The man stays with the carriage until it pulls up to a tavern in a miniscule town a few hours’ ride from Marianne’s destination. As the driver (Michael Ripper, of Night Creatures and X: The Unknown, Hammer's most ubiquitous bit-player) moves the obstruction, a mysterious man in black (Michael Mulcaster, from The Giant Behemoth and The Flesh and the Fiends) sneaks onto the carriage’s luggage rack to hitch a ride. Along the way, the coach is forced to stop because a large rotten log is blocking the road. Her name is Marianne (Yvonne Monlaur), and she is on her way to take up a position teaching at a Transylvanian girls’ school. Then we see a young French girl riding through the woods at a clearly unsafe speed in a public coach. An opening voice-over tells us in no uncertain terms that The Brides of Dracula will be about the count’s “disciples” and their insidious deeds. This is not immediately apparent, however, though the movie makes it clear that Count Dracula will be staying dead for the foreseeable future. Van Helsing,” as the possibly slightly mad modern-day crusader continues his efforts to stamp out the “vile cult” of vampirism. Instead, the direction for The Brides of Dracula is more along the lines of “The Further Adventures of Dr. I suppose Hammer could have hired another actor for the part (as they would many years later, when Lee refused to appear in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires), but for whatever reason they did no such thing. Like Bela Lugosi before him, Christopher Lee turned down the offer to reprise his performance as the vampire, although in Lee’s case, his decision represented a deliberate effort not to get boxed in by the role the way Lugosi had. Ironically, Hammer’s reasons were almost exactly those that had motivated the Americans a quarter of a century before. ![]() The British studio’s leadership didn’t set out to do this, but with The Brides of Dracula, the first successor to Horror of Dracula / Dracula, they ended up duplicating the development of Universal’s Dracula series much more closely, making a Dracula sequel in which the eponymous count never appears. When Hammer Film Productions spun off their first neo-Gothic horror film into a franchise in 1958, the course they took differed strikingly from what their predecessors at Universal had done with their Frankenstein series.
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