queer coding of female characters and to the avant-garde as a result of the political and aesthetic tendencies of Jacques Tourneur’s spectacle Cat People (1942).
The Vampire Lovers represents the best that Hammer Films had to offer during the seventies. Suffice to say that as the studio declined, so did the quality of the pictures that they produced. But every now and then Hammer produced a film that, while perhaps not good on a technical level, managed to find something different to do with the genre most closely associated with the studio.
